Breitbart's Rare Moment of Candor

“There cannot a greater judgment befall a country than a dreadful spirit of division as rends a government into two distinct people, and makes them greater strangers, and more averse to one another, than if they were actually two different nations. The effects of such a division are pernicious to the last degree, not only with regard to those advantages which they give the common enemy, but to those private evils which they produce in the heart of almost every particular person. This influence is very fatal both to men’s morals and their understandings; it sinks the virtue of a nation, and not only so, but destroys even common sense. A furious party spirit, when it rages in its full violence, exerts itself in civil war and bloodshed; and when it is under its greatest restraints, naturally breaks out in falsehood, detraction, calumny, and a partial administration of justice. In a word, it fills a nation with spleen and rancor, and extinguishes all the seeds of good nature, compassion and humanity.” -- President George Washington

For hard core partisans, candor is rare. A recent article in The Atlantic reports on several such moments in recent years.

Rush Limbaugh: Limbaugh “responded to GOP losses in Congress by admitting that he hadn’t been leveling with his listeners about their political party. He declared, “I no longer am going to have to carry the water for people who I don’t think deserve having their water carried. Now, you might say, ‘Well, why have you been doing it?’ Because the stakes are high! Even though the Republican Party let us down, to me they represent a far better future for my beliefs and therefore the country’s than the Democrat Party does.””

Morals and beliefs: Note the mindset and morality that led a person like Limbaugh who was followed and believed by millions of Americans to hold his political ideology and values in higher esteem that facts and logic or conscious reason (Washington's ‘common sense’). This is another example of why political ideology poisons reality and reason, a point this channel repeatedly makes. Truth and reason get in the way of sacred ideological beliefs* of people who elevate their political, religious, economic or other beliefs above both truth and reason.

* A sacred ideological belief mindset is defined here as a mind that elevates personal ideological and morals beliefs above both truth and reason such that lying, deceit, unwarranted emotional manipulation, and/or flawed reason are acceptable. In other words, the ends justify the means for the sacred belief mindset, at least to the extent of engaging in lying, deceit, etc. For some such mindsets, it extends to accept and engage in violence in the name of defending sacred belief.

Glenn Beck: “Then it was Glenn Beck, looking back on his stint as one of the right’s most popular cable-news hosts, admitting to Megyn Kelly in 2014, ‘I played a role, unfortunately, in helping tear the country apart,’ a reference to his rise to national fame fueled by scrawling unhinged conspiracy theories on chalkboards.”

In this example, one can see how easily the sacred belief mindset can slide into social discord and even edge a society toward violence.

Breitbart's moment of candor: “The latest cynical purveyor of misinformation to confess his sins is Alex Marlow, editor of Breitbart, one of the most highly trafficked news and analysis website on the right. He told CNN last week that the publication he runs, reporting to Steve Bannon, wasn’t honest in its coverage of Roy Moore’s Senate campaign. Rather than letting the merits of the race dictate coverage, Breitbart skewed its work and cast doubt on Moore’s accusers to protect President Trump: Marlow said he had no regrets about Breitbart's coverage of the race and stressed that the nationalist, populist website will not be changing course as a result of it… Until Election Day, Breitbart seemingly did everything in its power to try to discredit Moore's accusers.”

Marlow's reasoning reveals yet another sacred belief mindset. According to The Atlantic article, Marlow believes the news media was trying set a purely allegation-based sexual misconduct standard that President Trump could never meet. Marlow commented: “I think that's the playbook here. And I think it's part of the reason why it was so important for Breitbart to continue our coverage of the way we covered it ... and for Steve in particular to hold the line -- it's not just about Judge Moore, it is not even just about establishment, anti-establishment. It's about what's coming next for President Trump.”

Although Marlow claimed Breitbart has been “much more careful”, which he claims requires a “certain level of detail ” in sex misconduct allegations. Despite those claims, and whatever that standard amounted to in practice, it didn't impede Breitbart from relentlessly pursuing sacred goal of protecting Trump: “Marlow also stressed that he was personally uncomfortable with the behavior attributed by The Post to Moore, and noted that he did believe the accusations from [Moore accuser] Leigh Corfman had ‘a lot of credibility.’”

