User:JzG/The politics of sourcing

Sourcing. It's political. It shouldn't be, but it is.

The word fact gained its modern meaning alongside the growth of science out of the earlier field of natural philosophy. Over a period of a century or so, there was a shift from philosophical truth weighed by quality of rhetoric, to objective truth established by empirical measurement, and this latter became known as fact, from the legal term for "thing that was done", based on the Latin factum. Aristotle wrote that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones, and this was accepted as truth by some schools of thought long after it had been conclusively demonstrated to be wrong. When you hear of "alternative facts", or see mainstream media dismissed as "fake news", that is what you are seeing: a rhetorical Truth&trade; asserted against an objective fact.

'''Wikipedia is a reality-based project. Where facts conflict with Truth&trade;, we state facts as facts and describe Truths&trade; as beliefs. This is a foundational principle of the project.''' If you dislike it, you are almost certainly in the wrong place. Try Conservapedia or InfoGalactic.

But conservative voices are banned on Wikipedia!
Most of our deprecated sources are right-wing. Some would say conservative, there's no real difference (at least in the US). And this is asserted to be due to Wikipedia's biases, bias in the mainstream media, or whatever. Regardless, it's claimed to be a way that conservatives are being oppressed and balance is being skewed.

That's not actually true, and in some cases believing it could even be disqualifying. Let me explain why.

Mainstream is the opposite of...
A sane media ecosystem looks like the image at right: the more politically neutral a source is, the more accurate. The less you care about ideology, the less you're tempted to amplify a false claim that is believed by one side or the other. In normal politics and normal journalism, you would expect to see a continuum, with more heavyweight sources clustered at the centre and more overtly political sources out towards the edges. In the UK, this is basically what you see. The majority of British heavyweight newspapers are right-leaning, but they generally bend towards factual accuracy in their news reporting, and the genuinely biased (e.g. the Daily Mail) stand out starkly by comparison. Hence WP:DAILYMAIL.

The base premise of the right, though, is that mainstream sources are implacably opposed to conservatism, and when conservative sources and mainstream sources disagree, then the truth lies somewhere in the middle - or, in the minds of the most extreme, that the mainstream sources are "fake news". This premise is of course false.


 * The opposite of mainstream is not conservative. The opposite of mainstream is fringe.

The antithesis of Breitbart is not the Washington Post. The antithesis of Breitbart is Daily Kos.

The mistake is an easy one to make. It's easy to mistake loudness or popularity or position in the ideological firmament for some kind of objective measure of quality. Liberals regard WaPo and the New York Times as close to Gospel. Conservatives do the same for Fox, which has converged on Breitbart ideologically. But Fox and WaPo are not the same, and the difference is important for Wikipedia.

A lot of it is to do with adoption of fringe positions. Both political sides fall for this to a certain extent. Fans of alternative medicine, who are predominantly left-leaning, dismiss virtually everything that challenges alt-med bullshit like chronic Lyme disease as fake, industry-bought and the like. Anti-vax, anti-medicine, anti-GMO activists all tend to fall for the narrative of conspiracy and suppression. But, crucially, the most influential left-leaning sources challenge that narrative and generally reject it outright. By contrast, fringe positions have become articles of faith on the right. Climate change denial, for example. There's nothing inherent in the socially conservative world view that says destroying the planet is something to aspire to - the US Environmental Protection Agency was started by Richard Nixon, after all - but it has become axiomatic on the right that climate science is a liberal conspiracy.

Feedback loops
My background is in control systems. The most basic element of control engineering is the feedback loop: you compare the current state with the desired state, and adjust the input based on the difference. A negative feedback loop is inherently stable. I want the system value to be Y, the current system value is X, I scale the input by Y-X. Over time, X will converge on Y. This is inherently stable. A positive feedback loop does the opposite: if X diverges from Y, the feedback process tends to drive X further away from Y. This always drives to the limit: a binary outcome.

