62. How Biased Is Your Media?

The left and the right blame each other for pretty much everything, including slanted media coverage. Can they both be right?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 0:33Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:04Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:54Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:35Speaker 01

  Glenn Beck. I'm an entrepreneur. I am a reluctant, believe it or not, commentator and dad.

• 2:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, now, to the theme of our conversation today. When I say media bias, you say what?

• 2:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  From WNYC and APM, American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio. Today, how biased is your media? And how do we know? Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 3:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let's say that Glenn Beck is right, that the news media is biased, whatever exactly that means. Now, before you start foaming at the mouth, because I know that's what you're going to do, let me just say that you'll also hear from someone on the other side of the aisle, someone who sees things very differently.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  I don't know where to begin in describing how completely ridiculous I think that is. I mean, hey.

• 3:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Pick a spot and begin.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I don't.

• 3:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Andrew Rosenthal.

• 3:49Speaker 03

  I'm the editorial page editor of The New York Times, which means I'm in charge of editorials.

• 3:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  We'll hear more from Rosenthal later, but first, let's get back to the assertion that media bias is real and that it's a real problem.

• 4:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  How do you prove that? How do you measure something like media bias rather than just opine or bloviate about it? Here's Steve Levitt. He's my Freakonomics friend and co-author.

• 4:18Speaker 04

  So measuring media bias is a really difficult endeavor because unlike what economists usually study, which are numbers and quantities, media bias is all expressed in words. And so in the last five or 10 years, there have been some really tremendous advances in how we think about text as data. So how we take words and transform words into quantitative measures. And at the forefront of this endeavor have been people like Jeff Milo and Tim Grossclose and my colleagues, Jesse Shapiro and Matt Jenzgau. And so take the Grossclose and Milo work, for instance.

• 5:02Speaker 04

  What they did was they wanted to figure out how to compare media sources like the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times or Fox News, how liberal or conservative those outlets were compared to, say, politicians.

• 5:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  So there were 20 media outlets that I examined. Also, the original article had a co-author, Jeff Milo. That's Tim Grossclose.

• 5:29Speaker 05

  I'm a professor of political science and economics at UCLA.

• 5:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  Grossclose wanted to see if you could answer questions like, how does the average article in the New York Times with its supposedly liberal slant compare to the average speech by a Democratic heavyweight like Harry Reid? And similarly, how does coverage on Fox News with its supposedly conservative slant compare to the average speech by someone like Michelle Bachmann?

• 6:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  To make comparisons like this, Grossclose had to start with what he knew, with what was easy to quantify, that is, the political leanings of politicians themselves. So to that end, he assigned each Congress member a score, which he called their political quotient, or PQ.

• 6:18Speaker 05

  And this is just a way to say precisely how liberal someone is. So 100 is very liberal. It's about Nancy Pelosi, zero is Michelle Bachmann. These are all based on roll call votes in Congress. And in fact, I let the Americans for Democratic Action pick the roll call votes for me. This is a liberal interest group. And with each roll call vote, the ADA decides whether the yay or the nay alternative is liberal.

• 6:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, if you were listening carefully, you heard Grossclose say that he, quote, "let" the liberal ADA set the standard for each congressperson's political quotient, or PQ, which might make you wonder about Grossclose's own PQ. So, before moving forward, let's back up a bit. As part of this research project, Grossclose wrote a quiz that anyone can take to assess his or her own PQ.

• 7:12Speaker 05

  My hunch is that if you and Steve Levitt took my PQ, my best guess is you would turn out to be kind of left-leaning moderates.

• 7:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, Levitt put himself at about a 45.

• 7:22Speaker 05

  Is that right?

• 7:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah.

• 7:24Speaker 05

  I would've predicted 55 or 60.

• 7:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  But he didn't actually, he didn't actually take your test. I think he, I think he guesstimated. And I probably put myself at, and again, I haven't taken it either yet. I'd probably, I'd probably put myself at about 55 or 60. You're probably right on there. So together, we're right down the middle.

• 7:40Speaker 05

  And I say, my political quotient is a 13, which means I'm very much on the conservative end. Not, not quite Michelle Bachmann, but kind of near John Boehner, Mitch McConnell.

