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Liberal Media Bias (1 Viewer)

avoiding injuries said:
How about 60 Minutes rerunning a sympathetic piece on Syrian immigrants right now instead of the planned stories they had. No agenda there. 
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Nothing topical about Syrian refugees right now.

They probably should have stayed with their other important story about magnets and hidden motors in professional bicycling :lol:

 
The General said:
Nothing topical about Syrian refugees right now.

They probably should have stayed with their other important story about magnets and hidden motors in professional bicycling :lol:
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They needed to since a higher percentage of people actually agree with what's in the executive order than disagree with it. 

 
Just a few observations, in no specific order.

- The glowing coverage of the women's march on CNN, while clearly historical, were, in my opinion, overwhelmingly positive in comparison to the Tea Party.

- Fox News has only provided in/out coverage of the women's march and this weekend's protests. It's hard to accept some of their respected news commentators (Baier/Wallace) talk about how news vs. opinion is different when the network's news coverage has a conservative slant in it's coverage. Obviously, there is probably other examples of this.

- CNN and NBC, in particular, continue to have anti-Trump "Republican" panelists on their shows and most of the interviews are, at best, combative with conservative guests. While the party in power probably will get more of this treatment, it's pretty noticeable to see one sided treatment.

- Some reporters openly said in the campaign season that they felt obligated to call out Donald Trump's lies (or what they consider to be lies). I think that coverage (and hostility) has continued.

 
Truth Commission said:
- CNN and NBC, in particular, continue to have anti-Trump "Republican" panelists on their shows and most of the interviews are, at best, combative with conservative guests. While the party in power probably will get more of this treatment, it's pretty noticeable to see one sided treatment.
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CNN frequently has Jeffrey Lord on.  He's pro-Trump.  They have others too.  (I'm not claiming that CNN isn't biased, just that they do make a token effort to have some pro-Trump people.)

 
Juxtatarot said:
CNN frequently has Jeffrey Lord on.  He's pro-Trump.  They have others too.  (I'm not claiming that CNN isn't biased, just that they do make a token effort to have some pro-Trump people.)
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I absolutely agree, they do have pro-Trump panelists, like Jeffrey Lord, but they still have this habit of bringing Never Trumpers (or whatever they were called) on panels (Ana Navarro still has a job there somehow and is one of these people like they like to use on panels). They have improved in this area; back in the election season, they often had 1 Trump supporter, 1 anti-Trump Republican and 2 Democrats.

To CNN's credit, they do get the best guests on both ends of the aisle; although CNN does seem to treat Van Jones as if he is a wizard.

 
Truth Commission said:
- Some reporters openly said in the campaign season that they felt obligated to call out Donald Trump's lies (or what they consider to be lies). I think that coverage (and hostility) has continued.
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Ummmm......why do we have the press if not to call out politicians when they lie?

 
Skoo said:
Ummmm......why do we have the press if not to call out politicians when they lie?
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It wasn't so long ago that reports avoided using the word "lie". Now, it's become a common term for Trump.

For the record, Trump 1) doesn't appear to have much policy depth and 2) probably does lie.

It's just that reporters weren't using this term as commonly as they are now, even if Trump does do more of that.

 
Truth Commission said:
I absolutely agree, they do have pro-Trump panelists, like Jeffrey Lord, but they still have this habit of bringing Never Trumpers (or whatever they were called) on panels (Ana Navarro still has a job there somehow and is one of these people like they like to use on panels). They have improved in this area; back in the election season, they often had 1 Trump supporter, 1 anti-Trump Republican and 2 Democrats.

To CNN's credit, they do get the best guests on both ends of the aisle; although CNN does seem to treat Van Jones as if he is a wizard.
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I personally think it's appropriate for Never Trump Republicans to have a seat at the table. (I'm not a huge fan of Ana Navarro but S.E. Cupp, for example, is good, in my opinion.)

