The impossibility of rationally analyzing partisan news

The problem with this analysis is that it assumes that all inputs from partisan news sources are providing a consistent set of observations with differing levels of accuracy. This is demonstrably not the case. Partisan news[1] typically acts more like an extremely lossy compression algorithm that throws away information that doesn&#x27;t already conform to a predetermined pattern. That information is not retained as &quot;low accuracy&quot;, it simply doesn&#x27;t exist in their reporting. Many people still consider these types of sources as fairly reliable today. On occasion (or perhaps disturbingly often) extremely partisan news sources insert (i.e. repeat, amplify) observations that could be thought to have even a negative accuracy (falsehoods) [2].<p>The difference in conclusions is thus: suppose we had a computing device that could make the NP complete step (#3 in the post) P instead. It would mean that in such a scenario we <i>could</i> rationally analyze partisan news.<p>What I&#x27;m saying is that <i>even</i> given such a device, we could not. Given [1] above we would also need a device that could generate all possible observations and accuracies to attempt to fill in the missing information - which requires infinite computation. But [2] makes it even more intractable, where we have to not only compute all possible observations, but also consider all scenarios where there is no observation to report (with it&#x27;s own set of accuracies) -- an even larger infinity.<p>The article&#x27;s supposition can be resolved simply by observing enough partisan news (reported from every partisan angle) that you can put error bars on the reported information. Reality is such that you could observe all partisan news and still not know what&#x27;s going on because there would simply be information gaps that would be irretrievable without infinite computation.

It&#x27;s a well-known adage that a lie by omission is still a lie. Complete coverage of a topic or event is not just a positive analysis of factual claims, but also a negative analysis of facts omitted. This is an incredibly fuzzy realm where it is actually impossible to know if a story is truly complete. Thus, the entire pursuit of &quot;objective journalism&quot; to me seems a folly.<p>I much prefer that partisan actors pursue their incentives to include competing details, from which I can synthesize a Bayesian analysis of what is most likely to have happened. Often, the attempt to slander partisan coverage of events is done to cover up for partisan reporting masquerading as &quot;objective&quot; while omitting or massaging crucial details that only the slandered opposition will point out.

Whatever &quot;news&quot; you get is going to suffer from both conscious and unconscious bias on the part of the reporter(s), editors, et al.<p>You can only accept information from others as &quot;someone wanted to communicate this to me&quot; and speculate on their real reasons for doing so.<p>We just have to do the best we can with the limited, imperfect information available to us. Our very <i>senses</i> lie to us.<p>If your notion of rationality requires there to be Perfect Truth then you&#x27;re SOL right at the start.

It is possible to apply some filtration to one&#x27;s choices of news sources. Do they publish and enforce a code of journalistic ethics? Have they ever publicly disciplined a reporter for making things up or otherwise violating that code? Do they prominently and frequently publish corrections, either &quot;in-band&quot; or on their Web page? Do they refuse to provide a platform of respectability to people spreading [md]isformation?<p>None of these are guarantees of trustworthiness, but a lack of them is in my experience a warning signal.

I enjoyed this blog post but, broadly, conversation on the topic of news epistemology has always irked me because i detect an implication that there exists an &quot;unbiased&quot; recounting of events. This is naive.

I am fond of the &quot;STASM&quot; analytical framework given in: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gutenberg.org&#x2F;files&#x2F;48612&#x2F;48612-h&#x2F;48612-h.htm#Page_116" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gutenberg.org&#x2F;files&#x2F;48612&#x2F;48612-h&#x2F;48612-h.htm#Pa...</a><p>&gt; <i>The point will invariably arise: &quot;This tells me how to listen to a foreign radio. Okay, I&#x27;ll get the news, the lectures, the plays—all the rest of it. But so what? How am I going to know what&#x27;s the truth and what&#x27;s propaganda? How can I tell &#x27;em apart? Tell me that!&quot;</i><p>&gt; <i>The answer is simple: &quot;If you agree with it, it&#x27;s truth. If you don&#x27;t agree, it&#x27;s propaganda. Pretend that it is all propaganda. See what happens on your analysis reports.&quot;</i><p>(If I understand TFA, Linebarger&#x27;s proposed 1948 sol&#x27;n seems to lie in not updating beliefs, or at least not so aggressively?)