• 7:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  Give us some well-known politicians and what their PQs are, keeping in mind that 100 would be pure liberal and 0 would be pure conservative, right?

• 7:59Speaker 05

  Right. Yeah, so like Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank would be about 100. Barack Obama is not the most liberal on this scale. Barack Obama's about an 88. Hillary Clinton was something like an 87.9. They were almost exactly tied on this scale. Joe Biden would be something like an 85, 84. Harry Reid, 80. Joe Lieberman was a 74. Now, I computed two PQs for Joe Lieberman. One when he was a Democrat, one when he was an independent. They were almost exactly the same. I think when he was a Democrat, it was like 74.7. As an independent, a 74. So he moved just the teeny, teeniest bit right after he switched from Democrat to independent.

• 8:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay. So Gross Close had given each politician a PQ, or a political quotient, with 100 representing a hardcore liberal and zero, a hardcore conservative. Now, to make the connection between the politicians' leanings and the leanings of media outlets, he needed to take an intermediate step. This will be a little confusing at first, but bear with me. The intermediate step was to take more than 150 think tanks and interest groups and assign each of them a political quotient. The Center for American Progress. The Heritage Foundation. The Brookings Institution. So now, having determined a political quotient for each of these think tanks,

• 9:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Gross Close could start to measure media bias. How? Well, he simply counted how many times the name of each of these think tanks and interest groups were cited in the 20 major media outlets he was studying. So let's say that a given newspaper cited a group like the liberal Citizens for Tax Justice much more often than it cited the conservative Americans for Tax Reform. That would drive up that newspaper's liberal score on what Gross Close called a slant quotient. He used the same scale for the slant quotient as he used for the political quotient, which is that 100 is the most liberal and zero, the most conservative.

• 10:12Speaker 05

  The New York Times got about a 74. Of the 20, 18 of the 20 leaned left. Now, just about none of them were to the left of the average Democratic speech. So, you know, some of my conservative friends, I said, you know, the New York Times sounds about like a Joe Lieberman speech. Conservative friends said, "That's it? That's not very liberal." So, in some ways, NPR was something like a 67, you know, so even to the right of a Joe Lieberman speech. So, in some ways, my results, I think, say that the media are, in some ways, more centrist than lots of people have been saying. On the other side, I analyzed one Fox News show. This was Special Report.

• 10:56Speaker 05

  When I analyzed it, Britt Hume was the anchor. That slant quotient was a 40, which means it was 10 points right of center. And so, it sounded about like an Olympia Snow, Susan Collins, speech.

• 11:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Gross Close's argument, based on his research, is that most news organizations empirically lean to the left, although not as dramatically as some critics might suspect. He ultimately wrote up his findings in a book called Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind. Now, how did he come to that conclusion, that the American mind is being distorted by media bias? Well, Gross Close combined his own findings and existing research to calculate that the average American voter has a natural PQ, or political quotient, of around 25 to 30, which is firmly in the conservative range.

• 11:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  But, as Gross Close sees it, the left-leaning media pulls some of those naturally conservative voters into the center, which is why we generally vote about 50/50. Without media bias, Gross Close says, we'd be a much different country.

• 12:14Speaker 05

  So I suggest that we would be about like Texas or about like Kentucky. It might be even more conservative.

• 12:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  If Tim Grossclose is right, and it's a big if for sure, I wanted to know this. How does that bias happen in a newsroom? Does journalism simply attract more liberals than conservatives? And think of all the choices a given writer, editor, producer will make in a given day. Which story to cover and which to not, which sources to cite and which to leave out, which conclusions to draw and which to leave to the reader.

• 12:48Speaker 06

  Well, it's not about the culture of the newsrooms, per se, because all sorts of people work in there, although I would say that the NPR newsroom tends to be much more like a liberal college fraternity type of environment.

• 13:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Juan Williams. He's a political analyst for Fox News. He used to work for NPR and Fox News at the same time. You may remember that in October of 2010, NPR fired Williams for some comments he made on the O'Reilly factor about Muslims.