 
Juxtatarot said:
I personally think it's appropriate for Never Trump Republicans to have a seat at the table. (I'm not a huge fan of Ana Navarro but S.E. Cupp, for example, is good, in my opinion.)
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What % of Republican voters ended up voting for Trump?

What % of Democratic voters ended up voting for Clinton?

I think, but could be mistaken, that the overall % of voters for each were similar, but we didn't see Democratic panelists on who openly disliked Clinton. If Trump's appeal drops into the 30's (and it may be there according to some polling), you don't even need 'Never Trump Republicans', there will probably be plenty jumping off ship, especially on specific topics.

S.E. Cupp isn't too bad, but Navarro was just over the top ridiculous (and still is). It's like she found a calling and is going to just stick to this going forward.

 
 The collapse of trust in the mainstream media with effectively 0% of republicans finding the media trustworthy alters a lot of dynamics.  They are also tuning out and going to other sources which alters even more. That means, going forward, republicans simply cannot be REACHED by the mainstream press.  Theyve tuned out.  So the press could come up with hard evidence to remove trump from office but it will be worthless because of loss of trust.  They could remove him from office with said evidence and youd get mass riots because half the country will firmly believe it is a lie and unjust.   Polls should no longer work going forward.  Reactions to major news events will get stranger and stranger as half the country operates with a second set of facts.  

 
Another problem is the media COULD do a complete overhaul today and demand 50% of its staff be republican and 50% be democrat and report on things from both sides & it probably would not work because its too late.  The republicans are gone. They dont read and watch mainstream press anymore.  Maybe it would have been the right move 30 years ago, 10 years ago, 4 years ago.  But theyve left. 

 
The mainstream press trying to update itself in 2017 would be like myspace trying to update itself in 2017.  Even perfectly executed it doesnt work because everyone left

 
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History will record that Rush Limbaugh was the canary in the coalmine.  His rise in popularity should have been taken as a warning by the mainstream press to move to the right.  When the fleet of conservative talk show hosts followed Limbaugh, it was an even bigger warning.  The rise of FOX news was yet another warning.  All went unheeded, and everything finally toppled over in 2016.

 
I think this describes things pretty accurately:


NEUTRAL VS. CONSERVATIVE: THE ETERNAL STRUGGLE


POSTED ON MAY 1, 2017 BY SCOTT ALEXANDER
I.

Vox’s David Roberts writes about Donald Trump and the rise of tribal epistemology.

It’s got a long and complicated argument which I can’t really do justice to here, but the thesis seems to be that the US Right is defecting against the country’s shared institutions in favor of forming its own echo chambers.

So for example, there used to be a relatively fair media in which both liberals and conservatives got their say. But Republicans didn’t like having to deal with facts, so they formed their own alternative media – FOX and Rush Limbaugh and everyone in that sphere – where only conservatives would have a say and their fake facts would never get challenged.

Or: everyone used to trust academia as a shared and impartial arbitrator of truth. But conservatives didn’t like the stuff it found – whether about global warming or trickle-down economics or whatever – so they seceded into their own world of alternative facts where some weird physicist presents his case that global warming is a lie, or a Breitbart journalist is considered an expert on how cultural Marxism explains everything about post-WWII American history.

It concludes that “the press cannot be neutral”, although it also “cannot afford to be, or be seen as primarily instruments of the Democrats”. To its credit, it admits this is kind of contradictory:


They must figure out a way to play a dual role: to be fair and consistent referees of policy and ideological disputes within the public square — while also acting to defend the institutional integrity of the square itself from what is, at present, a highly asymmetrical threat. They must fight to keep some core principles and commitments inviolate, outside the sphere of normal political dispute, against an administration that wants to drag them in…that’s a humdinger of a problem.



Let me start by saying what this article gets right.

I think it’s right that the two parties used to have much more in common, and be able to appeal to shared gatekeeper institutions that both trusted.

I think it’s right the Republicans unilaterally seceded from those shared gatekeeper institutions, so that now we’re in the weird position of having two sets of institutions: one labeling itself “neutral” and the other labeling itself “conservative”.