The news media should be a negative-feedback system. If a news outlet suffers - financially, reputationally or whatever - when it publishes, and fails to correct, a false story, then it will have an incentive to be more accurate. Yochai Benkler describes this as a "fact checking dynamic". It is how the media has traditionally worked.

But the news media is made up of people, and people have biases, and there are perverse incentives (advertising dollars, say) and other factors. So there are, as at right, incentives pushing towards bias as well. And as long as the fact-checking incentive is stronger than the bias incentive, sources will tend to drift towards factually accurate coverage, and that coverage will tend to be decided without attention to its political implications.

In his book arguing with zombies, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman describes the tendency of conservatism towards bad faith argument. Consider: your party is primarily funded by billionaire plutocrats. These billionaires have set up economic think-tanks to engage in policy-based evidence making in support of the idea that the best thing for the economy is to make rich people richer. So you try that, and what happens is that the rich people get richer and everyone else gets worse off. What you should then do is revise your ideas. What the conservative movement did was to set up a news and disinformation media that presented the falsified belief as if it were true. Result? Art Laffer gets the Presidential Medal of Freedom for promoting an idea that he quite literally plucked from thin air, and was used to bolster a theory that has been shown repeatedly - and at great cost - to be false. Bad faith argument - motivated reasoning pursued even by those who must surely know it to be false - is probably not restricted to the political right, but it is more prevalent in right-wing media than in the mainstream.

What makes them bad faith arguments is not that they are wrong - you can be wrong in good faith - but that they are dishonestly argued. The reason for promoting climate change denial is to protect the profits of the fossil fuel industry, not to preserve individual liberty. The reason for promoting trickle-down is to benefit the wealthy, not to benefit ordinary people.

Asymmetric polarisation
What would the media landscape look like if one political side has a different incentive balance? What if there exists what Benkler terms "asymmetric polarisation", with one side having more incentive to be on-message than to be factually accurate? It would look like this third graphic - and that is exactly what we see in the US media. If you look at the Ad Fontes media bias chart you see a clustering of right wing sources towards the more biased / less accurate end of the curve, and a large gap between the conservative media bubble and the mainstream. It's noticeable that this gap has widened over successive generations of the chart: the problem is getting worse, conservative media is becoming more insular.

At 9pm Eastern, MSNBC airs the Rachel Maddow Show and Fox airs Hannity. Both are prime time news commentary shows. Maddow is liberal, Hannity is conservative. Now imagine the leaders of their respectively preferred parties both promote (presumably different) conspiracy theories. What do you think would happen?
 * Would Sean Hannity's viewers want him to join the Washington Post in challenging a conspiracy theory promoted by Donald Trump?
 * Would Rachel Maddow's viewers want her to join the Wall Street Journal in challenging a conspiracy theory promoted by Joe Biden?

Leave aside for a moment the actual likelihood of this happening. It's pretty clear that the answers are "no" and "yes" respectively, and that over the last five years, for almost all of the notionally serious conservative media, this has changed. Whereas Shep Smith challenged egregious falsehoods from Republicans just as readily as from Democrats, he's gone. Hannity's audience will punish him for challenging the Dear Leader. Maddow's audience will punish her for not challenging Uncle Joe. A recent survey of conservative journalists showed that they were more likely to look for a left-wing conspiracy theory to attack, than to challenge a right-wing one.

Conspiracy theories promoted by leftists, tend to be shot down by mainstream media. Anti-vaccinationism, for example. But Sean Hannity doesn't seem to have dropped the Seth Rich conspiracy theories even now. A left-wing Pizzagate almost certainly could not happen. Conservative media is an echo chamber, and this makes it markedly more biased and (of much more relevance for Wikipedia) markedly less accurate.

Reality has a well-known liberal bias
Sources become unreliable by promoting falsehoods, conspiracy theories and the like. We can't magically make them reliable just because we like their politics or want them to "balance" facts we don't like. Climate change is real, the Earth is billions of years old, Russia hacked the 2016 US election and Brexit. Balance on these issues does not lie halfway between the established facts and a political dogma that rejects them.