• 13:20Speaker 06

  But when I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb, and I think, you know, they're identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.

• 13:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  He was not expecting to get fired.

• 13:33Speaker 06

  I was in shock. I don't, I don't think I knew what to do. I went and ate some Chinese food. I did another TV show before I spoke to anybody about it. And that shows you how crazy I was, kind of lost in my mind over this thing.

• 13:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Naturally, Williams became a poster boy for media bias, which was strange, or at least seems strange to me, because he has one of the most nuanced views on media bias that you're likely to find.

• 13:57Speaker 06

  Well, the, the process, it can be amorphous, but here's the thing, it's a creative process. And I remember once, sitting at a lunch with Catherine Graham, a former publisher of The Washington Post. And we were talking about newspapers and I don't know why, but I said to her, "Well, you know, 10 years ago, this would be a totally different newspaper. You know, I have a different group of people, different opinions, different strengths, different interests." And everybody at the table said, "Well, of course." And I think the idea that this is not a programmed, constant feed of news happening

• 14:36Speaker 06

  out there and the newspaper or the news program is a direct reflection of that news. To the contrary, it's a reflection of the people and the agendas of people in the room as they begin to tell their story. For example, I find that as baby boomers have moved through American society, the political society, the cultural society, the economic society, that they have, in essence, told their story and told it loudly. They are a dominant voice. So their interest, their point of fascination, in fact, their self-reverence, has dominated news coverage for the last three decades.

• 15:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's an interesting point Williams makes. Putting together a news report is inherently a creative process and it'll reflect the people who do it, to some degree. But is it really their decision? What about the owners and managers of these media properties?

• 15:40Speaker 07

  How is it that media firms choose their content, basically? Or how is it they choose to have conservative slant or liberal slant?

• 15:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Matthew Jensko. He's an economist at the University of Chicago. Along with a colleague named Jesse Shapiro, Jensko set out to ask this question: If newspapers are slanted, does the slant really come from the newsroom? Or maybe the corner office?

• 16:08Speaker 07

  We wanted to know, is that really an economic decision that looks like any other firm choosing what flavor of ice cream to offer, what kind of shoes to sell? Or is it something different? Are those decisions driven by the personal tastes of the owners of media outlets or their political agendas?

• 16:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Jensco and Shapiro wrote a computer program that would sort through millions of articles from hundreds of newspapers. The program's job was to identify politically partisan phrases.

• 16:41Speaker 07

  And then, of course, the crux of the matter is, how do you define what's a liberal phrase and what's a conservative phrase? And our idea, which builds on some work that Tim Grossclose and Jeff Milo had done earlier, was to look at the speech of politicians, look at speeches by congresspeople. The nice thing about congresspeople is we know which ones are liberal and we know which ones are conservative. That's easy to measure. So we could ask, what are the phrases that liberals or Democrats tend to say a lot relative to conservatives? And what are the phrases that conservatives tend to say a lot relative to liberals?

• 17:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  So they fed the entire text of the 2005 Congressional Record, which is a transcript of every congressional proceeding and debate, into their computer program. And what did it spit out?

• 17:31Speaker 07

  I'll just have to remember with this table whether you should read down or across to get the top 10.

• 17:39Speaker 07

  I'll read the top 10 down. So the top 10 phrases used more often by Democrats are private accounts,

• 17:47Speaker 08

  Private accounts. Private accounts.

• 17:49Speaker 07

  Trade agreements, American people.

• 17:51Speaker 09

  The American people are speaking out.

• 17:53Speaker 07

  The American people. Tax breaks, trade deficit. Trade deficit. Trade deficit. Trade deficit. Oil companies. Credit card.

• 18:01Speaker 08

  Credit card. Why, the credit card companies would like to do it.

• 18:04Speaker 07

  Nuclear option. Nuclear option is called. The nuclear option. War in Iraq.

• 18:08Speaker 05

  The war in Iraq.

• 18:09Speaker 07

  And middle class.

• 18:09Speaker 08

  While leaving middle-class families out of the cold.

• 18:13Speaker 07

  The two-word phrases on the other side used more often by Republicans are stem cells.