This is how partisan politics and partisan morals work in practice, at least for modern conservatives and populists. Ideological and personal goals talk and truth and reason walk.

It is unfortunate that there are so few moments of candor that reveal the moral basis of partisanship and ideology, or the lack thereof.

Question: Do the means of lying and deceit justify the ends of defending sacred political, economic, religious or philosophical ideological beliefs? Is violence justified under circumstances of domestic political disagreement?

B&B orig: 12/30/17

Global Warming: What They Don't Tell You

Deer in the meadow

The discomforting news: A lead essay in the Economist magazine reports that assumptions under the 2015 Paris climate accord include not just reducing CO2 emissions. The proposed temperature target of trying to limit temperature increase to less than 2ᵒ C includes removing about 890 billion tons of atmospheric CO2 by 2100. In scientific terms, that's a lot. That point is not well-reported.

The Economist sums it up: “Stopping the flow of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is not enough. It has to be sucked out, too. . . . Unless policymakers take negative emissions seriously, the promise of Paris will ring ever more hollow.”

The good news: In summarizing promising technology advances for 2017, Scientific American reports on progress in technology that removes CO2 from air and converts it to fuel. Scientists have been working for decades on an artificial ‘leaf’ that uses sunlight, water and CO2 in the air to make alcohol fuels. In a significant advance, scientists at Harvard reported an artificial leaf that was much more efficient in converting CO2 and water to alcohol fuels than plant leaves are at converting CO2 and water to sugars (biological fuels).

In using sunlight for energy production, a plant uses about 1% of the energy in sunlight to make glucose (a carbohydrate or sugar). By contrast, the artificial leaf operated at 10% sunlight efficiency in converting CO2 in air to fuel. That system pulled 6.3 oz of CO2 from air per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated.

The scientists are in talks with industry to prototype large scale facilities to generate tons of fuels.

The technology includes (i) a non-toxic, biocompatible catalyst that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen using sunlight, and (ii) genetically engineered bacteria that use CO2 and the hydrogen to make fuel. The lead scientist envisions also using genetically engineered bacteria in soil to take CO2 and nitrogen from air to make fertilizers for plants.

So long as climate change deniers don't decide to intervene to stop or impede research,[1] there are developing technologies that can potentially have an impact on CO2 emissions. Presumably this technology an also be used to achieve at least some of the negative CO2 emissions that are believed necessary to stabilize the climate.

The unknown: Whether this and other developing technologies can be scaled up and still be economically competitive in time to make any difference is unknowable. It is possible that humans have already set in motion biological-geological processes that could lead to human extinction, e.g., anoxic oceans leading to a toxic atmosphere. The timescales and odds for very bad outcomes are impossible to know with any degree of certainty.

Footnote:
1. In the case of gun control research, gun advocates and political conservatives have successfully blocked funding for research on the public health impacts of gun ownership since 1996. Conservatives in congress today want to cut funding for Earth and climate science research to block research and new information that reveals the scope and nature of climate change. In this case, conservatives and/or economic interest who feel threatened by this new source of energy cold stop research and or development of this new technology. Much of the effort to stop science and new knowledge is well-funded and operating in as much secrecy as possible.

Where does this path lead, survival or extinction?

B&B orig: 12/31/17

Essentially Contested Concepts: What is Hate?

Essentially contested concepts involve widespread agreement on a concept (e.g., hate, fairness, constitutional, legal, moral, good, evil, etc.), but not on the best realization or definition thereof. They are concepts the proper definition or use of which inevitably involves endless disputes about their proper definitions or uses on the part of their users. These disputes cannot be settled by appeal to empirical evidence, linguistic usage, or the canons of logic alone. The disputes are unresolvable, but unfortunately are quite common in politics. Disputes over essentially contested concepts cannot be resolved by anything other than compromise, an imperfect resolution, because the definitions are heavily influenced by personal cognitive and social factors such as morals, political ideology, and social- and self-identity.