Unfortunately, a core part of the role of conservative media has become, over the last 40 years, to undermine public trust in facts that are financially or politically inconvenient to right-wing interests. The Wall Street Journal, one of the last mainstream conservative news organisations, still maintains an editorial line of climate change denialism. Newspapers have always had an editorial line, but in the conservative media bubble the editorial line is also the journalistic line. On Fox, Shep Smith would rail against Republican climate change denialist talking points. He's gone. Fox tries to portray climate science as an atheist liberal alternative to God. Fox has a direct line to the White House, and they are reluctant to challenge even the mostly egregious bullshit from Trump.


 * 40% of Americans believe in creationism.
 * 45% of conservative Republicans reject the idea that human activity is driving climate change. 9% of Americans think climate change is not happening at all.
 * Half of Americans think that evangelical Christians face persecution in the US. This perception has increased substantially since 2016: despite the unparalelled privilege of evangelicals in the Trump administration, American evangelicals actually feel more persecuted than under Obama.

This prevalence of manifestly false belief is not caused by careful examination of the facts. It's due to promotion of dogma through bad-faith argument, and it's happening mainly in the conservative media. For comparison, anti-vaccinationism, which spiked after Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent 1998 paper in The Lancet, has declined in response to the undeniable evidence presented by measles outbreaks.

If you want conservative voices to be reflected on Wikipedia as reliable authorities, you need to go and tell them to stop spouting bullshit. The fact that the majority of sources of bullshit are conservative is not Wikipedia's doing, and it's not our problem to fix.

Meanwhile on Wikipedia...
Here's an example from an actual Wikipedia userpage:


 * Media bias, post-truth politics and fake news
 * It is my conclusion from my own observations since the early 1990s that most mainstream American entities that define and identify media bias and post-truth politics are entities that either actually purvey those things or support such entities. As a result, I regard those entities as purveyors of fake news.
 * Bernard Goldberg has validated my observations about American media bias in his book Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News and in numerous comments as a commentator on Fox News.
 * I think that Donald Trump revealed a conclusion identical or similar to mine when he commented on the American traditional news media.
 * It seems to me that Steve Tesich, who apparently coined the term post-truth, was a (perhaps unwitting) supporter of entities that practice post-truth politics.
 * It is my humble opinion that a WP:VERIFY crisis of as-yet indeterminable but significant magnitude for Wikipedia has been created by:
 * an apparent general embrace of the aforementioned purveyors of fake news by the Wikipedia community as a whole
 * various actions of various Wikipedians (including various administrators) within the encyclopedia for which I can discern no purpose other than to hide facts the publishing on Wikipedia of which could result in negative repercussions for the ideologies to which they adhere - actions such as [A] reversion of various edits (including one or two of my own), [B] what were reported there, and [C] what were reported there 

This is the conservative narrative on mainstream-as-opposed-to-fringe reporting, of the "suppression" of conservative voices. If the media challenges a conservative narrative, it's because they are biased against conservatism, not because the narrative is wrong; it's "fake news".

Some - fortunately very few - want us to change our sourcing standards to allow conservative sources that have a documented history of inaccuracy, in order to provide political balance. That's a fallacy that prevails in news media but should not prevail here. There's a fabulously ironic 2016 piece in the New York Times which exemplifies false balance in the apparent desire to challenge its existence. Wikipedia does not do false balance. Again, if you want conservative voices to be reflected on Wikipedia as reliable authorities, you need to go and tell them to stop spouting bullshit. The fact that the majority of sources of bullshit are conservative is not Wikipedia's doing, and it's not our problem to fix.

Bias
I am biased, but not like the conservative media are biased. My politics are centre-right by historical standards, centre-left by current UK standards, and God alone knows by current US standards, because a country that can call Nancy Pelosi a "radical far-left socialist" has lost all grip of what any of those words mean.