Skepticism of news journalism, moral values, and framing effects
May 19, 2021 9:43 AM   Subscribe

"there is a link to differences in moral instincts, which cut across demographics and ideology." "A new way of looking at trust in media: Do Americans share journalism’s core values?" by the Media Insight Project. (Answer: many do not.) "The trust crisis may be better understood through people’s moral values than their politics." Using moral foundations theory, researchers found four clusters of people linked by their journalism & moral values. Researchers were able to revise stories to -- while keeping them factually accurate -- emphasizing aspects that made them more appealing to, for instance, people who care a lot about loyalty and authority. "Might people trust these stories more, attend to them more closely, see them as accurate, and so on?"

The explanation of five basic values from moral foundations theory (whether people value care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and/or purity) and five basic journalistic values (oversight, transparency, factualism, giving voice to the less powerful, and social criticism) is interesting, especially regarding what the inverse of each value is.

"Encouragingly, far from alienating other audiences, those revisions also made stories even more appealing to audiences who already agreed with core journalism values."
posted by brainwane (21 comments total) 23 users marked this as a favorite
 
Do Americans share journalism’s core values?

Do journalists, even?
posted by chavenet at 10:00 AM on May 19, 2021 [11 favorites]


The problem is that all five of the basic journalistic values are antithetical to capitalism.
posted by Faint of Butt at 10:02 AM on May 19, 2021 [8 favorites]


The problem is that all five of the basic journalistic values are antithetical to capitalism.

Eh, they're just antithetical to people in power and people for whom facts are inconvenient or secrecy or misinformation critical to their aims. In most of the world right now, it's capitalists. But it's not exactly like journalism flourished where capitalism was on the outs with the folks in charge.
posted by tclark at 10:06 AM on May 19, 2021 [36 favorites]


The problem is that "purity" is considered a moral category.
posted by Saxon Kane at 10:15 AM on May 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


Hey Saxon Kane, could you expand on that? I'm not sure what you mean. Is Haidt's approach something you've found flawed to work with?
posted by brainwane at 10:18 AM on May 19, 2021


Journalists, as in the people who report the news, have a different set of values than those who pay journalists. Their goal is revenue, and it's to the benefit of those who pay journalists for "content" to optimize for revenue. That's why you get things like shocking, controversial headlines that are designed to grab attention even if the headline doesn't accurately reflect the actual story in the article.

This is, of course, nothing new, but the collapse of ad rates in the social media age where there's infinite supply but finite demand for ads, has required a significant shift to prioritize maximizing the limited revenue one can get from ads. If you can get something to go viral on Twitter or Facebook with a shocking, viral headline and dek, people are more likely to share it, and that will drive more clicks and revenue, regardless of whether anyone actually reads the story, or reads past the lead.
posted by SansPoint at 10:20 AM on May 19, 2021 [3 favorites]


Mod note: One comment removed and a few left for visibility. Please remember the guidelines, particularly: *Be sensitive to context* "Read a thread before commenting. Engage with what people are really saying. Respond appropriately to people's mood and investment in a topic." So far most comments in the thread are ignoring the specific study at hand and turning the conversation into a criticism of journalism.
posted by loup (staff) at 10:45 AM on May 19, 2021 [3 favorites]


Many people who are not in power have a lot of reasons to dislike journalistic values as well, so it's not just a power problem. While I generally agree with journalistic values (which are mostly shared with academia in general), I find the assumption that they are automatically the best values very offputting because they often don't match the psychology of what makes people actually happy and fulfilled in life. Specific points based on the research's definition:

Oversight: This value measures how strongly a person feels the need to monitor powerful people and know what public officials are doing: This fights directly with the value of individual privacy, especially today where the split between "public" and "private" is completely arbitrary. I've seen this value be fought over very contentiously when it comes to things like reporting abuse where the journalistic assumption is that if someone is powerful in one area then everything about them is obviously journalistically relevant

Transparency: This is the idea that society works better when information is out in the open and the public knows what is happening: This fights with the more modern concern that information can easily be distorted by bad actors. More public information is not better when that information comes out in a form that hurts others and is easily abused

Social criticism: This value measures how people feel about the importance of casting a spotlight on a community’s problems to solve them versus celebrating what is right and working well to reinforce the good things: This fights with the fact that everyone is very, very tired of hearing about bad things. It is also used to encourage bad faith and perfectionist criticism that you constantly get on the internet where nothing is ever good enough.

Giving voice to the less powerful: This measures whether people want to amplify the voices of people who aren’t ordinarily heard: I think a lot of people agree with this in theory, but it ignores the fact that most people who have a voice only have it because of media/journalism in the first place! So in practice it often ends up amplifying the same voices of people who have journalism connections and know how to run PR

Factualism: This is the idea that the more facts people have, the closer they will get to the truth: I strongly believe in this one and so do most Americans based on the surveys, but it sometimes causes problems by encouraging people to remove context from truthful statements to make them sound more authoritative and gloss over complexities.
posted by JZig at 10:48 AM on May 19, 2021 [17 favorites]


It's interesting to me that the 4th quality, Giving voice to the less powerful, is often at odds with the 5th basic moral value as described in the theory " purity versus degradation".

