He writes,

Far more consequential, in terms of failed objectivity, is the journalistic tone of moral contempt for politicians, officeholders, and the democratic process in general. News is a rhetorical style, a form of persuasion: and the rhetoric of political coverage pours out toxic levels of cynicism and distrust. People in politics are assumed to be liars and cheats. As long ago as 1992, when Thomas Patterson asked “several of the nation’s top journalists” why they chose to portray the presidential candidates as liars, the usual response was “Because they are liars.” Candidates are depicted as making promises they never intend to keep. They say things that are incredibly ignorant or insensitive – often self-detonating by means of the dreaded “gaffe.” Elections are decided by money rather than a gullible electorate, in any case. Elected officials, the wise consumer of news must conclude, are pawns to powerful but unaccountable interests.

Read the whole post. I do not entirely agree. I think that the press in dealing with President Obama was quite far from “toxic levels of cynicism and distrust.” However, the Obama case may be an anomaly.

Most of his essay is on the “fake news” issue. He adopts the view that social media works to correct and filter out fake news. I am not so sure. I think that whether or not fake news has an effect gets caught up in the larger issue of political cognition, and I am not confident that anyone understands that very well.

The WaPo’s Chris Cillizza writes,

In the general election, 77 percent of the coverage of Trump was negative as compared with 64 percent of the Clinton coverage. (For the entire campaign — including the primary — Clinton had the more negative coverage — 62 percent to 56 percent.)

He cites a Harvard study. But how this coverage affected political cognition is not clear. For example, suppose that the public’s (unstated) baseline assumption is that the Republican candidate will receive 60 percent negative coverage and the Democratic candidate will receive 40 percent negative coverage. Relative to those hypothetical expectations, the coverage of Mrs. Clinton may have actually come across as the worst of the two candidates.

Note that the Harvard study looks at positive and negative content of stories, not at whether the stories were biased. As Cillizza points out, if Mr. Trump was genuinely bad, then negative coverage by the Harvard study definition does not indicate bias. Instead, it might indicate the antagonism toward politicians that Martin Gurri discusses.

Again, this is sort of a trial run. The idea is to work out the best approach for doing it. I agree with the commenters who say that someone other than me should take on this project. If someone is interested in taking it on, perhaps along with a similar project for the NYT, they should get in touch with me, and we can brainstorm how to fund it.

My current thinking is that there are three types of bias. First, the headlines and lead paragraphs sometimes do a lot of editorializing, as in the first story on the phone call between Mr. Trump and Taiwan’s President.

Second, there are double standards in choice of emphasis, as when the Post tells the “Steve Bannon is controversial” story in a way that makes Bannon seem totally beyond the pale but tells the “Keith Ellison is controversial” story in a way that endorses neither Ellison nor his opponents. I do not have a problem with the Ellison story, but I do have a problem with the disparate treatment given to Bannon.

Third, there is the “world view confirmation” bias of the Metro section, the Style section, and the Sunday Outlook section. That is, each contains essays or stories that make progressives feel good about their world view, with much fewer pieces that might give progressives reason to doubt or reconsider in any way.

Also, I am finding that a binary classification system of “bias or no bias” is not the best scheme. I would feel much better assigning bias points to pieces, which could range, say, from 0 to 5, with 0 for no bias to 5 for extremely high bias. Using this system, the initial story on the China phone call would get the full 5 points for editorializing. For each week, you would have a scorecard giving the number of progressive bias points and the number of anti-progressive bias points.

For now, and probably in general, the actual scoring is less important than explaining my thinking on the various pieces.
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