I think it’s right to consider the situation asymmetrical. Yes, CNN leans liberal, but it’s not as liberal as FOX is conservative, and it’s not as open about it – it has a pretense of neutrality that FOX doesn’t, and although we can disagree about how realistic that pretense is I think few people would disagree that the pretense is there. Nor is there a liberal version of FOX that lacks that pretense of neutrality.

I think it’s right that the conservative side is worse than the neutral side. However biased and crappy you think CNN and mainstream academia are, FOX and the conservative academic bubble are working on a different level (though note that as a liberal, I would say this, and you should interpret it with the same grain of salt that you would any other “my side is better than yours” claim).

I think it’s right that this situation is horrible and toxic and destroying the country, and it’s really good that someone has pointed this out and framed it this clearly.

I think it’s wrong in exactly the way I would expect it to be wrong, which is also an example of what’s wrong with it.

II.

Roberts devotes four sentences in his six thousand word article to the possibility that conservatives might be motivated by something deeper than a simple hatred of facts:


The right’s view that the institutions lean liberal is hyperbolic, but not without foundation. Science, academia (at least liberal arts and social sciences), and journalism do tend to draw their personnel from left-leaning demographics.

Those institutions have cosmopolitan aspirations — fair application of transpartisan standards — but there’s no doubt that in practice, those aspirations often cover for more parochial preferences.

But the right has not sought greater fairness in mainstream institutions; it has defected to create its own.



Roberts says that these neutral gatekeeper institutions “tend to draw their personnel from left-leaning demographics”, as if this was just a big fuss about 105 New Englanders for every 100 Texans. I would like to counter with a report from a friend who graduated from a top university last year:


I was at my graduation last weekend, and the commencement address was basically about twenty minutes of vitriolic insults directed at Trump. And in between burying my head in my friend’s shoulder in discomfort and laughing nervously, I was thinking about the family of this guy in my class.

He’s the first person in his family to go to college. He drove an hour every day to go to a somewhat better high school because there was an epidemic of gang violence at his local school. Against the odds, he did well, and got into college, where he has continued to get good grades and play sports and generally do things that make parents proud.

His family is not well off. They’re Mexican-American. And they’re Trump supporters.

Yeah, I’m kind of confused too. But they honestly are. (Not even reluctant Republicans supporting Trump–they voted for him in the primary. His aunt owns a Make America Great Again cap.) And all I could think about was how happy they must have been to be attending their son’s graduation from one of the best universities in the world [citation needed], only to have that happiness turn to bewilderment and anger as everyone around them cheered a series of caustic attacks against them and their values. The message couldn’t have been clearer: “You don’t belong here.”

My mom thought this speech was So Courageous. When I suggested that it might have been more courageous to say something that not everyone there agreed with, she replied, “the students maybe, but a lot of the parents looked unhappy.”

Seventy percent of the parents there had family incomes over six figures. (More, probably, since low-income parents are less likely to attend graduation.) A lot of them are members of the self-perpetuating intellectual/economic elite. This probably isn’t true of the few Trump supporters among them.

So if we are going to single them out for judgment, force them to account for their support for an “infantile,” “bullying,” “proto-fascist” “charlatan”…can it not be on the day of their kids’ graduation?



And sure, if you consider me your friend, then that makes this one of those “friend of a friend” stories. But I dare you to say that any of this sounds the least bit implausible. My point is, just because a university paints “ACTUALLY, WE ARE POLITICALLY NEUTRAL” in big red letters on the college quad, doesn’t mean that anyone is required to believe it. And the ideology that invented the microaggression can’t hide behind “but we haven’t officially declared you unwelcome!”

