Asymmetric Media

Paul Rosenberg discusses a study published in the Columbia Journalism Review in which "fake news" is identified as a problem, but "its overall impact was overshadowed by the sheer volume of stories coming from the established media".

Although "92% of claims of media bias in the 1988, 1992, and 1996 elections came from Republicans alleging liberal bias", Rosenberg characterizes The New York Times as "effectively hacked by pro-[von Clownstick] forces" and describes the findings of the CJR study as "shocking".

The Times was de facto strongly biased against Hillary Clinton and in favor of [Fuckface von Clownstick], simply by what the paper chose to focus on.

In particular:

[The study] found roughly four times as many Clinton-related sentences that described scandals as opposed to policies, whereas [von Clownstick]-related sentences were one-and-a-half times as likely to be about policy as scandal. Given the sheer number of scandals in which [Fuckface] was implicated ... it is striking that the media devoted more attention to his policies than to his personal failings. Even more striking, the various Clinton-related email scandals ... accounted for more sentences than all of [von Clownstick's] scandals combined (65,000 vs. 40,000) and more than twice as many as were devoted to all of her policy positions.

To the extent that voters mistrusted Hillary Clinton, or considered her conduct as secretary of state to have been negligent or even potentially criminal, or were generally unaware of what her policies contained or how they may have differed from [Fuckface von Clownstick's], these numbers suggest their views were influenced more by mainstream news sources than by fake news.

Rosenberg quotes co-author Duncan Watts' explanation for the bias.

[E]veryone was assuming Hillary would win and didn’t want to look as if they had helped her, so they were (either consciously or unconsciously) tougher on her.

[Second], liberal intellectual types (which describes most journalists) are much more worried than conservatives and anti-intellectuals about appearing to be unbiased, and so overcompensate.

Rosenberg maintains that conservatives do strategize ways to manipulate the establishment media.

That’s exactly what I mean by employing the metaphor of hacking: The right uses Enlightenment values, practices and institutions to subvert and destroy those very values, practices and institutions. They are essentially hacking our culture.

Update (April 25, 2018):  New York Times reporter Amy Chozick concedes in her book that poor judgement was used during the election.

In a chapter titled “How I Became an Unwitting Agent of Russian Intelligence,” Chozick, who spent a decade covering Hillary Clinton for the Times and The Wall Street Journal, recounts the October afternoon when WikiLeaks began releasing a new set of documents obtained from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s Gmail account. By then, journalists had reason to suspect that hackers working for Russian intelligence services were the source of the emails. Nonetheless, Chozick writes that she “chose the byline” rather than urging her editors to consider the possibility that the paper was being used by a hostile government. She was not alone -- virtually every major publication devoted significant attention to the hacked emails.

Update (June 22, 2018):  The Washington Post reports that The National Inquirer would regularly pass along stories about von Clownstick to Michael Cohen for approval before publication. Matthew Rozsa comments:

[T]his [demonstrates] that the same man who regularly complains about "fake news" has no qualms about colluding with a publication that literally publishes fake news if it can help his political career.