A Washington Post article discusses whether the hate group list that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has compiled is fair, dangerous or otherwise detrimental. The article starts with a member of the Family Research Council (FRC) pointing out the bullet holes in the group's lobby. The FRC, a conservative Christian anti-abortion, anti-same sex marriage advocacy and political lobbying group, is listed by the SPLC as a hate group. A deranged man with a gun came to kill people in the FRC because the FRC was on the SPLC hate list.

Is it fair or safe to identify groups like the FRC with the same language, hate group, as the Klu Klux Klan? What is the definition of hate in the context of politics?

The WaPo writes: “‘Labeling people hate groups is an effort to hold them accountable for their rhetoric and the ideas they are pushing. Obviously the hate label is a blunt one,’ Cohen concedes when I ask whether advocates like the FRC, or proponents of less immigration like the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), or conservative legal stalwarts like the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), really have so much in common with neo-Nazis and the Klan that they belong in the same bucket of shame. “It’s one of the things that gives it power, and it’s one of the things that can make it controversial. Someone might say, ‘Oh, it’s without nuance.’ … But we’ve always thought that hate in the mainstream is much more dangerous than hate outside of it. The fact that a group like the FRC or a group like FAIR can have congressional allies and can testify before congressional committees, the fact that a group like ADF can get in front of the Supreme Court — to me that makes them more dangerous, not less so. … It’s the hate in the business suit that is a greater danger to our country than the hate in a Klan robe.’”

Context: For context, the FRC operates ‘crisis pregnancy centers’, which are set up in poor neighborhoods. From the outside, they appear to be medical centers that provide professional medical access to abortion services. These centers have been called unethical for deceiving pregnant women by applying pressure tactics that range from lying about abortion options, e.g., falsely telling a woman that abortion is illegal or unavailable, to exerting intense psychological pressure to prevent a woman from having an abortion. These centers often seek to delay long enough so that a woman is forced by law to give birth. People running crisis pregnancy centers typically have no formal medical training at all and instead are Christian activists in white lab coats trying to prevent abortions by any means possible short of illegal actions such as threats of physical violence.

In view of lies, deceit and misery that crisis pregnancy centers were inflicting on low income women who were being tricked into bearing a child, California passed a law “intended to compel crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) to offer factual information about all options available to pregnant women and to disclose if a facility is unlicensed. . . . . NPCC asserts that 91% of unlicensed CPCs provided defective medical information such as a false link between abortion and breast cancer or suicide.”

What is hate? Do deceit-driven tactics related to abortion, like what the FRC and other groups engage in, amount to hate? Do other activities such as lobbying congress and mounting legal challenges to abortion or same-sex marriage amount to hate?

Hate (verb): to feel intense or passionate dislike for someone, a concept, e.g., the idea of abortion, or something.
Hate (noun): an intense or passionate dislike or loathing for someone, a concept or something.

Clearly, lobbying congress and mounting legal challenges are legal political activities. Can legal activities amount to hate? If it isn't hate, what can it more reasonably be called? Aggressive conservative or Christian activism? Immorality or unethical?

It appears that much or most of the activities the groups on the SPLC’s hate list amount to mostly legal activism infused with a rigid unwillingness to compromise. If one believes that, for politics in a liberal democracy, compromise is a core moral value and necessary for democracy to function properly (a concept or belief advocated here), then a refusal to compromise can be seen as immoral.

Is immorality the same as hate? If the definitions of hate given above are generally accepted as maybe incomplete but generally accurate enough, then it would logically seem that refusal to compromise alone will often or usually include a component of hate in it. Is that reasoning sound or flawed? Is compromise the only or best form of resolution for disputes over contested concepts?

The WaPo is right to raise this issue. A deranged man with a gun used the SPLC hate list to find a target for murder. That would seem to be no different than president Trump continually referring to journalists as ‘the enemy of the people’, thereby inciting a few people to begin to act to kill journalists. Is that hate?

