The media makes you smarter

The way you consume it makes you stupid

Common sense ideas in America have now come to include that the media is biased and not trustworthy. The truth is that the media, including Fox News, MSNBC, Reuters, the AP, and all the rest, rarely lies. Synthesizing all of these stories while not paying mind to story selection and interpretation is the problem.

Consider the front page of Fox News as I write this:

None of these stories are made up:

• The BBC covered the same story about Vance six days ago.

• The Tesla story includes a shot-up Tesla dealership in Oregon, covered by Portland-based KOIN 6 as well, and Tesla stations set on fire in Massachusetts, covered by CBS.

• The Biden story is based on his recent tweet celebrating International Women’s Day. The author chooses to pose this in contrast to an executive order he issued which allowed transgender women to compete with other women in sports. More specifically, the EO did this for transgender students, probably just those in schools where Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, a civil rights law, applies. This is selective reporting, but it’s still just reporting.

• The only other source I could find for the murder was the NY Post, but I doubt it was made up.

Now ask yourself the following:

• Does the Vance story imply that he is particularly victimized and targeted compared to other American politicians of similar status?

• Does the Tesla story imply that far-left activists denouncing Musk caused recent damage to Tesla properties?

• Does the Biden story tell you that Biden doesn’t care about women?

• Does the murder story tell you that undocumented immigrants are more likely to commit murder?

The answer to all of these questions is no. You can certainly make the case that the conclusions are correct on their own, but the implications are not.¹

If you wanted to know whether Vance is uniquely victimized by activists, you would have to compare him to other public figures and how often they’ve been victimized, and to what degree. There are certainly people who could be characterized as far-left who have denounced Elon Musk, but the ultimate cause of the wave of attacks on Tesla properties is Musk’s behavior.² Whether Biden really cares about women is ultimately an unknown, since we can’t observe a person’s motivations, but if you wanted to know whether his actions suggested he cares about women, you should start by looking at every bill he ever signed concerning the rights of women.

And if you wanted to know whether undocumented immigrants are more likely to commit murder, here’s a paper showing they aren’t. Even if you don’t like this particular paper, you would need alternative statistical evidence to disagree with it, not more anecdotes. It would be easy enough to match each anecdote you provide with many more stories of American citizens killing people.³

I can imagine a reasonable Fox News reader:

I heard that Vance’s family ran into a bit of trouble with activists. What a shame. That must be hard, being a public figure and all. And apparently some Tesla properties were getting vandalized, but I don’t know if that’s unusual. Biden tweeted about International Women’s Day. I’m glad; I wouldn’t have known about it if he hadn’t. But I do wish he didn’t let trans women compete with women in sports, though I don’t know how often that happens anyway. Some undocumented immigrants killed someone. I’m wondering if they’re more likely to do that.

This whole paragraph suggests a great degree of curiosity and level-headedness. But what Fox News probably expects from their audience is this:

Radical left-wing activists are completely out of control. They were harassing Vance’s family. I’m sick of them all getting away with it while we hardly do anything. And now they’re burning down Tesla dealerships! I’d be worried about all the carnage if Trump wasn’t in charge. I’m sure they’ll get it under control. Biden’s tweeting about International Women’s Day even after destroying their rights for years. What a joke. And of course, undocumented immigrants killed another person, a really good person, too, who was trying to stop them from stealing something. The invasion needs to stop.

Interpreting the world in this way is a choice. You don’t have to infer mass tragedy and chaos from anecdotal evidence.

Anyone learning statistics is able to think this way easily. If I have a fair coin, it will land heads up 50% of the time. Now suppose that I flip the coin a few times, and each time, it lands heads up. If you only had these three flips, you might decide the coin always lands heads up, which would make you very wrong and very stupid. If you instead waited for ten thousand flips to occur and saw that it only lands on heads half the time, you would be doing a better job.

What media sources typically do is worse. Not only do you get a small sample size, you also get a selected sample. Imagine if every time it landed on tails, I hid the coin from you. The outcomes wouldn’t tell you anything about the actual probability that the coin lands on heads.

Worse, imagine if you died and went to heaven, and rather than looking at your whole life, God just decided to look at the three worst moments in your life. Would that help God understand who you are? If this happened to Steve Irwin, a renowned zookeeper and conservationist, God would just see his controversies section on Wikipedia and decide there’s no way he’s letting him in, since he’s known for bringing his infant son near a live crocodile.

My gut centrist obligates me to perform a similar exercise on MSNBC.