And the same thing is happening in the media. For example, in this very piece, Roberts cites a Vox poll showing that Trump supporters are more likely to be authoritarians. Vox has pushed this same claim many more times: Authoritarianism: The Political Science That Explains Trump, The Rise Of American Authoritarianism: A Niche Group Of Political Scientists May Have Uncovered What’s Driving Donald Trump’s Ascent, The Rise Of American Authoritarianism Explained In 6 Minutes, The Best Predictor Of Trump Support Is Authoritarianism.

Okay. But Vox is working off an internal poll that it hasn’t released (or at least I can’t find it) meaning no one has any idea if the sample size and methodology are okay. And some political science professors tried the same exercise around the same time with excellent methodology and a sample size of over a thousand and found the opposite – Trump supporters were less authoritarian than Cruz supporters, and no more authoritarian than Rubio supporters. They did find that Republicans were a bit more authoritarian than Democrats, but correctly noted that the measure involved is literally called “Right-Wing Authoritarianism”, is based on a scale invented by Theodor Adorno to prove conservatives had fascist tendencies, and only asks questions about child-rearing practices (you get marked as “authoritarian” if you have a traditional religious child-rearing style). And there are other investigations of authority that try to control for this sort of thing and sometimes find find liberals and conservatives are about equal in respect for authority.

I don’t want to overdo my criticism. “Right-wing authoritarianism” is a powerful idea with a good academic reputation, and the decision to focus solely on child-rearing was a principled choice to avoid including politics itself in the construct. And failed replications should be an opportunity for reflection rather than a cause to instantly dismiss a finding.

Yet it’s still good practice to mention their existence. And I still feel like somewhere there might be a conservative who reads this sort of thing and feels like Vox is not quite the perfectly-neutral mutually-beneficial gatekeeper institution of their dreams.

And whenever I mention this sort of thing, people protest “But Fox and Breitbart are worse!” And so they are. But I feel like Vox has aspirations to be something more than just a mirror image of Fox with a left-wing slant and a voiced fricative. It’s trying to be a neutral gatekeeper institution. If some weird conservative echo chamber is biased, well, what did you expect? If a neutral gatekeeper institution is biased, now we have a problem.

Roberts writes that “the right has not sought greater fairness in mainstream institutions; it has defected to create its own”. This is a bizarre claim, given the existence of groups like Accuracy In Media, Media Research Center, Newsbusters, Foundation For Individual Rights In Education, Heterodox Academy, et cetera which are all about the right seeking greater fairness in mainstream institutions, some of which are almost fifty years old. Really “it’s too bad conservatives never complained about liberal bias in academia or the mainstream media” seems kind of like the opposite of how I remember the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

The way I remember it, conservatives spent about thirty years alternately pleading, demanding, suing, legislating, and literally praying for greater fairness in mainstream institutions, and it was basically all just hitting their heads against a brick wall. Then they defected to create their own.

III.

This predictably went badly.

I wrote before (1, 2) about the sort of dynamics this situation produces. A couple of years ago, Reddit decided to ban various undesirables and restrict discussion of offensive topics. A lot of users were really angry about this, and some of them set up a Reddit clone called Voat which promised that everyone was welcome regardless of their opinion.

What happened was – a small percent of average Reddit users went over, lured by curiosity or a principled commitment to free speech. And also, approximately 100% of Reddit’s offensive undesirables went there, lured by the promise of being able to be terrible and get away with it.

Even though Voat’s rules were similar to Reddit’s rules before the latter tightened its moderation policies, Voat itself was nothing like pre-tightening Reddit. I checked to see whether it had gotten any better in the last year, and I found the top three stories were:

* SJW Awareness is a Steam Curator That Warns You about SJW Games

* Africans describe their extortion schemes. They put babies in ovens and hot showers. Now they're migrating to EU.​

* "The Phantom," a black serial killer who targeted blonde haired white children, has been freed from prison and roaming streets of same city he terrorized.​

The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.

FOX’s slogans are “Fair and Balanced”, “Real Journalism”, and “We Report, You Decide”. They were pushing the “actually unbiased media” angle hard. I don’t know if this was ever true, or if people really believed it. It doesn’t matter. By attracting only the refugees from a left-slanted system, they ensured they would end up not just with conservatives, but with the worst and most extreme conservatives.

