Questioning the MSM

“Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives. They are controlling what we can & cannot see.” Donald Trump tweet, 2018

The mainstream press and other professional media outlets (MSM) are under sustained attack by authoritarians throughout the world. The US president refers to the press as the enemy of the people, apparently believing negative coverage of him is fake news consisting of lies and otherwise unreliable content. Many people reject most or all MSM content and consider the MSM to be so inaccurate and/or biased that it is worthless or nearly so. Is that true? This is the first of several discussions that will focus on that question.

A June 2019 article in the Economist, Google rewards reputable reporting, not left-wing politics, examined the veracity of the factually unsupported president's claim. They concluded: “Our statistical study revealed no evidence of ideological bias in the search engine’s news tab.”

Google said it uses 10,000 evaluators to rate sources for its search engine. The company claimed they assess expertise and trustworthiness, but not ideology. The data above shows a bias to rely on sources with higher fact accuracy and lower political ideological bias.

The data the Economist obtained shows that if Google favored liberals, left-wing sites would appear more often than their model predicted. Right-wing sites would be cited less often. The Economist summarized the bias: “We saw no such trend. Overall, centre-left sites like the New York Times got the most links—but only about as many as our model suggested. Fox News beat its modest expectations. Because most far-right outlets had bad trust scores, they got few search results. But so did Daily Kos, a far-left site.”

The Economist points out that their study did not prove Google is completely impartial. For example, there is a possibility that fact-checkers were partisan. That would tend to inject bias into the model. Some keywords suggested bias, but in both directions. The data suggested that Google’s bias increases hits for “viral articles.” Incendiary Trump stories tend to come from leftist sources, while gory crime coverage is more common on rightist sites. People click on links like that. That is where most bias toward viral articles appears to come from.

MSM -- Worthless or Not?

What this does not directly address is the question of whether the MSM is basically worthless. Although Google searches are, or appear to be, biased toward sources having a higher fact accuracy and lower ideological bias, that says nothing about what standard of accuracy and bias constitutes a very low, low, moderate, high or very high level of reliability for (i) a source, (ii) any individual article or broadcast segment from a source, or (iii) any series of related articles or broadcast segments. It also does not shed light on how to assess reliability for clusters of ideologically related sources or issues, assuming that is a factor at all.

It does appear that is it hard to objectively define the relative degree of objectivity and reliability for the MSM as a whole and for individual sources and clusters of related sources. It may be the case that professional print media is significantly more reliable than cable news. In view of the complexity, the concept of “reliability” of the MSM or any single source is probably an essentially contested concept and no universally accepted definition can be articulated. Many or most supporters of the president firmly believe that most or all of the MSM is or almost completely unreliable, i.e., worthless at best and probably harmful.