If nothing else, one can see from the foregoing why essentially contested concepts lead to intractable disputes and how the disputed concepts can foster actions that lead to misery or even social conflict and outright murder. Essentially contested concepts can be dangerous because of the heavy cognitive (moral) and social (identity and social context) loads they carry. From that point of view, it is easy to see why (i) disagreements over essentially contested concepts are not resolvable, and (ii) compromise must necessarily be a pillar of peaceful, non-tyrant, democratic society.

B&B orig: 11/15/18

Propaganda, Social Media & A Weakening Union

Managing editor Mark Gimein’s essay in November 16 issue of The Week is interesting.

“How you whip up hatred and distrust has never been much of a secret. More than 50 years ago, Jaques Ellul, in his landmark book Propaganda, wrote, ‘Those who read the press of their group and listen to the radio of their group are constantly reinforced in their allegiance. They learn more and more that their group is right, and that it’s actions are justified; thus their beliefs are strengthened.’ Substitute ‘tweets’ and ‘memes’ and you have social media today, in which an algorithm feeds you the information you are likely to click on -- because you have clicked or retweeted or reposted something j ust like it. The techniques that once worked on TV and radio have been supercharged by microtargeting. This is not merely an echo chamber: It’s a pinball machine, into which manipulators cynically drop memes -- the Black Panthers support the democrats! -- to bounce around and amplify.

The government of the US was constructed, as James Madison wrote, ‘to break and control the violence of faction’. Now faction is ascendant, and it is the union that is breaking. There are no more big tents. Centrist Republicans such as Bob Corker and Jeff Flake have quit politics; centrist red-state democrats Claire McCaskill and Heidi Heitkamp didn’t survive Tuesday’s vote. In congress, it becomes harder for elected representatives to do anything but vote in lockstep with their parties. When Donald Trump was elected, it was said that he had ‘broken’ the republican party. The opposite is true: The parties are stronger than ever. Except now party loyalty is enforced by you own friends and acquaintances, who will make sure you don’t step out of line on Twitter or Facebook. That’s something that autocrats[1] and demagogues of the past could only dream of. How else can the dark powers of social media be manipulated and misused? In the coming two years of divided government, we will most likely find out.”

When Gimein asserts that how to whip up hatred and distrust is common knowledge, he seems to miss the mark. America has witnessed the whipping up of hatred and distrust to an amazing extent since President Trump came to power.[2] The minds now driven by hate and distrust do not know that they have been manipulated and used. They think that happened to the opposition, not themselves. Manipulators certainly know how to do it. But if everyone knew the trick, it would be harder for that manipulated mindset change to happen on such a large scale in such a short time.

This is an example of what can happen to a society whose people are untrained in defense against the dark arts. The American people are, for the most part, defenseless against manipulation by dark free speech** operating ways that social media make more effective than ever before.

**Dark free speech: Lies, deceit, misinformation, unwarranted opacity and truth hiding, unwarranted emotional manipulation, mostly fomenting fear, anger, hate, distrust, and/or disgust, bogus (partisan) logic, unwarranted character assassination, etc.

Gimein’s reference to Bob Corker and Jeff Flake as ‘centrist Republicans’ reflects the power of rhetoric to obscure unreasonable extremism in the mantle of a reasonable-sounding label like centrist in the context of the republican party. By standards of 25-30 years ago, Corker and Flake would have been seen as far right conservatives on most issues by the republican party. There is nothing centrist about them now. Sure, on a few occasions they ineffectively squeaked at their colleagues in feeble protest over something or another, but it didn't amount to a hill of beans.[3] They both voted the republican way about 84% of the time. By no stretch of the imagination of anyone neutral is it possible to argue that there was not extremism in many of those votes.

That someone today refers to Corker and Flake as ‘centrist Republicans’, shows how extreme the republican party has become and how well the right and/or trapped minds has obscured that fact. Gimein is deceived and wrong. A better label for folks like Corker and Flake is something along the lines of far right republican, with the rest of the party being extreme right. The concept of centrism has no place in the republican party at present. Decades of RINO hunts have insured a thorough ideological and moral cleansing.

