Amerika

It’s not liberal bias, yet it ends up being liberal bias.

People who want to be in elites imitate other elites, which are those who adopt cutting-edge, altruistic programs. In their imitation, they simplify this to a form of competitive altruism that is also the root of modern liberalism. But they’re not doing it to be ideologically liberal; they’re doing it to look cool.

Second, people who want to profit by getting people to buy their product or vote for them are pandering to the cross-section of all people that’s called the lowest common denominator. How do you appeal to that? You simplify to a form of competitive altruism that is also the root of modern liberalism. Again, they’re not doing it to be ideologically liberal, but to market themselves.

Thus it’s not surprising that media, government and social elites are liberal and inject liberal bias into their products:

Groseclose and Milyo based their research on a standard gauge of a lawmaker’s support for liberal causes. Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) tracks the percentage of times that each lawmaker votes on the liberal side of an issue. Based on these votes, the ADA assigns a numerical score to each lawmaker, where “100” is the most liberal and “0” is the most conservative. After adjustments to compensate for disproportionate representation that the Senate gives to low‑population states and the lack of representation for the District of Columbia, the average ADA score in Congress (50.1) was assumed to represent the political position of the average U.S. voter.

Groseclose and Milyo then directed 21 research assistants — most of them college students — to scour U.S. media coverage of the past 10 years. They tallied the number of times each media outlet referred to think tanks and policy groups, such as the left-leaning NAACP or the right-leaning Heritage Foundation.

Next, they did the same exercise with speeches of U.S. lawmakers. If a media outlet displayed a citation pattern similar to that of a lawmaker, then Groseclose and Milyo’s method assigned both a similar ADA score.

“A media person would have never done this study,” said Groseclose, a UCLA political science professor, whose research and teaching focuses on the U.S. Congress. “It takes a Congress scholar even to think of using ADA scores as a measure. And I don’t think many media scholars would have considered comparing news stories to congressional speeches.”

Of the 20 major media outlets studied, 18 scored left of center, with CBS’ “Evening News,” The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ranking second, third and fourth most liberal behind the news pages of The Wall Street Journal.

UCLA

Media bias is real, but it’s not ideological bias. These people are using the root of liberalism, or the idea that everyone is equal, as a means of selling themselves to you. Most liberals are doing the same thing.

But now this grand liberal vision is running into some problems:

A United Nations forum on Thursday passed a resolution condemning “defamation of religion” as a human rights violation, despite wide concerns that it could be used to justify curbs on free speech in Muslim countries.

Western governments and a broad alliance of activist groups have voiced dismay about the religious defamation text, which adds to recent efforts to broaden the concept of human rights to protect communities of believers rather than individuals.

It called on states to ensure that religious places, sites, shrines and symbols are protected, to reinforce laws “to deny impunity” for those exhibiting intolerance of ethnic and religious minorities, and “to take all possible measures to promote tolerance and respect for all religions and beliefs.”

Reuters

But groups are composed of individuals, and sometimes individuals as a group choose to have a certain value system.

All value systems are intolerant of all that are materially different from them; for example, tolerance-based value systems are intolerant of intolerance.

Is this a paradox? If you let bad logic into your mind, you’ll assume we can all just get along in the same space even though we have different values and backgrounds, because that’s how you please an audience of people. Offer them a vision of egalitarianism, of peace and comfort, of unity.

Even if it’s completely divorced from reality. After all, they just need to buy your product or vote for you, and you’ll be out of range when the fit hits the shan.

Tags: crowdism