Thread by @SeanTrende

Long-ish thread here. This @ezraklein piece is interesting, if only because of what it tells us about how the media is biased. This bias isn't the aggressively anti-conservative bias of right-wing fever dreams, and isn't ideological as such. 1/

vox.com/2020/6/10/2128…

I'll spare you the entire article, but we can focus on Klein's three categories: Consensus, legitimate controversy, and deviant. He places BLM in the first category, prison abolition in the second, and Cotton's op-ed in the third. 2/

Which is . . . strange? If we use public polling as a gauge, BLM could be placed in the "consensus" category, but it is a pretty recent development that may or may not regress to what has been more of a "legitimate controversy" mean. nytimes.com/interactive/20… 3/

Using broad public opinion, Cotton's op-ed would seem to fit more neatly into the "legitimate controversy" category.

abcnews.go.com/Politics/52-am…

I . . . couldn't find polling out outright prison abolition. But this Vox poll from 2016 finds pretty minimal support for reducing sentences of violent offenders, or even non-violent offenders who are a risk to commit another crime. 5/

cdn3.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus…

This seems like a deviant opinion -- to say nothing of the NYT's famous "Pedophilia shouldn't be a crime" op-ed from 2014. Regardless, whatever drives the classification of "deviant," "consensus" and "legit controversy," it doesn't appear to be broad public opinion. 6/

Which is really what this discussion is about: "Who decides?" Or, to put it more in the lingo of the day: "Who holds the power to control the discourse." 7/

It's pretty obvious that a technocratic liberal like Klein is going to categorize things differently than a writer at The Bulwark, and that both would categorize things differently than a populist conservative like Cotton. 8/

In other words, these categorizations are, broadly speaking, arbitrary, without meaningful grounding in any particular metric to which we might turn. So again, our question is not so much "how do we decide," which implies an actual method for decisionmaking, as "who decides." 9/

One solution would be something similar to what Facebook has done, and bring in a wide swath of voices to serve as its appeals board for content moderation. You might try something like that if your goal really was to approximate broad public opinion, however imperfectly. 10/

The approach here, though, frankly leaves the decision of "who decides" to the whims of the newsroom editors, and increasingly, the newsroom writ large. Which is fine -- as I said, I think these things are arbitrary. There are, however, consequences. 11/

To wit -- just about everyone in that news room will be college educated, many (most?) will be some level of middle class, and they will be disproportionately White. Many (most?) will be selected from highly prestigious universities. 12/

In other words, this is a way to ensure that the news reflects the mood and biases of college educated, middle class Whites, from select colleges. Which, incidentally, is how it has *always* been. Note that I did not include the word "liberal".13/

On cultural issues, this will be, at least for the present, quite "liberal," but on economic issues, especially regarding things like the deficit, it will tend to be reasonably centrist, or even center-right. On foreign policy it will tend to be modestly pro-intervention. 14/

But none of this is inherently "liberal" as such; as the whims of the middle class shift over time, so will its definitions of things that are "obviously" deviant, or "legitimate" or whatever. 15/

Normally this wouldn't be *as* big of a deal (I'm not even sure you can classify it as a "deal" since it just sort of *is*) but we're entering a period where these types of divides are increasingly salient to our politics, *especially* education. 16/

Even bringing on a token conservative or two won't be a "solution," since these conservatives will be disproportionately drawn from prestigious schools, have college degrees, etc., and have a very different view of what conservatism should be than your voter in Gotebo, OK. 17/

And so over time, barring some jarring shift in our political alignments, this is a prescription to increasingly give one side in our political debate control over the bounds of acceptable discourse. 18/

It's also the side that Klein, and most of the people pushing this sort of thought, would like to see win (including me on most issues -- I don't want cops policing protesters!), which one can deconstruct as they see fit. 19/

What this really is, though, is the internet coming full circle. In the early aughts, the promise of the blogosphere was the democratization of discourse. One of the early books--a really good one!--was explicitly premised on destroying gatekeeping. 20/

amazon.com/Crashing-Gate-…

Indeed, the old Netroots has been stunningly successful in destroying the old establishment of the Democratic Party; the right-o-sphere is sort of TBD. 21/

So many of the voices that dominate media today have their roots in that period, including a daily read of mine called Pandagon. 22/

So it's just sort of weird to see people trying to re-build the gates now, in a form that in so many ways reflects what stood before. Weird, sort of depressing, but I suppose not in the least bit surprising. 23/23

So @ezraklein suggests here that his piece is descriptive rather than prescriptive. That wasn't my read, but if I misread it is on me. Regardless, I think most of the thread stands.

https://twitter.com/ezraklein/status/1271175307563696128