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Apparently, I’m a "warmonger." Or a "neo-conservative." Or a "liberal military-hate[r]." Or possibly "knee-jerk anti-defense, anti-Pentagon." At least, that’s what some of the commenters here tell me.
I’m constantly amazed at the partisan maneuvering some of them see behind every post here (even if they can’t agree on which agenda, exactly, is being advanced). But what’s even stranger is how the most technical, seemingly apolitical story can spark the same ol’ red vs. blue fights. I’ve been so perplexed, in fact, that I’ve asked a bona fide expert, Farhad Manjoo, to investigate. Farhad is the author of True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society . The book looks at, among other things, how deeply people perceive "bias" in today’s news — and how it colors nearly every story they read, see, or hear. Farhad, take it away…
The other day Noah posted an item on Dick Cheney’s reaction to American troop deaths in Iraq passing 4,000. In an interview with ABC News, Cheney said that while families of the dead felt a "special burden" of war, "the president carries the biggest burden, obviously."
Noah’s post was a simple, straightforward recounting of Cheney’s quote. He even included a video of the interview to show the context surrounding Cheney’s words. Several readers, though, saw it differently; at worst, Cheney simply misspoke, they said, and Noah was betraying a knee-jerk anti-Cheney liberal bias in pointing to the quote.
"I really just can’t believe you went so low to spin a statement around on the Vice President who obviously didn’t mean that in the context you infer," wrote Drew. "You know damn well what Cheney meant. An American president bears the biggest burden of any American when sending troops into battle. He has to make the decisions and he has to take responsibility."
Arcane said, "Ah, typical Noah. The U.S. can never do anything right (at least not until a Democratic administration comes to power, of course)." Jim agreed, calling Noah "willfully stupid" and "blinded by his Bush-hatred." And then there was brett: "If I want to read about politics, I’ll go to a political blog. Unsubscribe from this blog?
This happens often at Danger Room — see here and here — but it’s a common feature across the media now. Whether the topic is military technology, the presidential race, the war, the Apple-PC divide, or anything else people feel strongly about, commenters are always on the lookout for bias, and they claim to see it everywhere.
Many books describe how the news media is systematically tilted toward either the left or the right. In True Enough I examine, among other things, the opposite effect — why we are all so quick to suspect that the news is against us, and how this tendency has given rise to a class of news outlets that profit by pandering to certain views (think Fox News).
In 1982, Robert Vallone, Lee Ross and Mark Lepper, psychologists at Stanford University, conducted the seminal study of this tendency. The researchers showed groups of pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian students several network news broadcasts covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They found that both sides saw the same news stories in diametrical ways; people who favored the Israelis thought the news was biased toward the Palestinians, while people who favored the Palestinians saw a pro-Israel bias.
Psychologists call this the Hostile Media Phenomenon: When you’re passionate about a subject, any "objective" overview of it will feel strained, as if it’s not telling the whole truth. "If I see the world as all black and you see the world as all white and some person comes along and says it’s partially black and partially white, we both are going to be unhappy," Lee Ross explains.
The Hostile Media Phenomenon isn’t new. But it has special resonance in the digital age, in which we can choose from a million flavors of news online, on TV, and on the radio. Look how brett reacted to Noah’s post: He didn’t like it, so he decided to leave forever, presumably in search of more sympathetic fare. He’ll surely find it, too.
Recent studies show that many of us now react this way. Republicans feel a magnetic attraction to the Fox News logo, while Democrats are pulled toward NPR and CNN. Shanto Iyengar, a political scientist at Stanford who has studied this effect, says that people go in search of consistent news even for uncontroversial subjects, like travel and sports. "They’ve gotten into the habit of saying, ‘Whatever the news is talking about, I’m just going to go to Fox.’"
There’s one positive trend to be found in the comments at Danger Room: Readers often seem to be hip to how people’s biases color their responses. In the Cheney story, Steven described the full effect in quite elegantly:
UPDATE : The comment thread below, on the other hand, is pretty awesome. And for a few more pristine (and rather comical) examples of what Farhad’s talking about, check out this rant and this little exchange.
One Danger Room pal says I’m being unfair, however. "I don’t think it’s really fair to laugh at your readers for inferring ideology from DR when you guys obscure your ideology as a deliberate journalistic choice," he writes. "You should pick sides, you should put forward a viewpoint. Have Sharon, who I gather is to your right, do the same, as with Axe, who I gather is to your left. Let it become what the people want — an opinionated punch-up of experts, with no confusion about who stands where."
I’m not sure that’s where the three of us line up on the political spectrum. (It depends on the issue, I suspect.) And I’m not sure most of the material here even lends itself to that sort of treatment. Still: Is our pal right?