They also ensured that the process would feed on itself. As conservatives left for their ghettos, the neutral gatekeeper institutions leaned further and further left, causing more and more conservatives to leave. Meanwhile, the increasingly obvious horribleness of the conservative ghettos made liberals feel more and more justified in their decision to be biased against conservatives. They intensified their loathing and contempt, accelerating the conservative exodus.

The equilibrium is basically what we see now. The neutral gatekeeper institutions lean very liberal, though with a minority of conservative elites who are good at keeping their heads down and too mainstream/prestigious to settle for anything less. The ghettos contain a combination of seven zillion witches and a few decent conservatives who are increasingly uncomfortable but know there’s no place for them in the mainstream.

IV.

I don’t want to give the impression that this is limited to the places people traditionally gripe about like academia and the media. The same dynamics are going on everywhere.

In the hospital where I work, there’s a RESIST TRUMP poster on the bulletin board in our break room. I don’t know who put it there, but I know that anybody who demanded that it be taken down would be tarred as a troublemaker, and anyone who tried to put a SUPPORT TRUMP poster up next to it would be lectured about how politics are inappropriate at work. This is true even though I think at least a third of my colleagues are Trump supporters.

I went to a scientific conference in a field completely unrelated to politics where one of the researchers giving a presentation started with a five minute tangentially related anti-Trump rant. I can’t imagine someone giving the opposite rant any more than I can imagine a pro-Trump commencement speaker at my friend’s graduation.

I’m desperately trying to avoid the Nerd Culture Wars, which have somehow managed to be even worse than the Regular Culture Wars, but even I’ve heard about GamerGate and the Sad Puppies. These were originally movements to fight a perceived liberal bias in regular gaming/sci-fi. They of course failed, and now they’re their own little separate conservative spaces practicing conservative video game commentary/sci-fi writing. I don’t want to deny that they’re often horrible. They’re horrible in exactly the same way FOX News is horrible, and for exactly the same reasons. I expect this pattern of conservatives seceding from theoretically-neutral-but-realistically-left-leaning communities and forming terrible communities full of witches to repeat itself again and again, because it’s happening for systemic rather than community-specific reasons.

The overall impression is of a widespread norm, well-understood by both liberals and conservatives, that we have a category of space we call “neutral” and “depoliticized”. These sorts of spaces include institutions as diverse as colleges, newspapers, workplaces, and conferences. And within these spaces, overt liberalism is tolerated but overt conservativism is banned. In a few of these cases, conservatives grew angry enough that they started their own spaces – which began as noble attempts to avoid bias, and ended as wretched hives of offensive troglodytes who couldn’t get by anywhere else. This justifies further purges in the mainstream liberal spaces, and the cycle goes on forever.

Stanford historian Robert Conquest once declared it a law of politics that “any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing”. I have no idea why this should be true, and yet I’ve seen it again and again. Taken to its extreme, it suggests we’ll end up with a bunch of neutral organizations that have become left-wing, plus a few explicitly right-wing organizations. Given that Conquest was writing in the 1960s, he seems to have predicted the current situation remarkably well.

V.

David Roberts ends by noting that he doesn’t really know what to do here, and I agree. I don’t know what to do here either.

But one simple heuristic: if everything you’ve tried so far has failed, maybe you should try something different. Right now, the neutral gatekeeper institutions have tried being biased against conservatives. They’ve tried showing anti-conservative bias. They’ve tried ramping up the conservativism-related bias level. They’ve tried taking articles, and biasing them against conservative positions. I appreciate their commitment to multiple diverse strategies, but I can’t help but wonder whether there’s a possibility they’ve missed.

