Brian Beutler has a piece up today that's gotten a lot of attention. He argues that Democrats haven't adjusted to a new online media environment that gives Republicans a big advantage in spreading their preferred dystopian narratives. He points to 2012 as the last old school election:
Back then, Republicans were just as invested in spreading doom and gloom as they are today, but they had fewer tools to work with. Mainstream news outlets still viewed economic data principally through the lens of horserace politics, but they were more or less on the same page about what metrics were important: how many jobs the economy created on net, the unemployment rate, GDP.
....Today, it’s much less clear if and how regular people distinguish news media from every other kind, and (I think by no coincidence) wide swaths of the population believe we’re in recession when we’re not; think inflation remains out of control, when it isn’t; think gas prices are high, when they’re low.
This needs some pushback. For starters, I don't think Democratic campaigns are quite as clueless as Brian suggests. Mainly, though, I think he badly overestimates how informed voters were in the olden days.
As an example, Ipsos has conducted its "Perils of Perception" survey for the past decade. Back in 2014, one of the questions they asked was about how many people are out of work. The real answer was 6%, but that's not what people thought:
Americans pegged unemployment at 32%, above even Great Depression levels! And when Ipsos tallied up their whole set of questions, Americans were (almost) the most ignorant people in the advanced world:
This is in 2014, before the great wave of social media crashed over us. Are we even more ignorant today? Ipsos hasn't asked the unemployment question since then, so who knows. But it hardly matters. When you're as far off as 32% vs. 6%, a few percentage points here and there hardly matter.
There are a couple of things to say more generally:
- Aside from weirdos who inhale BLS statistics, everyone is ignorant about the economy and always has been. Nobody knows anything.
- Fox News has always spread misinformation far more efficiently than social media.
- In fact, research suggests that social media doesn't have a big effect on perceptions. It might make extremists a little more extreme, but that's it.
- In summary: All the evidence I'm aware of suggests that ignorance and distortion are no worse today than they've ever been. Social media just makes our ignorance a little more obvious.
None of this is to say that liberals should brush aside social media. And I don't think they do. But it's outrage that always gets outsized attention, and the unfortunate fact is that Republicans have long been better than Democrats at the outrage business, full stop. They're better at it on TV, better in newsletters, better in email, and better on social media. This is not because they're smarter or meaner than liberals, it's because their audience responds to outrage so that's what they give them. Liberals respond more strongly to other things, so we get those. And since outrage gets more traditional media attention than appeals to unfairness or poverty, we have headwinds there too. Them's the breaks.
coupla things that got some airplay in the msm:
the pregnant woman who had been to the ER three times that was told to pound sand by the tx supreme court
the 10 year old rape victim in ohio
so actual outrage gets some play; what the republicans excel at is BS and manufactured outrage, which is easier to conjure up day after day after day
litter boxes in school bathrooms for kids who identify as 'trans-species'?
yeah, we're not so good at coming up with that stuff
You mean, us, you and your readers?
Guilty, your honor.
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I've assumed most educated people who read the news daily have a grasp of the current numbers for economic indicators like the unemployment rate, GDP growth rate, and the inflation rate.
Hmm, just asked a family member what they thought these numbers are currently, and they were making guesses that were pretty far way off. These economic indicators are just not things they follow or care a lot about, I guess. So now, I’m not so sure about even the news-reading public.
Progress one
I, am old and in "my day" the printed word HAD to be right and news people in particular double checked just about every story they put out. TV new people did the same but because of the "Immediacy" of that venue they were NOT used to verifying certain things
I harken back to the Kennedy assassination, People tuned in because it was so important. We saw Cronkite cry, on air and felt the same as he did. We watched the Apollo mission but then read all the details in the following mornings newspaper
Nowadays we "watch"news on sketchy websites and the stuff we read we don't take the time to verify because we never had to do that in the past. The printed word has lost its lustre
We believe what we want to believe. unfortunately
Republicans have always understood politics as a branch of the entertainment industry, where Democrats think they'll get a gold star for good governance.
The internets brought in this era of "Everything Is A Lie Or A Scam". I just answered a call for my wife from a resort about our reservations. I assume now that every call is from a scamstrer.
Everything now is a Big Lie
Politics
War
Health
News
.
.
.
The list is endless.
Is this true or is it because I am old and grouchy?
Was there ever trust?
Do I distrust everything now because I just "Woke" up???