• 18:18Speaker 08

  Stem cells. Stem cell research.

• 18:19Speaker 07

  Natural gas.

• 18:20Speaker 08

  Affordable natural gas. It gets pretty cold in Omaha.

• 18:23Speaker 07

  Death tax. Death tax. I'd vote for it. Illegal aliens. Illegal aliens. Illegal aliens into the United States. Class action.

• 18:30Speaker 08

  Class. Class action reform is badly needed.

• 18:34Speaker 07

  War on terror.

• 18:34Speaker 08

  Of our war on terror. We're winning the war on terror. Embryonic stem. I am 100% opposed. Embryonic stem cells. To embryonic stem cell research. For research purposes.

• 18:46Speaker 07

  Tax relief.

• 18:46Speaker 08

  This isn't a tax relief bill. Tax relief. Tax relief.

• 18:50Speaker 07

  Illegal immigration.

• 18:51Speaker 08

  Do something about illegal immigration.

• 18:54Speaker 07

  And "date the time."

• 18:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  What was that last one?

• 18:57Speaker 08

  Morning hour be deemed expired, the journal proceedings be approved to date, the time for the two leaders be reserved.

• 19:02Speaker 07

  So, I mean, I really like the phrase "date the time" because it reminds people that this is an automated method, that we involve no judgment on our part, and that these things are just spit out by the computer.

• 19:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Republicans had the congressional majority in 2005, and it's the majority that uses this kind of procedural language more often. That's why "date the time" makes the list. Other frequent Republican phrases? Change, hearts and minds. Border security. And, believe it or not. Grand Ole Opry. 2005 was the 80th anniversary of the Grand Ole Opry. Some common Democratic phrases? The Arctic Refuge. Living in poverty. And? Rosa Parks. This was shortly after Rosa Parks's death. So, having categorized all this language along Democratic and Republican lines, Jensko

• 20:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  and Shapiro looked at how often a given newspaper used each of these signature phrases. And from that, they were able to determine each newspaper's political slant. But it was the next step that really mattered: figuring out where a slant comes from. In other words, is it that reporters have a bias that gets into their stories? Or maybe newspaper owners demand a certain line of coverage? They looked into these factors and more, including one very clever indicator: the voting patterns of the people who read a particular newspaper. They're finding? The most important factor driving the slant

• 20:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  of a given newspaper is the political leanings of the people who buy it. In other words, newspapers are giving the people the news that they want.

• 20:53Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think the broad conclusion of our paper is that newspapers look just about like every other firm in the economy. What the people making the decisions in the newspapers are doing is trying to sell newspapers. And it may be that the reporters have their own personal political views. It may be that the owners have their own personal political views. It may be that everybody involved would love to push their own personal political views a little bit more. But something we show in this paper is that if they did that, it would be really, really costly. They would lose a lot of money. And I think, at the end of the day, most of the time in most places, the people in control are not willing to give up lots and lots of money in order to change the content

• 21:37Speaker 07

  of their newspapers to satisfy their own personal views.

• 21:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up, we ask Ann Coulter what she'd do if the New York Times came to her for help. I would dance a jig. And we go inside the Times to talk to the editor who gets this kind of email.

• 21:57Speaker 03

  Thank you for making me laugh this morning. Another blithering idiot at the New York Times. Why don't you put on a tight skirt and just be a cheerleader for Obama?

• 22:25Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 23:09Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 23:28Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 24:11Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 24:32Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 25:21Speaker 02

  From WNYC and APM, American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 25:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, earlier, we heard from Tim Grossclose, UCLA professor, who says that the US media is categorically empirically biased to the left. Now, if you think that's true, what do you do about it? Here's his idea.

• 25:53Speaker 05

  I would say maybe hire more conservatives.

• 25:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  You know Ann Coulter, the commentator and author? She's on Grossclose's side. I understand that Tim Grossclose has this quiz on his website. Test your political quotient. You can kind of align yourself, match yourself to various politicians. Did you take that test? How'd you do on it?

• 26:17Speaker 10

  Well, I would say I got an A+ as a conservative.