Look. I read Twitter. I know the sorts of complaints people have about this blog. I’m some kind of crypto-conservative, I’m a traitor to liberalism, I’m too quick to sell out under the guise of “compromise”. And I understand the sentiment. I write a lot about how we shouldn’t get our enemies fired lest they try to fire us, how we shouldn’t get our enemies’ campus speakers disinvited lest they try to disinvite ours, how we shouldn’t use deceit and hyperbole to push our policies lest our enemies try to push theirs the same way. And people very reasonably ask – hey, I notice my side kind of controls all of this stuff, the situation is actually asymmetrical, they have no way of retaliating, maybe we should just grind our enemies beneath our boots this one time.

And then when it turns out that the enemies can just leave and start their own institutions, with horrendous results for everybody, the cry goes up “Wait, that’s unfair! Nobody ever said you could do that! Come back so we can grind you beneath our boots some more!”

Conservatives aren’t stuck in here with us. We’re stuck in here with them. And so far it’s not going so well. I’m not sure if any of this can be reversed. But I think maybe we should consider to what degree we are in a hole, and if so, to what degree we want to stop digging.
 
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Gr00vus said:
Maurile Tremblay said:
It’s got a long and complicated argument which I can’t really do justice to here...
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Glad he restrained himself to the abridged version. Can you sum up MT? I don't have the time (or inclination really) to read all that.
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The argument that's long and complicated is the one by David Roberts in Vox. The article I pasted by Scott Anderson summarizes Roberts's argument in a few sentences and then riffs on it. I'm not going to summarize the riff, but I'll quote what might be described as its thesis regarding how Fox News happened: "The overall impression is of a widespread norm, well-understood by both liberals and conservatives, that we have a category of space we call 'neutral' and 'depoliticized.' These sorts of spaces include institutions as diverse as colleges, newspapers, workplaces, and conferences. And within these spaces, overt liberalism is tolerated but overt conservativism is banned. In a few of these cases, conservatives grew angry enough that they started their own spaces – which began as noble attempts to avoid bias, and ended as wretched hives of offensive troglodytes who couldn’t get by anywhere else. This justifies further purges in the mainstream liberal spaces, and the cycle goes on forever."

 
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Maurile Tremblay said:
The argument that's long and complicated is the one by David Roberts in Vox. The article I pasted by Scott Anderson summarizes Roberts's argument in a few sentences and then riffs on it. I'm not going to summarize the riff, but I'll quote what might be described as its thesis regarding how Fox News happened: "The overall impression is of a widespread norm, well-understood by both liberals and conservatives, that we have a category of space we call 'neutral' and 'depoliticized.' These sorts of spaces include institutions as diverse as colleges, newspapers, workplaces, and conferences. And within these spaces, overt liberalism is tolerated but overt conservativism is banned. In a few of these cases, conservatives grew angry enough that they started their own spaces – which began as noble attempts to avoid bias, and ended as wretched hives of offensive troglodytes who couldn’t get by anywhere else. This justifies further purges in the mainstream liberal spaces, and the cycle goes on forever."
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The Eliminationists Published in 09 by David Neiwert of the Southern Poverty Law Center and Crooks and Liars (an old friend). Prescient. 

Pretty much calls everything in the material you're referencing. He describes "shunning" as a primary tool of "eliminating" the left from the conversation. Mission accomplished?

There's something Orwellian about this. The evolution toward that dystopia would need a phase where it looks something like today, an immature breakaway of big brother from institutional norms. He's big baby at the moment. George just thought it would be ushered in by an omnipresent oppressive super state, not the host of Celebrity Apprentice. 

 
FOX is amazing. I'm so impressed with how lock-step they are with Trump. Here's an exchange with an anchor I don't recognize and Hoekstra (R-MI) about the impending Comey testimony:

Anchor: "...What is this really about, if there's no new information coming that you can see? I mean it's not like he's going to take the memos out of the inside of his jacket and say "you know, the president was trying to get me to stop the investigation," 'cause that would make him look, well, pretty bad.