Finally, Gimein asks a question with an interesting tell in it: “How else can the dark powers of social media be manipulated and misused?”

Mr Gimein apparently disapproves of dark free speech being deployed on social media to deceive and manipulate the public. Otherwise he would not see it as manipulation or misuse. Presumably, he also sees the same tactics on all other sources of media the same way. For better or worse, there is not a thing anyone can do about it. It is all constitutionally protected free speech, no matter how dark and deadly it is. Therein lies democracy’s greatest weakness.

Footnotes:
1. Gimein made a mistake by referring to autocrats and demagogues in the same breath. As we all know, that pairing seems discordant with Aristotle’s taxonomy of political regimes. Gimein probably meant either autocrats and monarchs or, more likely, he meant oligarchs and demagogues.

2. Yes, partisan hate and distrust had been building for decades, especially since influencers like Lee Atwater and Newt Gingrich injected their poison into politics a few decades ago. Trump brought the emotion to a whole new, more toxic level. It is reasonable to think that Trump was probably helped significantly by years of Russian propaganda fomenting hate and distrust among the American people. That said, it is far and balanced to give Trump most of the credit for us being where we are today. As long as he is in power, the buck stops with Trump whether he likes it or not.

3. For example, both Corker and Flake voted for the nuclear option for supreme court nominees, thereby killing the filibuster. That was not centrist, not even close.

B&B orig: 11/17/18

The Anti-Bias Ideology: A Simplified Explanation

CONTEXT: A reasonable belief holds that existing political ideologies are more bad than good for various reasons related to cognitive biology and social behavior and influences. That is what B&B argues. Ideologies tend to foster in-group thinking and behaviors and that tends to make it easy to distort reality, facts, truths and thinking into beliefs that are unreasonably detached from reality, facts and truths. It makes politics more irrational than it has to be. One idea would propose that people simply adopt a science mindset that looks to impose more rationality into politics.

In his blog post at Neurologica entitled, Against Ideology, skeptic Steven Novella discusses some thinking about problems with existing political ideologies. Novella comments on problems with ideology and the exhilarating experience of walking away from one: “The skeptical movement has always struggled with some unavoidable ironies. We are like a group for people who don’t like to join groups. We actively tell our audience not to trust us (don’t trust any single source – verify with logic and evidence). Our belief is that you really should not have beliefs, only tentative conclusions. Essentially, our ideology is anti-ideology.

This approach is both empowering and freeing. One of the most common observations I hear from those who, after consuming skeptical media for a time, abandon some prior belief system or ideology, is that they feel as if a huge weight has been lifted from their shoulders. They feel free from the oppressive burden of having to support one side or ideology, even against evidence and reason. Now they are free to think whatever they want, whatever is supported by the evidence. They don’t have to carry water for their ‘team.’

At the same time, this is one of the greatest challenges for skeptical thinking, because it seems to run upstream against a strong current of human nature. We are tribal, we pick a side and defend it, especially if it gets wrapped up in our identity or world-view.”

That, in a nutshell, is one of the biggest problems with standard ideologies, all of which are fairly called ‘pro-bias’ ideologies. Existing ideologies are powerful motivators to distort reality, facts, truths, and reason whenever those any of those things contradict or undercut the chosen ideology. Distortion and ensuing irrationality is probably the norm, not the exception.

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The Anti-Bias Ideology: A Simplified Explanation 

Some years ago, it made sense to reject ideology as a framework for doing and thinking about politics. The science mindset of pragmatic, evidence-driven trial, error and course corrections seemed to be the best approach. Then, after some years of looking into cognitive biology and social behavior, it seemed that one cannot eliminate emotion and morals from the process. That lead to a science- and morals-based 'anti-bias' political ideology that focuses on the the key sources of irrationality, incivility and failure. Four core moral principles seem to be the most anti-biasing. The morals are (i) fidelity to trying seeing fact and truth with less bias, (ii) fidelity to applying less biased conscious reason to the facts and truths, (iii) service to the public interest (defined as a transparent competition of ideas among competing interests) based on the facts, truths and reason, and (iv) willingness to reasonably compromise according to political, economic and environmental circumstances point to.