• 26:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, let me ask you this, Ann. If, let's say, Jill Abramson, editor of The New York Times, comes to you and says, "You know what? I think you're right. I think all these years, you've been right, and that we want to do better."

• 26:38Speaker 10

  I would dance a jig.

• 26:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  But let's say that she were to come to you and say, "Ann, we think you've been right and we've been wrong, and we are starting over. We have a great infrastructure here. We know how to report the news, but we want to render the news more down the middle." What are the top priorities that you would give, let's say, The New York Times?

• 27:00Speaker 10

  Hire 10 conservatives.

• 27:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's as simple as that? It's just find a different set of people?

• 27:05Speaker 10

  I think so. I mean, just having a conservative around, it breaks the cocoon effect, I would imagine. A conservative working at The Times would be able to tell them, "David Brooks is a conservative. Could we have someone else representing us?" And I think that's all it would take. I really, I mean, maybe there is invidious bias, and they just secretly hate us or openly hate us. But I really think it's mostly a matter of not knowing any conservatives.

• 27:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coulter very much agrees with Tim Grossclose that a biased media pushes the American electorate further to the left than what it would naturally believe.

• 27:59Speaker 03

  I don't know where to begin in describing how completely ridiculous I think that is.

• 28:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  Pick a spot and begin. That's Andrew Rosenthal.

• 28:07Speaker 03

  I'm the editorial page editor of The New York Times, which means I'm in charge of editorials, letters to the editor, the columnists who work for The New York Times, and the op-ed stuff, which is people who don't work for The New York Times, who we invite to write their opinions, and that's in the paper and online.

• 28:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  So here's the thing, you know, I used to work here, as you know, and when you work here, even if you're a fan of newspapers and journalism, which some people are, but not so many, you understand that there is a demarcation, there is a Maginot Line between, or maybe a DMZ is a better phrase, between what you run, which is called Opinion Here, and the news shop. So can you describe how it works here?

• 28:50Speaker 03

  Sure. Well, the purpose of it, quite simply, is to keep the expressed opinions of people who are journalists who express their opinions out of the news columns. It is to avoid the contamination of news with opinion, not the other way around, obviously, because there is lots of news in opinion writing. And that is to maintain the independence of the news report. The Times was historically one of the first independent newspapers. And by independent, I mean politically independent. Before the current publisher's family bought it in 18, whatever it was, The New York Times was a Republican newspaper, which people will find hilarious. The guy, the first editor of The Times actually was Abraham Lincoln's

• 29:34Speaker 03

  campaign manager for reelection and one of the founders of the Republican Party. It is vitally important to remember in this context that the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln had nothing whatever to do with the Republican Party of John Boehner.

• 29:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Was there much of a distinction between editorial and news at the time?

• 29:50Speaker 03

  No, in fact, the editor of the newspaper ran the editorial page and the news pages.

• 29:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  But there was an editorial page, but it just wasn't...

• 29:56Speaker 03

  Correct. It was run by the same person who ran the news pages.

• 29:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Gotcha.

• 30:00Speaker 03

  And that was a common thing. And it's not entirely uncommon right now. There are, I know, people who are editorial page editors who report to the chief news executive of the organization that they're part of. And I think that that's the problem. And that's what we deal with here, is that at The New York Times, the most important thing is the news report, just overwhelmingly. It's our reason for existence. And that is run by Jill Abramson. Jill can't tell me what to editorialize about, doesn't know what I'm editorializing about, doesn't know what positions I'm taking, although a lot of the positions we take aren't big shockers, if you've ever read The New York Times editorial page. And I don't give her advice on what news to cover, and neither one of us has any involvement in the other's personnel decisions. I don't go to their news meetings.

• 30:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah.

• 30:44Speaker 03

  The people from the newsroom never come to editorial board meetings. We meet three times a week, the editorial board and the editorial writers. The people from the newsroom never attend those meetings. And they are not invited to be part of it. I view it as wildly inappropriate when people tell me what I should write on the editorial page, and it sometimes happens, and they all get the same response, which is, you know, my dear friend, or if they are my friend, or my colleague, please don't ever ask me a question like this again, you know how this works. And then they stop immediately. Everybody here knows what the deal is. And they don't lobby for positions. And I don't lobby for coverage.