Hoekstra: I think that's exactly right. You know, Comey has said that there was no influence on him to try to stop or direct the investigations. There's a lot of palace intrigue here. Everybody wants to know what the president may have said in private to Comey and these types of things. But if there had been something nefarious there you would have thought that he would have acted on it when it occurred rather than, you know, a few weeks after he got fired. That he's now going to go in--I'm not sure we're going to see anything explosive on Thursday. I rather doubt it. 

Anchor: Wow. They're calling this 'The Hottest Ticket in Town' inside the beltway. I can't imagine. We have so many things to concentrate on--Obamacare and the like. 

**********

Wow is right. I can't tell the difference between their news and everyone else's fiction anymore. What a powerful, powerful tool this is for the Trumps. 

 
I guess with all the other news going on yesterday, Fox picked a great time to drop its "Fair & Balanced" slogan.

I suppose its a step in the right direction towards improving its trustworthy numbers...

 
http://nypost.com/2017/10/21/the-other-half-of-america-that-the-liberal-media-doesnt-cover/

Most reporters and editors are liberal — a now-dated Pew Research Center poll found that liberals outnumber conservatives in the media by some 5 to 1, and that comports with my own anecdotal experience at National Public Radio. When you are liberal, and everyone else around you is as well, it is easy to fall into groupthink on what stories are important, what sources are legitimate and what the narrative of the day will be.

This may seem like an unusual admission from someone who once ran NPR, but it is borne of recent experience. Spurred by a fear that red and blue America were drifting irrevocably apart, I decided to venture out from my overwhelmingly Democratic neighborhood and engage Republicans where they live, work and pray. For an entire year, I embedded myself with the other side, standing in pit row at a NASCAR race, hanging out at Tea Party meetings and sitting in on Steve Bannon’s radio show. I found an America far different from the one depicted in the press and imagined by presidents (“cling to guns or religion”) and presidential candidates (“basket of deplorables”) alike.

I spent many Sundays in evangelical churches and hung out with 15,000 evangelical youth at the Urbana conference. I wasn’t sure what to expect among thousands of college-age evangelicals, but I certainly didn’t expect the intense discussion of racial equity and refugee issues — how to help them, not how to keep them out — but that is what I got.

At Urbana, I met dozens of people who were dedicating their lives to the mission, spreading the good news of Jesus, of course, but doing so through a life of charity and compassion for others: staffing remote hospitals, building homes for the homeless and, in one case, flying a “powered parachute” over miles of uninhabited jungle in the western Congo to bring a little bit of entertainment, education and relief to some of the remotest villages you could imagine. It was all inspiring — and a little foolhardy, if you ask me about the safety of a powered parachute — but it left me with a very different impression of a community that was previously known to me only through Jerry Falwell and the movie “Footloose.”

Early this year, I drove west from Houston to Gonzales, Texas, to try my hand at pig hunting. It was my first time with a gun, and the noticeably concerned owner of the ranch at first banished me to a solitary spot on the grounds. Here, he said, the pigs would come to me and I could not pose a danger to anyone else. It was a nice spot indeed but did not make for much of a story, so I wandered off into the woods, hopefully protected by my Day-Glo hunting vest.

I eventually joined up with a family from Georgia. The group included the grandfather, Paps, and the father, CJ, but it was young Isaac, all of 8 years old, who took on the task of tutoring me in the ways of the hunt. He did a fine job, but we encountered few pigs (and killed none) in our morning walkabout. In the afternoon, with the Georgians heading home, I linked up with a group of friends from Houston who belied the demographic stereotyping of the hunt; collectively we were the equivalent of a bad bar joke: a Hispanic ex-soldier, a young black family man, a Serbian immigrant and a Jew from DC.

None of my new hunting partners fit the lazy caricature of the angry NRA member. Rather, they saw guns as both a shared sport and as a necessary means to protect their families during uncertain times. In truth, the only one who was even modestly angry was me, and that only had to do with my terrible ineptness as a hunter. In the end, though, I did bag a pig, or at least my new friends were willing to award me a kill, so that we could all glory together in the fraternity of the hunt.

