The only surprising aspect of Nate Silver’s latest substack essay is that he actually wrote it and had the courage to put it on the web. He is honest about mainstream media bias, and until he got kicked off his own creation, the 538 blog, Silver was a willing accomplice in this rot in the foundation of our democracy, making a lot of money in the process. Now—finally—he’s using his substantial critical thinking and research skills to expose the bad guys (his former pals before they rejected him : yes, I suspect there’s a measure of vengeance in this)who continue to successfully warp public knowledge and the process of an informed democracy by convincing sufficient number of ovine citizens that the concept of progressive media bias is a right-wing conspiracy theory. The focus of his traitorous analysis is how Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has helped address the effects of the media’s partisan bias.
In “Twitter, Elon and the Indigo Blob,” Silver becomes one of the very few progressives of note to admit what has been going on under their cultural assault. Some others include Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and Bari Weiss, but Silver is more scientific and detached than any of them, and as a result, his analysis is more persuasive and, I hope, more disruptive to the blue wall of silence the progressive Borg has erected around a throbbing, obvious, disgusting truth.
Read it all, but here are some excerpts:
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“I’ll sometimes see progressives lament that there is no left-wing equivalent to Fox News. Mostly, I agree that there’s an asymmetry. For example, if you average out all of the content on their respective platforms, The New York Times maintains a much higher level of journalistic quality than Fox News does, and is much less partisan. However, that’s largely because partisan, progressive, pro-left wing, pro-Democratic Party media is embedded within the mainstream media.”
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“The Indigo Blob [ “the common argumentative space” shared by “left-progressives, liberals, centrists, and moderate or non-MAGA conservatives” that “excludes MAGA/right-wing conservatives” or 30%of the country] also encompasses many ostensibly nonpartisan institutions such as the media, science, government, academia and even many types of businesses.”
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“Until the past year or so, it was therefore much safer for supposedly agnostic or nonpartisan institutions such as corporations to express left-leaning viewpoints than right-leaning ones. What’s more, because the employees of these institutions tend disproportionally to be college-educated — and because educational status is a strong correlate of the Blob/MAGA divide — these institutions are often more left-leaning than the constituents or consumers that they’re designed to serve.”
- “I think institutions like the media — and certainly science and medicine — provide substantial, non-zero-sum benefits to society and that this mission has been somewhat compromised in recent years by left-leaning partisanship. I would argue that many of the worst failures of COVID policy — for instance, extended school closures — partly reflected the politicization of these institutions.” [Nate is being a weenie there with his equivocal language— “somewhat,””partly”—but I’ll forgive him; he just lost 75% of his friends and media bookings. He equivocates again in his conclusions, like...
- “The basic critique here is that some people within the Indigo Blob have laundered the trust placed within their institutions as sources of expertise to advance a political agenda or for other self-serving purposes….”
As I noted at the start, none of this is even faintly surprising or new: Ethics Alarms has chronicled the phenomenon for more than a decade. It is obvious and undeniable, which is what makes the gaslighting of the dishonest (or made stupid by bias) mob who deny it so infuriating. (I haven’t had to do it yet, but I resolved recently that any commenter who denies the existence of progressive bias in the media will be banned.) Nonetheless, for Silver to clearly—with only a tinge of weeniness—state that truth is admirable and courageous.
uuu
Ethics Alarms 
Here is another one of those fundamental premise differences between Left and Right manifest.
When we see the effect: “College educated people tend to lean progressive” both sets of premises see different reasons.
The Progressive says “well of course – they’re educated, and intelligent people see the rightness of progressivism.”
The Conservative says “well of course – colleges are very effectively disseminating a set of progressive visions for the future and calling it education”
Michael.
Part of the problem is how we define educated. I would posit that the generally held belief is that anyone without a college degree is uneducated and those with college degrees are educated. This assumption is biased toward those who derive their economic wellbeing from government spending. Academics, scientists, medical professionals and government workers are for the most required to have a degree for their position. Conversely, many small businesses owners have no degrees nor do many plumbers, carpenters, machinists, auto techs or self-taught web designers and computer “geeks”. The concept of who is educated is built squarely upon a foundation of sand.
Just how many communications gender studies or graduates of some other esoteric programs are needed to maintain a healthy economy, or do we expand government (federal, state, & local) to find employment for and absorb excess graduates of those fields of study? What value do these graduates provide to consumers?
I know plenty of college graduates whose opinions are formed not through a critical assessment of the issues, but rather on just how the issue will affect them monetarily. We often hear teachers complain they have to buy materials out of their own pockets, but when they push for more education dollars, they don’t demand increases in materials of instruction they demand higher salaries and benefits. I worked in post-secondary education, and I saw that firsthand.
I wonder how the information from various government funded studies would change if government got out of the funding of studies that relate to their policy perspectives. Do we not denigrate studies funded by tobacco or the pharmaceutical industries because of a conflict of interest. Of course, we do. We see and obvious conflict of interest. If government is seeking to remake an economy to advance a specific technology, does it not make sense for the research grant seekers to deliver a product that supports the government? Of course, it does because the researcher’s income is predicated on staying in favor of the buyer, which is of course government.
Real education allows the individual to be able to evaluate something from multiple angles and not just their own parochial interests. Perhaps the correlation between education and progressive policies has more to do protecting their sources of income rather than having some keen insight into resolving problems because of their education.
This is all correct. Don’t miss the point that the narrative crafters are slowly working on associating the working class (as it shifts more conservative) with being stupid. It will all ultimately be an open slur – oh, you’re conservative? Well of course… you aren’t educated.
Unironically, pointing ridicule at an interest group that had been supposedly actively championed by progressives.