• 31:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let me ask you this. So here's some official language from, I guess, the Times website. "The editorial department of the paper is completely separate from the news operations."

• 31:28Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 31:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  "And Mr. Rosenthal, it's you, answers directly to the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr." I'm just curious, do you ever wonder if that's a kind of, you know, quaint, old-fashioned demarcation that has maybe outlived its time? In other words, that it's impossible now, the way that news travels, the way that news is consumed, for the reading public not to conflate the opinion report of a paper like yours with the news report?

• 31:53Speaker 03

  I think it's very hard for them not to. For people who grew up, so, for example, in Europe, it's almost impossible, because they don't really have, well, they do, but there's a lot of European newspapers that are, where they co-mingle. And there is something that has happened, you know, the, everything we've been talking about is about institutional separation and bureaucratic separation and about separating the stuff that my people write from the stuff that Jill's people write.

• 32:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right.

• 32:19Speaker 03

  This does not guarantee the separation of opinion from news. And what's happened over the last decade or so, to a great, to a great extent, in constantly increasing extent, and a lot of this is because of what's going on online, and we could talk about that if you like, but is, is the seepage of opinion into news, not from the editorial department into news, but within the news departments of, of media.

• 32:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right.

• 32:49Speaker 03

  People, the, the separate, they are doing opinion.

• 32:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  Including your own paper.

• 32:54Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 32:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  So let me ask you this, does it drive you crazy some days when you read the news report of your own paper, which is as good a news report as there is, and say, hey, that should be on my page, not on their page? Do you see phrases? Do you see ideas?

• 33:06Speaker 03

  No, it's more like, you know, and, and I think this is important, and this, when this comes to media bias, I think that, that by and large, the news articles in the newspaper are very straightforward. They are, they, they have no stake in the outcome, that the writer does not believe that one way or another should be the way that the thing turned out. Certainly you do not have a situation where people are either twisting facts or leaving facts out to make something appear different than it really is in order to suit their ideology. I think the language is pretty straightforward. I think there's more analysis in New York Times articles than in most, there used to be, now everyone does it. What I, what you see is actual-

• 33:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  The implication being that analysis tends to hue a little closer to opinion than straight news.

• 33:53Speaker 03

  It hews closer to conclusion, you know, I mean, if you've ever been a foreign correspondent, like I was, and, and I was a foreign editor for a while, foreign correspondents need, need to have, they need to do reporting that reaches a conclusion.

• 34:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right.

• 34:04Speaker 03

  A foreign correspondent in Afghanistan who is not telling you which side is winning the war is not doing his job, and that's a conclusion. And there and and it's not that I want this side to win the war. And and also, a little bit of political reporting, you have to you have to reach conclusions about how candidates are doing. And if a candidate's losing an election, you have to say so.

• 34:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  There is a kind of, I think, common analog. I hope I'm not overstating it by saying that it's common, that Fox News is to the right what the New York Times is to the left. I'm guessing that you would see that as a false equivalency on a lot of levels. Tell me if I'm right.

• 34:38Speaker 03

  I think I think it's there's a word I want to use here, but even on the radio.

• 34:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  We bleep so much on the show.

• 34:43Speaker 03

  Well, it begins with bull and ends in it, and you can figure out what comes in between. I think it's absolute pernicious nonsense. I think that there, I know, I've been at this newspaper a long time. I've been in a lot of newspapers. Fox News presents the news in a way that is deliberately skewed to to promote political causes, and the New York Times simply does not. We make mistakes. We don't achieve perfect balance. There is no such thing as perfect balance, because there is such a thing as truth.

• 35:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Talk about you for a minute, growing up with New York Times, Inc., kind of in your bloodstream. So your dad was the editor of this paper for nearly 20 years, I believe, which were very important years for this newspaper in a lot of ways.

• 35:23Speaker 03

  They were formative years.

• 35:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  Talk for a minute, though, about, okay, so you are the man who runs the most important opinion section in in newspapers, and you are the son of the man who ran the news report here for for nearly 20 years. So just talk a minute about that household and what position the New York Times played in the orbit of that household.