I also spent time in depressed areas of Kentucky and Ohio with workers who felt that their concerns had long fallen on deaf ears and were looking for every opportunity to protest a government and political and media establishment that had left them behind. I drank late into the night at the Royal Oaks Bar in Youngstown and met workers who had been out of the mills for almost two decades and had suffered the interlocking plagues of unemployment, opioid addiction and declining health. They mourned the passing of the old days, when factory jobs were plentiful, lucrative and honored and lamented the destruction and decay of their communities, their livelihoods and their families. To a man (and sometimes a woman), they looked at media and saw stories that did not reflect the world that they knew or the fears that they had.

Over the course of this past year, I have tried to consume media as they do and understand it as a partisan player. It is not so hard to do. Take guns. Gun control and gun rights is one of our most divisive issues, and there are legitimate points on both sides. But media is obsessed with the gun-control side and gives only scant, mostly negative, recognition to the gun-rights sides.

Take, for instance, the issue of legitimate defensive gun use (DGU), which is often dismissed by the media as myth. But DGUs happen all the time — 200 times a day, according to the Department of Justice, or 5,000 times a day, according to an overly exuberant Florida State University study. But whichever study you choose to believe, DGUs happen frequently and give credence to my hunting friends who see their guns as the last line of defense for themselves and their families.

At one point during my research, I discovered a video of a would-be robber entering a Houston smoke shop, his purpose conveyed by the pistol that he leveled at the store clerk. But the robber was not the only armed person in the store. The security cameras show Raleigh, the store clerk, walking out from behind the counter, calmly raising his own gun and firing an accurate stream of bullets at the hapless robber. The wounded robber stumbles out, falls over the curb and eventually ends up under arrest.

It is not just defensive gun use that makes the video remarkable — it is Raleigh himself, who evidences such a nonchalance that he never bothers to put down the cigarette that he is smoking. At the end, Raleigh, having protected his store, enthuses, “Castle Doctrine, baby” — citing a law that allows a person to use force to defend a legally occupied place.

It is an amazing story, though far from unique, but you simply won’t find many like it in mainstream media (I found it on Reddit).

It’s not that media is suppressing stories intentionally. It’s that these stories don’t reflect their interests and beliefs.

It’s why my new friends in Youngstown, Ohio, and Pikeville, Ky., see media as hopelessly disconnected from their lives, and it is how the media has opened the door to charges of bias.

The mainstream media is constantly under attack by the president. They are “frankly disgusting,” “tremendously dishonest,” “failing,” “they make up the stories” and are now threatened with loss of broadcast licenses if they continue to author “fake news.” And that is just a random Wednesday’s worth of words from Donald Trump.

Some may take pleasure in the discomfort of the media, but it is not a good situation for the country to have the media in disrepute and under constant attack. Virtually every significant leader of this nation, from Jefferson on down, has recognized the critical role of an independent press to the orderly functioning of democracy. We should all be worried that more than 65 percent of voters think there is a lot of fake news in the mainstream media and that our major media institutions are seen as creating, not combating, our growing partisan divide.

Some of this loss of reputation stems from effective demagoguery from the right and the left, as well as from our demagogue-in-chief, but the attacks wouldn’t be so successful if our media institutions hadn’t failed us as well.

None of this justifies the attacks from President Trump, which are terribly inappropriate coming from the head of government. At the same time, the media should acknowledge its own failings in reflecting only their part of America. You can’t cover America from the Acela corridor, and the media need to get out and be part of the conversations that take place in churches and community centers and town halls.

I did that, and loved it, though I regret waiting until well after I left NPR to do so. I am skeptical that many will do so, since the current situation in an odd way works for Trump, who gets to rile his base, and for the media, which has grown an audience on the back of Washington dysfunction. In the end, they are both short-term winners. It is the public that is the long-term loser.
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