Media Bias

The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he doesn't exist. We'll apply Baudelaire's take on the devil's finest trick to discuss the way media operate at a level even below our conscious awareness.

We might start out with the most flagrant example in which bias actually rises to the level of targeted manipulation i.e. social media. It's now trite to say but nonetheless true that products served up as "free" simply mean you are the product. View any of them -- facebook, google, instagram, etc. -- simply as attention extraction machines designed to peek into our very souls. No, not just to peek, but to shape. This particular devil behind the curtain may be motivated by anything from simple commercial exploitation to outright ideological manipulation.

Think that's all a cynical exaggeration? If so, the very best preparation for our session is a ninety minute viewing of that stunning recent documentary The Social Dilemma (available on Netflix). The human brain stem, its existence measured in terms of millennia, is no match against the power of technology, around for mere decades, to hack it. Now picture yourself as an appendage dangling from a node on the network.

The underlying power, however, is as old as psychology itself. Edward Bernays (Sigmund Freud's nephew), the so-called father of spin, knew all about the power of subliminal association starting with his famous campaign in 1929 to promote female smoking by branding cigarettes as feminist "torches of freedom."

Now add technology to such a subliminal delivery system. Algorithms applied to the mined data of social media have now become smart bombs, unleashing with uncanny precision exactly what Bernays had first applied almost a century ago. These vast social media machines know more about you -- what you want and what you'll do -- than what you consciously know yourself.

We may then reflect on our susceptibility to the biases of mass media, both print and broadcast which, while perhaps more blunt instruments than are social media, have similar drivers. The decline of the subscription-based model here again means somebody else is fronting or subsidizing the costs. Among the most common forms of political and non-political media biases: advertising; corporate; partisan; sensationalism; concism; mainstream; speculative; and false timeliness (old stuff, served up as new). We might exercise some degree of self-knowledge by reflecting on how our perception of media bias says something about the nature and extent of our own biases.

Simple awareness might be the best defense against any such uninvited bias. Good luck with that. One approach would be to consciously follow a variety of political, philosophical, sociological, and financial media streams and triangulate on our own truth. Another approach would be to outsource such an effort to a trusted third party. They may be out there.

A word similar to the word triangulate is consilience (roughly meaning the convergence of evidence, especially in science and history) which leads to the exciting introduction of Rob Schuham, leader of an upcoming effort aptly named The Consilience Project, who will be joining our session.

(To access previous Member Monday introductions click TOC)