• 35:45Speaker 03

  Well, it's the other way around. It was the household in the orbit of the New York Times. The New York Times, my dad was, you know, man of his generation. He was born in 1922. For him, the New York Times was the beginning, and the middle, and the end of his existence, and he was dedicated to it entirely. He believed, you know, he, you know what it says on his gravestone, right? He kept the paper straight. I have a thing on my desk, which most people don't know what it is, but it's that reverse lead type. And he hired a reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer, discovered after he hired her that she'd been sleeping with one of his sources at the Philadelphia Inquirer, and fired her, even though it had nothing to do with the New York Times. And someone said to him, why do you care who she sleeps with?

• 36:26Speaker 03

  And he said, rather memorably, and it's there on my, I don't care if you [bleep] an elephant just so long as you don't cover the circus.

• 36:34Speaker 03

  And that was my dad. I really truly believed that you could do that to an elephant and he'd be okay with it, but you know, no circus coverage. And you know, and that, but that is the, no, seriously, I mean, it sounds goofy. No, but that's the core of. But it's profound. It's the core of journalistic principle. And by the way, journalistic principle applies to what I do, too. We don't lie. And we don't work for Barack Obama. Or we don't, you know, we're not members of anybody's team. It's journalism. We're supposed to be writing our opinions about stuff as we truly see it. A great editorial is a strong position, firmly held, quickly and cleanly expressed, based on actual reporting.

• 37:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  You know what I learned today? I learned that media bias is probably an argument that'll never go away. We put out a podcast not long ago about how people choose to believe what we believe, about everything from the risk of global warming to whether we've ever been visited by UFOs. Now, it turns out that a lot of us unknowingly bend our beliefs to fit our political or social or family circles. We carry around all sorts of personal biases that we simply don't see. The best description I've ever heard of this comes from Danny Kahneman, the Nobel winning psychologist and author of Thinking Fast and Slow. He

• 38:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  calls it being blind to our blindness.

• 38:07Speaker 11

  Well, there's a lot of psychological research that points in that general direction. We think other people are biased and we don't feel that we're biased. We feel that their opinions are right because our intuitions tend to land on one coherent interpretation of the world. And that looks almost like a sure thing. And so we tend to be overconfident in whatever we believe. That's generally true. And, you know, we find it much easier to find the errors in other people.

• 38:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  So we'll continue to point fingers at the other side while declaring ourselves blameless. That seems to be the nature of the human beast. But more troubling, at least to me, is that we seem to like it like that. One reason we love to argue about something like media bias is that after all these millennia, we still thrive on tribalism. We still love to divide ourselves into us and them, left and right, liberal and conservative, whatever you want to call it. We find the tribe where we fit in and we rush over to join and rally round its flag and immediately start tossing grenades at the idiots who

• 39:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  are flying the other flag. Now, personally, I find this instinct a little bizarre, this instinct to herd ourselves into one of two major groups. Why should we want to define ourselves as right or left? If I'm a hardcore environmentalist, that means I have to want higher taxes too? If I'm pro-death penalty, I can't also be pro-choice? We love to complain about partisanship in Washington and in the media, but could it be that we get the partisanship we want, the partisanship we deserve? Here's my advice: If you want an enemy to root against,

• 40:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  watch more sports. That's what sport is good for. It's a proxy for war, for violence, for tribalism. And then, when the game's over, and when you're ready for some nuance, come back to the real world. And only then, if you think you're calm enough to handle it, pick up a newspaper.

• 40:25Speaker 02

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC, APM, American Public Media, and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Susie Lechtenberg with help from Jacob Berman. Our staff includes Catherine Wells, Diana Nguyen, Borey Lam, and Chris Bannon. David Herman is our engineer, Jacob Bastian is our intern, and our executive producer is Colin Campbell. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, subscribe to our free podcast on iTunes and go to Freakonomics.com, where you'll find lots of radio, a blog, the books, and more.

• 41:02Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 41:47Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 42:11Speaker 12

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• 42:35Speaker 09

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