It&#x27;s like survivorship bias. You only see the things that aren&#x27;t targeted for omission.<p>Sometimes you can tell a lot by what a given source leaves out about a given story. You find what&#x27;s &quot;allowed into the narrative&quot; and how that evolves over time. Can be more interesting than the story itself.

&gt;Critically, if we are persuaded by either camp, we will find most of the sources in that camp believable. And most in the other camp to be not believable.<p>You don&#x27;t believe one camp or the other. You look at how each camp reports on the same event. You use them against each other to get closer to the truth, like a trial where both sides argue their case and you are the judge.

The most valuable thing I ever read about trust was this gem by a bank risk policy consultant:<p>One Minute MBA – Avoiding Projects Pursued By Morons 101 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dsquareddigest.wordpress.com&#x2F;2004&#x2F;05&#x2F;27&#x2F;108573518762776451&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dsquareddigest.wordpress.com&#x2F;2004&#x2F;05&#x2F;27&#x2F;108573518762...</a><p><i>Fibbers’ forecasts are worthless.</i> Case after miserable case after bloody case we went through, I tell you, all of which had this moral. Not only that people who want a project will tend to make innacurate projections about the possible outcomes of that project, but about the futility of attempts to “shade” downward a fundamentally dishonest set of predictions. If you have doubts about the integrity of a forecaster, you can’t use their forecasts at all.

The issue of rationality in analysis is it is forced to take on the base assumptions of the thing it&#x27;s analyzing. If you start from false premises you will reach bad conclusions. This is the difference between rationality and reason.<p>Media literacy, in particular a rather (dare I say) postmodern approach to understanding the process of narrative construction, helps a whole lot to see through the ideological underpinnings. It actually helps quite a bit to triangulate an approximation of the truth by understanding not only the partisan bias in interpreting facts but also what different outlets might choose to include or not in their stories in order to further ideological arguments as well as how they might try to think for the reader to lead them from bare facts to interpretations that feel like facts.

We all want to be lied to. The alternative, watching CSPAN live-stream congress or the senate is so boring that you can even see the senators or congress people sleeping in the chambers!<p>We have the tools to find the truth, at least for many parts of our government. If you go look at CSPAN programming which allows the public to comment, or watch &quot;debates&quot;, you&#x27;ll notice a lot of empty chambers and very old people with nothing better to do being the only participants.<p>This is why we turn to partisan news. Shame on us.

I don’t think I quite understand what a belief is or what is being updated in this context.<p>If I have lots of beliefs, like every fact in a news story is a belief, then even an O(n) updating process seems overwhelming.<p>If my beliefs are just big things, like “people in states governed by political party X tend to have better outcomes by the metrics I care about,” then I think I only have like a handful of beliefs and I don’t really care about the big-O cost of updating them.

I feel that reporting which is done in a neutral tone tends to correlate well with organizations and individuals who are interested in factually true reporting. Also, people who are concerned about the truth will tend to use more weasel words, such as “appears to” or “alleges”, because those words leave open the possibility of being wrong.

It should be noted that if you ask most people whether foreign news contains propaganda, they&#x27;ll say it almost certainly does, but if you ask them whether our news contains propaganda, they&#x27;ll say it&#x27;s pretty unlikely, minor, or they can easily spot and dismiss it.

It seems like you should be able to extract statements of fact from competing sources, say Fox and CNN. The overlap of facts would likely be true enough. The distinct sets then become color as to why those facts were included&#x2F;excluded and the bias is then it&#x27;s own set of news.