This actually seems worse, since they’re leading with editorialization, but I’d still prefer this since they aren’t selecting stories to try to make me think undocumented immigrants are unusually violent. Again, the things they’re reporting on are really happening:

• RFK Jr. did, in an interview with Fox News, talk about how the kids recently infected with measles here in Texas were treated with budesonide and cod liver oil, praising their (supposed) efficacy at treating the disease. To their credit, Fox News did point out that all of the children infected with measles were unvaccinated. Budesonide is indeed a bad idea in this case; the NHS actively advises against taking it if you’ve been in contact with someone with measles. Cod liver oil is not recommended as a treatment for measles, though there is technically some evidence I found in the form of reports by old Orthodox Jewish communities saying those taking vitamin A (presumably from cod liver oil) contracted measles later than others. Vitamin A is actually one of the few recommended treatments for measles, but you should probably take it as a supplement.

• Trump did make a post offering a rapid pathway to citizenship for South African farmers, though it’s not clear to me what the hypocrisy is, since ctrl+f “hypo” did not yield anything in the article and I don’t really need to read it to finish making my point here.

• Trump did appoint Fox News employees to the Kennedy Center’s board.

• (I could keep going, but you get the idea.)

The potential false implications you could get here are:

• RFK Jr. is an idiot and endorsed using cod liver oil to treat measles because it has vitamin A in it, so I should make sure that I tell anybody who has a loved one with measles that they should avoid vitamin A. Also, he’s not a competent choice for HHS secretary.

• Trump offering citizenship to white South Africans is hypocritical (?), which implies that he is morally bad in some objective sense (even though we haven’t looked at everything else he has done).

• By appointing potentially incompetent loyalists to its board, Trump has turned the Kennedy Center into a propaganda arm.

Another article linked on the front page endorses the use of vitamin A to help treat cases of measles where the patient has a deficiency.

What Trump is mentioned doing may or may not be bad, but that’s not relevant to the point I need to make here. The point is that if you wanted to perform a general assessment of Trump’s performance as president, the information you get from MSNBC wouldn’t help you because it’s selected to be bad.

As for the Kennedy Center, I really don’t know if it will get turned into Fox News 2. But given that the Kennedy Center is a performing arts center catering to the residents of Washington, D.C., it seems unlikely.

So a reasonable MSNBC viewer would sound something like this:

Apparently RFK Jr. endorsed some poor treatments for measles. Seems like a bad choice for HHS Secretary, but I don’t know how that department is run. I just wish those kids in Texas were vaccinated by their parents. It’s a lot of unnecessary suffering. Oh, and Trump is offering citizenship to some South Africans. He also appointed some Fox News people to the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees. I have no idea what the implications of that are.

But really, what you get is this:

What a nutcase that RFK Jr. is. He’s going to get kids killed, endorsing pseudoscience all the time. I heard he told people to treat measles with fish oil or something. Meanwhile, Trumpy is offering citizenship to white South Africans, you know, ‘cause they’re the good ones, while he’s appointing Laura Ingraham of all people to help run the Kennedy Center. And he appointed himself chair. The whole thing is so sinister, like he’s setting up a propaganda arm.

The real point of this post is that I think it’s completely fine if I spend my time reading The Economist even if it has a liberal bias, as long as I remember not to extrapolate too much and use my brain. If you read an article talking about a recently proposed bill to cap credit card interest rates and decided it was a good idea, the main problem is that you don’t know what the law of supply is, which should be very intuitive.⁴

I would generally avoid taking anything away from an article you read or a news program you saw other than the basic facts of the story, unless they’re talking about your personal area of expertise or you’re ready to spend a lot of time learning about the subject. And if you do just take the basic facts of the story, you’ll learn a lot about the world. You might even decide to go read something that would help you analyze those basic facts, like a microeconomics textbook.⁵

1. Except in a formal logic sense. If you ever took a formal proofing class for mathematics, you probably learned that “If 2 + 2 = 4, then apples are red” is a true implication, even if it doesn’t make sense.

2. i.e. his (probably unintentional, in my opinion) Hitler salute.

3. I once ran into someone online who thought that all murders committed by undocumented immigrants would be prevented if they weren’t here, which is true, but ignores the fact that this wouldn’t make America a safer place to live. What concerns us is the probability any given person is murdered in a year. Undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit murder than other Americans, so removing them wouldn’t lower this probability.

If all you care about is whether American citizens are murdered by undocumented immigrants, getting rid of them all would solve the problem, and anecdotes are sufficient to show the problem. But all that matters is keeping people alive, not making sure they’re killed by the right people.

4. The article is decent in that it brings in the alternate viewpoint, but does it in the worst way possible by making it seem like the alternate viewpoint you should hear is from the banking industry, which is obviously not a trustworthy source. You should listen to economists like Tyler Cowen, one of the coauthors of the microeconomics textbook I helped teach to undergraduates, and one person aware of the history of what happens when you impose price controls. If you get rid of the reward for lending to someone unlikely to pay back their debt (a high interest rate), there is no reason to lend to that person.

5. This is a joke. I am aware that nobody likes me and my graphs.