The New York Times article about SlateStarCodex is finally out and it is...bad. There's a lot I could parse, but let me just walk you through one paragraph that is so misleading as to be deceptive.
Take the first sentence of this paragraph. Now, technically the clause--"who proposed a link between race and IQ"--could simply modify "Murray" and have nothing to do w/ SSC.
But 99% of readers are going to assume that the clause actually defines SSC's alignment with Murray. In other words, the author is strongly implying that SSC shares Murray's racist beliefs.
And that would be big(!)...if it were at all true. It is not. Indeed, if you go to the hyperlink, you'll find that SSC's purported "alignment" has nothing to do with Murray's "Bell Curve." slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/23/thr…
What SSC & Murray agree about is that poverty is partly hereditable and thus very sticky, so much so that the proposition job retraining programs will meaningfully address mass economic disruption is a pie-in-the-sky fantasy.
Funnily, this is a mundane progressive policy stance. Oh no, SSC believes poverty is...cyclical! Quelle horreur! Job retraining is a sop for politicians to show they're doing something rather than a meaningful solution to the decline of mid-20th c factory towns?? May it never be!
What the journalist is doing is lazy. If SSC says he *ever* agreed on *anything* with Charles Murray, than he *must* agree with Murray on *everything.* And since Murray has racist views on race and genetics, SSC must--by the transitive power of bad journalism--share those views.
This is dumb. If I were to propose that, say, Bernie Sanders' past expressions of admiration for socialist economies necessarily means he supports every atrocity committed by any socialist regime, you'd tell me to get a grip (and spend less time hanging out with Ben Shapiro).
Now, the second sentence in the paragraph is equally problematic, and much harder to track down since the author provided no hyperlink. Here it is.
No wonder he didn't provide a link; it doesn't say what he implies it does!
The author's juxtaposition of this sentence w/ the first strongly implies that SSC agrees with Murray's racist proposition. It's the same transitive illogic again.
But if you go and read the actual article, SSC is citing Murray not to agree with him but in order to parse the various ways that one might object to Murray's beliefs *as racist*.
In any case, the Times piece is chock full of sections which are, like this one, full of bad faith representation and accusation by grammatical implication. It's a bad piece that the @nytimes should yank.
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If you think Marjorie Taylor Greene is an unprecedentedly conspiratorial, bigoted nut job, well, then let me introduce you to Republican Congressman James B. Utt, who represented Southern California back when the state was a reliably Republican state in the 50s & 60s.
Utt was a John Birch Society ally. The JBS was somewhat analogous to QAnon, heightening every political disagreement into a sinister conspiracy.
He was also a Republican racist at a time when that was still somewhat novel, blending racism & conspiracism in a now familiar combo.
Take how Utt responded to civil rights protests in Savannah, Georgia in the summer of '63. Civil rights activists were winning concessions in the city that year, w/ MLK even calling it "the most desegregated city south of the Mason-Dixon line."
Folks think futzing with Section 230 will be some kind of quick fix for the toxicity and craziness in our politics. But the causes of our national illness are far deeper than the internet platforms that host their content. Shooting the messengers won't solve that.
We should know this, right? I mean, we had a national experiment with this approach during the First Red Scare. The government harassed socialist newspapers, jailed activists, and tried their best to shut them up.
And it didn't work. The persecution only fueled a resurgence of left-wing radicalism leading to the Popular Front era of the 1930s.
It's rooted in what is--to be fair--the received understanding of broadcast regulation, a hazy idea of a past, golden era of equity, reasonability, and freedom in broadcasting.
But the government actions that are waved at by the author were actually responsible for major episodes of government censorship and the repression of political dissent, which affected people from across the political spectrum.
I wrote a book about the Fairness Doctrine and how it was responsible for one of the worst episodes of government censorship in US history.
So I am somewhat alarmed at the calls percolating on Twitter for a new, internet Fairness Doctrine. This is a thread about why that is.
Let's start with what most people think when they hear "Fairness Doctrine." They imagine a time at an indeterminate point in the past when mass media was reasonable, balanced, equitable, and fair. It was a veritable golden age of mass media and the Fairness Doctrine was to thank.
Back then, radio & tv stations couldn't just air their opinions, spreading unchecked misinformation. No, they had to let the other side of any given issue have a say, giving the good guys a chance to check the bad guys when they told bald lies.
I think what the "antitrust / link payment" crowd misunderstand about the role of digitization in the decline of local news is that online platforms are simply middlemen in what was really a massive expansion in competition *between* news outlets.
Once upon a time, the standard consumer of news had relatively few options. (For sake of simplicity, let's stick to print for now.) There was the local town paper (maybe two); you could subscribe to a regional/state level paper or one of the major national papers of record.
But if you lived in, say, South Carolina, you couldn't get fresh news delivered to you by the local / regional papers in Oregon, and vice versa.
If a critical mass of people on twitter generate enough Section 230 hot takes, all that energy fuses to create renewed interest in the #FairnessDoctrine.
I wrote a book on the FD so let me walk you through why reviving it would be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea.
First, the Fairness Doctrine was responsible for the most successful episode of government censorship of the past half century. While the Fairness Doctrine was technically created to encourage fair and balanced coverage of “controversial issues of public importance"...
...in the 1960s the Kennedy administration weaponized it to punish conservative radio critics. You see, fairness is in the eye of the beholder--which is the FCC--and the person who appoints the commissioners--the president--gets a say in what looks fair or foul.