After considering politics through human history, most or all bad leaders (tyrants, oligarchs, kleptocrats, etc.) seem to share the four key traits. They generally disregard, deny or hide facts and truths when it is politically convenient to do so, which is most of the time. Bad leaders also routinely apply biased (bogus) reasoning to facts, fake or not, typically to foment unwarranted emotional responses such as fear, anger, bigotry, racism and distrust-hate toward out-groups or ‘the enemy’. All of that irrationality is focused in service to a corrupt self-serving conception of the public interest, and it is reinforced by a corrupt, self-serving unwillingness to compromise.

If one accepts that those four bad traits of bad leaders are real and the norm, then arguably the four core moral values of a pragmatic, evidence-based anti-bias political ideology would seem to make sense if one wants to fight against the rise and ability of bad leaders to gain power and then do bad things to people and societies.

The question is, would this ‘anti-bias’ mindset or ideology work. Maybe. Maybe not. The experiment appears to not have been tried in modern times with modern means for mass communication of dark free speech (lies, deceit, unwarranted opacity, unwarranted emotional manipulation, mostly fomenting unwarranted fear, intolerance, anger, and hate, etc.). Testing an anti-bias ideology for success or failure is a multi-generational social engineering experiment. It would be great to see it tried. Even if it failed, the failure might shed enough light on the human condition and politics to reveal another more civilized, sustainable and efficient way to do politics.

Anti-bias is not just the scientific method applied to politics: The anti-bias ideology isn't just adoption of a scientific method mindset. It expressly includes moral values and treats them as such. In science, there tends to be less outright lying and grossly bogus reasoning. Those things tend to get called out and careers then tend to crash and burn if a course correction isn't made. In science, errors happen, but they are typically mistakes, not lies. Flawed reasoning in science tends to be honest support of a hypothesis, not sloppy thinking in defense of an indefensible ideological belief. In these regards, the anti-bias ideology directly accounts for human nature. Science tends to downplay that in a belief that fact and logic will quench errors to a reasonable extent. That may be generally true for science, but it is clearly not true for politics. Science and politics are simply not the same thing, at least not yet with existing pro-bias ideologies that dominate.

White-faced whistling ducks guarding the waterfall

B&B orig: 12/8/18

The Slippery Business of Bias and the Media

Author: Maistriani the Machiavellian

Snow Leopard, endangered species of uncontrolled poaching

Our brother Germaine has asked me to "try" to put out a post on evaluating media reporting with a systematic process. Mind you, I'm wordy, in case none have noticed, and maybe a bit towards the esoteric lean with my writing style and word choices. He promised to beat me with multiple implements of cooked pasta, delete all my posts and ban my account if I didn't bring it down a notch, so I'll try. References will be at the end, for those interested.

BIAS

Seeing as we are talking about media and the language they use, I'll go with a definition of writer's bias:

Bias occurs when a writer displays a partiality for or prejudice against someone, something, or some idea. Sometimes biases are readily identifiable in direct statements. Other times a writer's choice of words, selection of facts or examples, or tone of voice reveals his or her biases.

That's not bad, but I've been really looking into language bias for about the last year solidly and what becomes apparent is that it is quite a bit more involved. We generally tend to look at bias through the socio-cultural prisms of offensive or vilifying statements, propositions or words that directly indicate an attack of a person or social grouping by race, sex, gender identification, religion, etc.

That's the right in your face kind, but what if there is more? Much more, and it is sublime because even though we don't get the conscious "bump - hey that's not right", there is a non-conscious affective outcome that we very often feel as specific emotion towards, but are very unlikely to be able to point to a cause. Here's a short list of what I would term "occult language modifiers":

1. Factive verbs: are verbs that presuppose the truth of their complement clause.

2. Implicative verbs: : implicative verbs imply the truth or untruth of their complement, depending on the polarity of the main predicate. (Polarity here is also called valence, which means positive or negative word, statement, proposition, tone, word choice)

3. Assertive verbs: are verbs whose complement clauses assert a proposition. The truth of the proposition is not presupposed, but its level of certainty depends on the asserting verb.