“ In fact, the average mainstream media story has only a slight hint of left-wing bias, and many mainstream media stories have no bias at all or even have a modest right-wing bias.” I’m curious how he is defining left-wing and right-wing bias and which publications he is talking about here. I don’t know how he can conclude that many mainstream media stories have no bias or modest right-wing bias.
He means, I think, non-politics stories. He’s wrong, but then bias makes you stupid. At least Nate’s making a good faith effort to get past his. But the Times left-biased world view seeps into everything: sports, movie reviews, business reporting.
I do appreciate when people at least try to be evenhanded in their assessments, even if they don’t succeed completely. To be fair, it can be hard to notice things that you take for granted due to your worldview. I doubt anyone is perfect at it.
Yep, he’s a fish who has a hard time understanding what it’s like to live in water.
Silver nails this:
“The Indigo Blob is not an undifferentiated mass. If you look closely, it contains multitudes. However, it’s to some people’s advantage to maintain the Blob’s ambiguity. Trying to disambiguate the Blob will often make you the subject of intense criticism on Twitter, and Twitter’s architecture has tended to make such dissent painful.”
[…]
“Many other people in the Indigo Blob don’t agree with this attitude and don’t partake in these behaviors. However, here is where Twitter plays a role. If you’re one of those annoying people like me who thinks there’s value in pointing out hypocrisy and other misbehavior from people in the Blob, you will get absolutely shat upon on Twitter. People feel extremely threatened when you point this stuff out. They will go great lengths to deter it. They will launch all types of ad hominem attacks against you. They will just flatly make stuff up about you. This is particularly likely if you are member in good standing of the Indigo Blob yourself, and have some credibility to critique them. Your credentials will be attacked, or you will be called a “closet right-winger”; anything to disqualify you.”
He’s explaining how the group has resisted labels. If you label something you can criticize it. If you label something, some of the people standing beside you might disagree with you on the topic. If you label something, it makes it more vulnerable. I talked about it on my Substack using zebra camouflage as a metaphor.
And speaking of media bias, has the MSM gotten wind of any new developments on the Hunter Biden and the Big Guy hearings going on in Congress? Evidently not. There’s no mention of it whatsoever. Amazing.
It’s hard, because we don’t even have a transcript yet.
I don’t understand why this was allowed to be behind a closed door.
Probably for analogous reasons for why the Epstein client list is still behind closed doors.
True no transcript yet, HT. But the contrast between the Dem and Republican summaries are hilarious.
Exactly. Everyone is beaking off, telling us that when the transcript is released it’ll completely back up their diametrically opposed version of that hearing. I’m actually fairly confident that we will get a transcript, and I think it’ll be interesting as heck.
According to Jonathan Turley, the transcript will be forthcoming in a few days as a matter of course. I think he knows how these things work.
Just posted on it!!!
Also, this;
“The writer Damian Linker defined “wokeism” as follows:
The effort by progressives to take ideological control of institutions within civil society and use those positions to mandate that their moral outlook be adopted throughout the broader culture.
I don’t think this is a particularly good definition of “wokeism” or wokeness, just because I don’t think that’s quite what people are referring to when they use those terms. But I do think it gets at something vital. This is sometimes why relatively picayune arguments, like who is allowed publish an op-ed in The New York Times, blow up on Twitter. They are proxies for larger discussions about whether these institutions ought to be openly progressive.”
I agree with Nate that that’s a bad definition for “wokeism”, but I also agree that what Linker described was both real and important. And I think progressives even come to this in a roundabout honest way… When your politics are as far to the left as some of the activists we’re talking about, an actual centrist position looks unbearably to the right. I have the impression that a lot of progressives are so high on their own supply that they legitimately believe that objectively neutral positions are antagonistic to them. And if those neutral institutions (most of them) were willing to be antagonistic to them, why not create an environment where they’re antagonistic to everyone else? I think it’s important to understand that because it’s ultimately a power play, and neutrality won’t be rewarded with neutrality when progressives are in power.
Dear Mr. Marshall, I read your emails everyday, sometimes more than once. I’m not a well educated person who only has a limited amount of education under my belt. With that being said, I want to thank you for the enlightenment you provide on many issues that I otherwise would have thought unimportant. Sometimes I have trouble understanding some points you make but this only makes me do some of my own research to gain clarity. Although I’m not well educated and have a limited amount of common sense I have watched the degeneration of our country and understand it’s implications. I just stand amazed at the number of people who are “well educated” who either can’t see the writing on the wall or refuse to see it. My grandmother, who went through the Great Depression and many other world events, only had an eighth grade education was a very wise woman and often commented, “You can send a fool to college but all you get afterwards is an Educated Fool.” I find that truer every day. I thank God for your wisdom and common sense that you’ve obtained through your education and life experience you share daily. Thank you and don’t give up the fight for it is for the very soul of our nation. Sincerely Yours in East Tennessee, Linda Wilburn
Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPad
Thank you so much, Linda. It’s been a rough July for the business, the family and my psyche. Notes like yours help a lot.
Now there’s comment of the day.
It’s great hearing from the world wide world. There are people and things out there that are encouraging. They’re hard to see, but they’re there. Last Friday I had a flat on I-10 in the middle of nowhere in 116 degree heat in the late afternoon. I ended up having to call a wrecker which took an hour to arrive (I was able to sit in my airconditioned car well off the side of the road). Two, count ’em, TWO different young, able bodied guys, both Hispanic by the way, stopped on the side of the Interstate at great risk to life and limb, to ask me whether they could be of any help. They couldn’t, but boy, was that ever a wonderful experience for me in the midst of a mini-catastrophe.