Is there an ideological bias in mainstream reporting?
Hedge funds and newspapers
The argument is that hedge funds can make a nice profit off a daily newspaper if they steadily eliminate the reporting staff.
What the article does not mention is why and how they can still make a profit with so little journalism. This is because most people who read local newspapers were never primarily interested in the news, they were mostly interested in entertainment. Also, those few local readers who were interested in actual journalism were very interested in national and international stories, and prior to the internet, their local daily newspaper was a cheap and convenient source of that; today, they can get that elsewhere, get it more and better, and get it for free.
There would seem to be a tendency to blame the problems of journalism on new technology and corporations. But a closer look might show that there is another factor -- the majority of human beings. They were never so interested in local news.
Title 9
Definition of Title 9, passed in 1972.
No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.
How Title 9 revolutionized women's sports.
On noncompliance with Title 9 in sports.
Title IX does not require schools to sponsor any particular sport (or sports at all). It just requires that, if schools are going to offer sports, they have to do two things. First, they have to offer males and females equal opportunities to participate. Second, they have to provide equal treatment to the males and females who are participating, including financial aid (where offered), facilities, equipment, scheduling, travel, recruiting, coaching, tutors, medical and training services, housing, dining, support services, and publicity.
The problem is that, even now, after 40 years, very few schools are doing this.
When Title IX was enacted, schools dramatically expanded opportunities for girls and women to play sports. They learned it was like the Field of Dreams: If you offer opportunities, they will come. Female participation increased to match the opportunities made available.
NCAA Division I-FBS (formerly Division I-A) schools are spending only 28 percent of their total athletic expenditures, 31 percent of their recruiting dollars, and 42 percent of their athletic scholarship dollars on women athletes.
Why? Some people point to football, claiming it makes money. But the claim is false – the overwhelming majority of schools lose money on football. And it could not justify sex discrimination even if it were true. Schools can’t discriminate against women to make money. Yet many keep spending more and more on football, shortchange or cut other men’s teams in the process, and then try to scapegoat Title IX.
Most schools are not providing men and women with equal opportunities to participate and equal treatment in athletics because most educational administrators are not sufficiently dedicated to achieving equality.
Blame it on administrators.
But why would school administrators -- arguably a group that one would expect would be prototypical liberals -- not be for "equality" in sports? (In fact, one gets the sense that many educational administrators would, if they had their druthers, banish all sports from campus, such is their commitment to the life of the mind.) So why do they discriminate against women's and girls' sports?
This is because they are under the most intense public pressure to promote men's sports. The pressure they get from politicians to do so reflects the intense pressure that the politicians themselves are subjected to from the voters. Once again, the problem is democracy, the majority. But there is no mention of that in any of these articles.
Comment sections
CNN, NPR, NBC and other news outlets dropped their comment sections.
A chronology of online publications dropping their comments section.
The Washington Post as well. Things changed over time.
Over the years, however, our comments changed. They had always been edgy, but the ratio of offensive to substantive shifted in favor of the offensive. Inside information about law firms and schools gave way to inside jokes among the “commentariat,” relevant knowledge got supplanted by non sequiturs, and basic civility (with a touch of political incorrectness) succumbed to abuse and insult. A female Supreme Court justice was called a “bull-dyke.” An Asian American woman’s column about civility in the legal profession provoked “me love you long time” in response. My colleague Staci Zaretsky, who writes extensively about gender inequality in the legal profession, was told: “Staci, you have plenty of assets, like that fat milky white ass.”
So we decided to get rid of the comments section.
All of these publications echo this same narrative. Once upon a time, the comment section was informative -- sometimes even more so than the article -- but over time, a trickle of bad comments became a perpetual flood of vulgarity and hate.
The offending comment makers are usually identified as the same small bunch of relatively young white men, the proverbial few bad apples that spoil the whole barrel.
What these journalistic narratives fail to mention is the history of the internet. The golden age of the internet was in the 1990s, shortly after the World Wide Web was invented in 1989. The internet then was predominantly the domain of scientists sharing their research. What has happened since then is the democratization of the internet. The problem is not the internet per se, but democracy.
Perhaps the best comment section in existence is that of the Chronicle of Higher Education, where the comments are made by professors. Here one still finds a glimmer of the golden age of the internet.
One comment in the Chronicle stated that there are essentially three types of institution of higher education:
1. Elite universities for the best and brightest.
2. Small liberal arts schools for those who want to teach and learn.
3. State universities for people who need credentials for employment.
The comment went on to state that when you go to the library at an elite university on a Thursday night, it is packed with professors and students preparing for a long, hard weekend of study. When you go to the library of a state university on a Thursday night, it is vacant. The drinking has begun.
Best. Comment. Ever.
The problem is democracy.
But no one seems to notice this problem with democracy. This is because human beings are essentially robots programed to see only what society wants them to see. American society programs people to worship democracy as a surrogate religion.
There are often protests in comment sections by relatively young white guys that there is a liberal bias in the "elite" mainstream media. That criticism would seem to be accurate.