The scammers are upping their game. I regularly get calls about problems with my Apple credit card. The scammers spoof the phone number so that it looks like the call is from Apple’s 800 number for credit card support.
Fortunately, it is easy to tell by their stilted English. Now I have fun before I hang up. You have to start asking them questions to easily trip them up.
Where are you calling from? Romania?
No, The United States of America. (LOL)
I’m calling from the billing department.
Billings Montana?
Yes. (LOL, then I hang up.)
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Speaking of scamsters...
As I keep saying, current evaluations about the state of the economy are not only out of whack with reality, but with evaluations in the past. When the economy was good, for example in the late 90's, poll ratings were good, and when it was bad, for example in 1980 and and 2009, poll ratings were bad. Now the economy is good, but Republicans think it is horrible. Democrats think it is better than it is, certainly with respect to how it was during the Trump administration.
The disparity between parties has greatly increased since the start of the Obama administration. The U Michigan poll:
https://www.skeptometrics.org/ConsumerExpect.png
Before say 2009 most politicians at least did not throw out ridiculous claims like Trump does. Did Gingrich or Fox News lie this much about the economy before Trump? Fox News and right-wing talk radio were around long before the disparity began getting absurd.
My guess is there are at least two main factors. Republican politicians and media have gotten more extreme in their lying and more detached from reality, but the increasing polarization has also caused Republican voters to be more credulous with respect to their leader. This is what happens when group instincts are aroused - people are less rational.
Trump and Republicans can get their messages out without social media. Social media are not what has made people lose touch with reality, it's the polarization.
The FT charts here show consumer sentiment as measured and as would be expected based on economic indicators. The US is way out of step with the past, and with Europe. Contrary to Kevin's point, we are bigger idiots today than we used to be.
No doubt, much of that is partisanship/polarization. But Brian Beutler's main point is a valid one. We are witnessing the disintegration of what major media used to be. It's having a profound effect on all of us.
Yes, we have come a long way from the days of the Fairness Doctrine.
I tend to agree here, even though I hold both Beutler and Drum in very high regard. But one factor that always bugs me:
"And since outrage gets more traditional media attention"
Statements like this seem to be based on the assumption that the "media" are a natural phenomenon like a forest or an asteroid, the behavior of which is determined by chemistry and physics. But "media" consists of people who have agency and make decisions. They need to be held accountable for their dismal failure to better inform the public. After all, where else are people supposed to get their information?
We give them a pass far too easily, based on a sense that this is "just the way things are." If people think the unemployment rate is 32%, the media are failing to dispel that.
Sure, there were always idiots. But now they are so full of passionate intensity.
I blame Family Feud. Survey says…
Dumb. Richard Dawson was awesome. Steve Harvey, not so much.
Hate him or despise him, Trump was good at marketing whatever message he wanted to get out. Within days of taking office in 2017, he was playing up the strength of the economy (which he inherited and was railing against days earlier) and he continued to do so for 4 years : “the best economy in American history”. I’m not saying Biden and team need to go to that level, but he needs to hammer home a few key points about the strong economy on a daily basis.
The ignorance is both more obvious and more organized than it used to be, and that is a problem because politicians now feel obligated to cater to ignorance even when they personally know better. It used to be that when congresspeople heard a constituent say something asinine at a town hall meeting, they'd either try to gently correct them or deflect, then go back to Congress and vote based on the real facts (assuming they did in fact know them, obviously they didn't always). Now they know they'll get slagged on social media if they don't indulge the idiots completely, and they often capitulate when they wouldn't have done so in the past.
The irony, tinged perhaps a bit rose thanks to bit errors in the dimm wetware memory, but weren't the Democrats being touted circa the 2008 elections for their mastery of things online?
How does one separate ignorance from messing with the survey taker?
And we may have been second on that overall index of ignorance, but it doesn't say how far behind we were from #1 or ahead of #3
Definitely OT, but probably inevitable for Kevin Drum's former spot:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/14/business/media/mother-jones-merger.html
https://www.motherjones.com/
Aside from weirdos who inhale BLS statistics, everyone is ignorant about the economy and always has been. Nobody knows anything.
Ignorant about the economy, sure. And politics, government, civics, international relations, history, comparative religion, science, the arts and any other number of topics. There's surely some overlap between "people with huge knowledge gaps" and "lower cognitive capacity" but I don't think that overlap is all that huge.
I"ve always gotten the impression there are lots of perfectly clever people out there—normally highly competent in their own spheres—who are simply highly incurious and/or not well read.