Many of our less powerful voices are the voices of those seen as impure by moral authority. LGBTQ+ , for instance.
posted by OHenryPacey at 10:55 AM on May 19, 2021 [6 favorites]


The result is described as "researchers found four clusters", but in the technique they used (k-means) the number of clusters is chosen (that's what the "k" is) rather than discovered from the data. They don't seem to describe how they chose k, so I'd take these four clusters with a grain of salt, as they might just be the product of deciding based on intuition that there ought to be an aesthetically pleasing four.
posted by Pyry at 11:42 AM on May 19, 2021 [4 favorites]


Is Haidt's approach something you've found flawed

This isn't directed to me, but I'll chime in that I do not find Haidt compelling. For me there was a quick litmus that failed: 0 results for Ctrl F: "Power" on his wikipedia page. This isn't cherry picking. I've seen him before in TED-style presentations.

Look at the link above for 'four clusters' and trace the boundaries of how the groups are differentiated. The language used and the framing has a very 'have you ever tried sugar or PCP' vibe to it for me. For non-Hedberg fans, what I'm getting at is that the (possibly) intentionally obtuse framing elides subjects that are inconvenient to the premise of the research.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 11:44 AM on May 19, 2021 [3 favorites]


In a larger sense, you can't destroy the master's house with the master's tools. That is: it's folly to expect capital to fund hard-hitting journalism that digs into and exposes the misdoings of the capital and ruling classes (as we've seen with ad-based everything on the internet).

In that sense, what we've seen is the courtly class of Washington journalists genuinely angry when someone attacks their pals in the political classes. They move in the same circles. They are friends. Why would they hold them to account? How much of the journalistic outrage to Trump was just lack of deference to said courtly class?

There are, of course, nonprofits, but even most of those are funded or gifted funding by the wealthy. And most of them employ a handful of people or have a narrow focus.

There's also the argument that a public good should be funded like a public service, but there again we see the problem: How can we expect public/governmentally-funded news outlets to dig into misdeeds from the very people funding them, when those people could and probably will cut their funding?

I think in a larger sense the question is: How do you get people to hear what they don't want to hear? (That is to say, everyone loves mudslinging when it's their enemies, but hates when it's their faves being mudslung).

I don't pretend like I have an answer, either. It's a hard question and none of the incentives align, at least not under capitalism.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 11:53 AM on May 19, 2021 [4 favorites]


but in the technique they used (k-means) the number of clusters is chosen (that's what the "k" is) rather than discovered from the data.

I believe there are metrics for measuring how compact the resulting clusters are based on the selection of k and techniques for deciding which k best describes the data by trying a bunch of different values for k, but 10-dimensional space is really, really, big and I think a healthy dose of skepticism is required before drawing conclusions about the number of clusters especially since k-means will always give you k clusters.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 12:03 PM on May 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


There are more involved and computationally expensive algorithms which attempt to determine the number of clusters (DBSCAN, Affinity Propogation) based on the spread of the data. I'm not an expert in this field, but I imagine it would be nice to know that the optimal selection of k for k-means coincides with the determination of k from one of these other algorithms.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 12:11 PM on May 19, 2021


The most recent series of podcasts from Invisibilia, called the Chaos Machine goes into this issue in depth. For a growing number of people, with growing influence, purity is way more important than impartially or truthfulness. They're empowered because that's who we tune into these days.
posted by Popular Ethics at 5:11 PM on May 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


At the end of the day, all I care about in journalism is usefulness. I want information that informs my thoughts & actions and ultimately aids in improved decision making.
posted by grokus at 9:22 PM on May 19, 2021


This was interesting. I was not crazy about the write up--talking about, but not enumerating, the five core values of journalism in the initial introduction was really frustrating--but glad I went through it. The example articles really made it clear; pitch something as civilian leaders ignoring a "military study" and I totally believe you can flip around who trusts it.

I didn't get their argument that this cuts across partisan lines. The cluster that had the highest trust in journalistic values was by far the most liberal; the runner up was the second most liberal.

I personally would mistrust k-means clustering just because you pick "k". Like all clustering, it's just a way of simplifying data. You could use other techniques but you're still dealing with tunable parameters that will give you an arbitrary number of clusters in the end. You then decide what gives the most useful cut of the data. There's no way of going through this exercise that is "objective" in any meaningful sense; ultimately you have a human look at the clusters and decide if they are helpful or not.
posted by mark k at 11:38 PM on May 19, 2021


So, I'm a little late to the discussion, but re: my comment about purity above: it wasn't a statement about the methodology, I just mean that if someone says that they value purity, and you ask "purity of what?" I have a hard time thinking of answers to that question that aren't awful.
posted by Saxon Kane at 4:53 PM on May 23, 2021 [1 favorite]


Saxon Kane: thanks. I may be an outlier here but I do think some things are sacred, and that's how I read the "purity" value.
posted by brainwane at 5:25 PM on May 23, 2021


Purity is a description; not everyone r about reacting to purity would use the word purity to describe it.

When I first saw that model, "purity" (which also correlates with being conservative) made me think of fundamentalists hung up on sex or racists not wanting to share a lunch counter with black people.

Someone pointed out to me that, on the more liberal side, having a gut response if you (as a vegetarian) find out there was chicken broth in your meal or pesticides. That made it easier to see how a rational modern person could still have something on this axis.

I'm not saying that this is a wrong response. But when I cower from someone getting 7' away, outside, in my very low-Covid area because I picture them spewing virions on me, I know I'm reacting to risk not supported by rational levels; that is the purity intuition driving it.
posted by mark k at 5:29 PM on May 23, 2021


Most recently: the emotional reaction I had to the January 6th attempted coup included my horror at the defilement of what is - to me - one of my country's holiest sites. I recognize of course that many people didn't have this reaction, and indeed that some find it incomprehensible or ridiculous that I felt this way. But to me it's part of why the pictures and video from that day are so viscerally awful.
posted by brainwane at 5:49 PM on May 23, 2021 [1 favorite]


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