What can they do about that bubble? Frank Camp at the Daily Wire answers: “The conservative media must make itself the press of intellectual honesty.”
That’s all well and good — except that the reach of the conservative press is chiefly to conservatives. So while the conservative press must be intellectually honest (duh!), it needs to get serious about fighting and winning the information war — and that means reaching more people. A better idea might be for conservative millionaires and billionaires to start buying media outlets that already have a respectable reach and hiring professionals to do actual journalism.
Here is Frank Camp:
In a piece titled: “There Really Was A Liberal Media Bubble,” FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver writes that a lack of diversity among news outlets has led to a progressive media echo chamber:
Much of The New York Times’s coverage, for instance, implied that Clinton’s odds were close to 100 percent. In an article on Oct. 17 — more than three weeks before Election Day — they portrayed the race as being effectively over, the only question being whether Clinton should seek a landslide or instead assist down-ballot Democrats.
…political experts aren’t a very diverse group and tend to place a lot of faith in the opinions of other experts and other members of the political establishment. Once a consensus view is established, it tends to reinforce itself until and unless there’s very compelling evidence for the contrary position. Social media, especially Twitter, can amplify the groupthink further. It can be an echo chamber.
Silver recalls a book by James Surowiecki, titled The Wisdom of Crowds, which claims that crowds will “make good predictions” only if they fulfill four conditions: diversity of opinion, independence, decentralization, and aggregation. While Silver writes that journalists score high on aggregation, they fail miserably in all other categories:
As of 2013, only 7 percent of them identified as Republicans (although only 28 percent called themselves Democrats with the majority saying they were independents)…
Read more: The Daily Wire
Image credit: www.thefederalistpapers.org.