Trump falls into this category, when you think about it. Not that I regard him as some kind of genius (far from it). I suspect he's about average or slightly above average intelligence. He's enjoyed a more cosmopolitan vantage point of the world because of inherited wealth. And he's not devoid of talent (he's got a certain mafioso-like shrewdness about keeping one step ahead of the police; and he's good as reading others; and he's a skilled communicator). But he's obviously very poorly read, and intellectually incurious in the extreme.
For over 50 years Republicans have been exploiting racism and religiosity. Of course Democrats in the South had used it up to the second half of the 20th century. This calls up very powerful tribal instincts, which overrule rationality when sufficiently excited.
In the current party configuration Democrats can't use this - they must keep racial and religious groups united, although sometimes excessive activism is divisive.
So it is just not a matter of Republicans being better at media messaging, or Democrats being inept. Relying on race and religion, inciting hatred against the "other", which can be foreign enemies or internal minority groups, is a strategy which demagogues have always been able to turn to. Unfortunately the media have always worked very hard to obscure the nature of the problem, looking for other reasons for people to vote for Trump and Republicans.
I don't think the media writ large actually "favors" the Republicans, or the Democrats either for that matter. My hypothesis is that they favor whatever spin will maximize their revenue. During campaign season (which is actually about 75% of the time), that's whatever will maximize the flow of campaign spending into their coffers. Note that when people complain about the role of money in politics, they need to ask the question, "Who ends up with that money?" It's the PR firms and consultants AND the media companies who sell the air time!
So how do you maximize that spending? By helping make the elections AS CLOSE AS POSSIBLE. That way, both sides will pour as much money as they can raise into their campaigns. Thinks of the counterfactual where one candidate is 20 points ahead from the get-go. Neither side is going to be able to raise much money. But if it's a "dead heat," that's when the money pours in. And guess who benefits?
"Back in 2014, one of the questions they asked was about *how many people are out of work*. The real answer was 6%,"
A constant problem with polls (a reason I have so much contempt for them, and one reason so much soc sci research is unrepeatable) is that pollsters seem to have zero interest in the difference between what they THINK they are asking and how people will INTERPRET the question. Much easier just to pretend that people mean, by their answer, what you think they mean...
So, the question is a technical one, having to do with the exact definition of unemployment. But even KEVIN rewrites mentally to "people out of work", which is something very different...
What's the answer to the second question?
Well we can make a kinda guess. The US population between 18 and 65 is about 215M. The size of the labor force is about 165M. So about 25% of people 18..65 are "not working" in some sense. That's very different from 6%, and not that different from 32%. Especially if you expand "not working" to also include older people.
So, does the question show that people are unfamiliar with the technical definition of unemployment? Sure. But WTF ask random people a technical question? It's like me asking random people the mass of the Higgs boson.
It only makes sense to ask random people a question of "sentiment" or "social reality" or something like that, in which case something like "what fraction of adults around you are not employed, or only partially employed" is the SENSIBLE interpretation of the question, and the idiots are the pollsters who assume they are doing anything otherwise.
This is not about Republican vs Democrat, it is about having basic curiosity as to how tools (in this case the tools of social science) actually work and what their results mean.
What IS Republican vs Democrat is that Republicans understand this a lot better. Maybe they are just better innate philosophers (appreciate the ambiguity of language, aren't blinded by numbers so that their brains stop working), or maybe they just have less contempt for the average person, and so think about what responses like this mean, rather than assuming "ha ha, American idiot"?
And BTW this is not just as issue of political polls. GSS is RIDDLED with stupid questions that, any sophomore philosophy student could tell you are useless because it's so unclear what respondents think they are being asked. But the GSS maintainers have absolutely zero interest in fixing this; god knows I spent a year talking to one of them and could not get them to understand the issues.
This is not surprising. I mean, this is the reason we teach math and physics in school, because we don’t know things intuitively.
You have to make the effort to learn facts. I try to be well read but I’m sure I have enormous blind spots about all sorts of things.
Jay Leno used to take advantage of this in his segment “Jay Walking” where he would ask people on the street simple questions. One time he asked a girl “How may feet in mile?” and she replied “75.” It was epic. He pointed to some building a ways off and asks “So that is about three miles away?” It was really funny, but in that woman’s life this number had no utility so she never invested in learning it.
That thing you're worried about (social media making people idiots)? It's not a big deal to me, Kevin Drum (because people have always been idiots).