The problem is that there is a deeper pro-democracy bias throughout the political spectrum in the United States, including the right-wing media. In the USA, it seems as if everything and everyone is given over to the cult of democracy.
Democracy as doxa
Democracy as doxa
In American society, democracy is the "doxa" -- the unspoken, unconscious set of assumptions that all groups in a society take as the basis of their beliefs, but which they interpret differently from one another.
Doxa (ancient Greek δόξα; from verb δοκεῖν dokein, "to appear", "to seem", "to think" and "to accept"[1]) is a Greek word meaning common belief or popular opinion. Used by the Greek rhetoricians as a tool for the formation of argument by using common opinions, the doxa was often manipulated by sophists to persuade the people, leading to Plato's condemnation of Athenian democracy.Pierre Bourdieu, in his Outline of a Theory of Practice,[10] used the term doxa to denote what is taken for granted in any particular society. The doxa, in his view, is the experience by which "the natural and social world appears as self-evident".[11] It encompasses what falls within the limits of the thinkable and the sayable ("the universe of possible discourse"), that which "goes without saying because it comes without saying".Doxa and opinion denote, respectively, a society's taken-for-granted, unquestioned truths, and the sphere of that which may be openly contested and discussed.
In every society, there is an "orthodoxy" -- the dominant, official creed.
There are also "heterodox" beliefs at variance with the official ideology.
Heterodoxy in a religious sense means "any opinions or doctrines at variance with an official or orthodox position".[1] Under this definition, heterodoxy is similar to unorthodoxy, while the adjective "heterodox" could be applied to a dissident.
Heterodoxy is also an ecclesiastical term of art, defined in various ways by different religions and churches. For example, in the Apostolic Churches (the Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of the East, and the Non-Chalcedonian or Oriental Churches), heterodoxy may describe beliefs that differ from strictly orthodox views, but that fall short either of formal or of material heresy.
Within a given society, both orthodoxy and heterodoxy share the same basic assumptions -- the doxa.
Heresy goes way beyond that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heresy
Heresy (/ˈhɛrəsi/) is any belief or theory that is strongly at variance with established beliefs or customs, in particular the accepted beliefs of a church or religious organization. A heretic is a proponent of such claims or beliefs.[1] Heresy is distinct from both apostasy, which is the explicit renunciation of one's religion, principles or cause,[2] and blasphemy, which is an impious utterance or action concerning God or sacred things.
In traditional East Asian societies, Confucianism was (is?) the official, orthodox creed, and Taoism (and shamanism) was the marginalized heterodoxy. Nevertheless, Taoism shares the most basic assumptions with Confucian thought. The heresy in these societies was once Christianity, which was (rightly) perceived as alien and radical, and which was consequently persecuted.
Perhaps with time a heresy can become a heterodoxy that is tolerated and valued. Protestantism was originally a heresy in the eyes of the Catholic Church, but is now tolerated. Catholics and Protestants now recognize each other as Christians by enforcing boundaries that distinguish themselves from other, newer groups that call themselves Christian. (E.g., one of the most basic litmus tests to be accepted as Christian by the mainstream Catholic and Protestant sects is belief in the Trinity. As a concept that is not mentioned in the Bible, it goes against the Protestant rule of "sola scriptura", but nevertheless is a useful boundary for most Protestants to distance themselves from the "fringe".)
What happens when the heterodoxy suddenly becomes the dominant orthodoxy?
Perhaps something like that happened in the 1970s in the United States.
The liberal revolution of the 1970s
Journalists tend to be very conventional, orthodox people. In the 1950s, American journalists were supposedly uniformly conservative; they were conforming to the orthodoxy.
At the time, there was a "Cold War consensus", in which the foreign policy establishment adopted a moderate form of "Liberal Internationalism" or interventionism that centered on the doctrine of "containing" the Soviet Union (as opposed to either directly attacking the USSR or retreating into isolationism). Likewise, in domestic policy, Eisenhower consolidated rather than dismantled the New Deal.
But by the 1970s, the heterodox politics of the 1960s had become the new orthodoxy. In popular perception, interventionism in foreign policy seemed suspiciously like fascism. (Compare the rebels of "Star Wars" to the earlier Federation of "Star Trek".) In the domestic sphere, the idea of fostering assimilation among immigrants into mainstream American culture ("Anglo dominance") was seemingly replaced by an ideal of multiculturalism. This revolution in perceptions could happen so rapidly because the previous orthodoxy and the insurgent heterodoxy were really not so different to begin with. Subsequently, even the far-right has subsequently adopted non-interventionism as "America First", and embraced multiculturalism in terms of celebrating "white identity"; this illustrates the completeness of the victory of the 1960s heterodoxy in the 1970s, but it also suggests how these polar opposites were never quite so different from one another.
Again, because journalists tend to be very conventional, orthodox people, of course they conform to the new liberal orthodoxy since the 1970s -- but then again, so do all Americans, each in their own way.
But the real underlying doxa of all American beliefs is the appeal of democracy. This includes certain expressions of a "fascism" that is itself populist and anti-elitist. So in mainstream journalism there may indeed be a liberal bias, but at a deeper level, there is a pro-democracy bias that warps the craft of journalism.