4. Hedges: used to reduce one’s commitment to the truth of a proposition, evading any bold predictions.

5. Strong subjective intensifiers: are adjectives or adverbs that add (subjective) force to the meaning of a phrase or proposition.

6. Degree Modifiers: are contextual cues (often adverbs such as extremely, or slightly) that modify the intensity or degree of an action, an adjective or another adverb.

Now just using those few markers, we could go through virtually any news media reporting and find bias that we likely never noticed before, probably passed over and weren't actually aware was affective of both our thinking and our mood, especially towards the reported subject or issue.

All of media will be found to be biased, even if that bias goes towards our particular political, social or cultural preferences, it's still bias. Because bias is affective of thinking processes, emotions and moods, it isn't making us better thinkers and problem solvers to allow it to happen.

So what do we do? Change the media? I'll wish you the best of luck with that but don't think you'll manage very well. What we need to do is build better tools for better thinking as the best defense against these problems.

The best part about Biopolitics and Bionews is that the channel has a foundation enforcing that strong ethics are required. Strong ethics is the foundation of creating one of our best tools: the rubric.

RUBRIC

Rubric: A rubric sets out clearly defined criteria and standards for assessing different levels of performance. Rubrics have often been used in education for grading student work, and in recent years have been applied in evaluation to make transparent the process of synthesising evidence into an overall evaluative judgement.

So we start with our ethical decision making and create a rubic built from our ethical values.

The great thing about a rubric that is built from ethical decision making is that it is easily modifiable to accommodate a myriad of different applications.

So, when we are reading a media news story, we can pull up our rubric if we keep it on our PC or MAC, or as I prefer to have it separate because it works better for me, I print it out. Then we can dissect and analyze any media coverage by comparing the statements, facts, commentary to our rubric and ask ourselves the question, "does this meet with my rubric?" Obviously, we can use this across media platforms, media outlets and even for those who are engaged through social media.

METRIC

For some, an extra step may be used, although it isn't absolutely necessary. We can also apply a metric to gauge how well any media coverage has done with regards to facts, accuracy, ethical decisions. The extra component added should be to check for and assess not only the presence of bias, but the actual level of bias.

There is an awesome application called VADER, which means Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner. Sentiment analysis is becoming more and more important across domains, corporations are even using it to modify their application processes to achieve better outcomes on hiring targets.

Sentiment analysis means not just the measurable positivity or negativity of text but also of biased wording and even that found in text containing slang, emojis, similes, metaphors, etc. It is a whole tool language metric with a proven track record.[*see below] If not your style or too much technology involved, in the references you will find sufficient information for standard metrics used in bias and sentiment analysis.

So this is my toolbox for Defense against the Dark Arts of media bias, dark free speech and failures at missing bias in my own cognitive processing. If Germaine approves this post, hope to see comments and will help with inquiries in any way possible.

REFERENCES
https://www.betterevaluation.org/en/evaluation-options/rubrics
https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2013/12/02/sustainability-ethics-and-metrics/ http://oxfordre.com/communication/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228613-e-439
https://www.thinkmind.org/download.php?articleid=huso_2015_2_30_70077
https://research.ku.edu/sites/research.ku.edu/files/docs/EESE_EthicalDecisionmakingFramework.pdf
https://www.victoria.ac.nz/vbs/teaching/aol/rubrics-and-score-sheets/LO-4a-Rubric-for-Ethical-Perspectives.pdf
https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/simplifying-social-media-sentiment-analysis-using-vader-in-python-f9e6ec6fc52f
[*downside] The only downside is VADER requires operation on a Linux distribution because it uses Python. For anyone interested, feel free to ask, and even if you are a long time Windows or MAC user, there is a Debian distribution called DeepIn that I am confident most would find very comfortable and easy to use. It is also the most beautiful OS I have ever seen.

B&B orig: 1/18/19