[HN Gopher] Friends are not a representative sample of public op...
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Friends are not a representative sample of public opinion
Author : jgalt212
Score : 23 points
Date : 2024-05-15 19:41 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.natesilver.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.natesilver.net)
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Is it really that hard to believe that journalists are better
| informed about a faraway country then ordinary people? I'm sure
| teachers know more about education and cops know more about crime
| then journalists but I don't see what profession would know more
| about the middle east.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| Masha Gessen is a paranoid fool. As evidence, go back and read
| her writings about the end of democracy in the US which draw
| strong and outlandish parallels between the US and Russian.
| yorwba wrote:
| For any given faraway country, most journalists do not do in-
| depth reporting on that country themselves and instead get
| their news from other journalists, same as everyone else. So
| they can be expected to be informed about as well as ordinary
| people.
|
| In any case, the comparison in the article is between
| journalists Gessen is friends with and unspecified other people
| who disagree with them. It's basically an attempt to reframe a
| political conflict as not political in nature at all, but
| instead rooted in ignorance, so that everyone who knew enough
| would obviously join the only correct side.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| No, they don't just get their news from other journalists the
| same as everyone else, they also get it in person.
|
| The article makes a broader point, but if you insist on
| focusing on Gessen: she is mentioned in the article because
| she was interviewed by the leading Israeli newspaper. Is it
| that hard to believe that she and her friends know more about
| Israel then ordinary people?
| scarmig wrote:
| Most journalists have never visited Israel (though I
| believe Gessen has).
|
| As far as who knows more, the base level facts are well-
| known: two ethnic groups both want a piece of land with
| lots of religious and cultural attachments; the weaker one
| engages in terrorism, while the stronger one engages in
| strict restrictions on the weaker population and kills more
| people than them. And if people know anything, they know
| that, and the difference in opinion is more about moral
| rules than a factual dispute.
|
| If anything, the people who know more than that tend to be
| less thoughtful about the conflict, able to recite lists
| the atrocities one side has committed against the other and
| obscure historical incidents to justify one side or
| another, without even making the smallest effort to
| comprehend why the other side does what it does. I can't
| say I've ever walked away better informed by reading one of
| the "well-informed" partisan screeds.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _No, they don 't just get their news from other
| journalists the same as everyone else, they also get it in
| person_
|
| You'd be surprised.
|
| Most never get it in person, having never even visited the
| countries they write about. A journalist covering global
| affairs might have visited a few of them, have a working
| knowledge of a couple or so, and the rest only know about
| superficially (if they're not merely Googling or checking
| 1-2 books, that could just be biased summaries about those
| countries and their issues).
|
| And for those that do get it in person, like going there to
| report, many never get beyond the superficial, or beyond
| talking to people telling them what they want to hear (or
| even just people in their ideology/class).
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| _> No, they don 't just get their news from other
| journalists the same as everyone else, they also get it in
| person._
|
| Unfortunately, no. AP, DPA, Reuters, AFP, ... -- that's
| where those news come from.
| zeroCalories wrote:
| I don't think that's Nate Silver's point? He said that some
| specific journalists are generalizing their social circle's
| opinion to the wider public leading them to make unfounded
| claims about the election. It seems clear that for all the
| attention pro-Palestine groups are given, the issue is
| basically a rounding error for the election, yet many left wing
| journalists are adamant that Biden is throwing the election on
| this issue. Are they bad journalists, or cynical propagandists?
| Dunno.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Is it really that hard to believe that journalists are
| better informed about a faraway country then ordinary people?_
|
| From the average person yes. From ordinary people in general
| (even not including academics and such), not necessarily, and
| not as an aggregate group.
|
| Journalists follow rote narratives about faraway countries -
| either those of the establishment, or of their peer circle.
|
| Or they are too superficial. Or their understanding of the
| foreign country is the pals they spoke too that tell them what
| they wanted to hear (or belong to their political
| persuassion/peer group/class in the first place, and are hardly
| representative of the country, as in "I spoke to my fellow Ivy
| League school educated Nigerians about the situation in the
| country, and they confirmed what I believed was the case").
|
| Most of them are also notoriously ignorant about foreign
| relations, the history of different countries, and so on, even
| at the basic level (but still write nonetheless).
|
| The journalists that specialize on a country, and have deep
| knowledge of it beyond the surface level and beyond their local
| same-ideology opinions, are few and far between.
|
| The layman Indian immigrant for example would more often than
| not know more about India and what's going on, than the average
| journalist writing about some latest development there (or
| merely rewriting a Reuters or AP report).
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| _> From the average person yes. From ordinary people [...]
| not necessarily._
|
| That does not make any sense.
| rayiner wrote:
| You're assuming that the relevant debates rest on different
| views of facts, when in reality they rest on different values.
| Specifically, journalists tend to have a very different view of
| fairness and justice when it comes to people who they perceive
| as non-white and whose religion is seen as adverse to
| Christianity than ordinary people do. Indeed, I think that if
| your average person knew as much about the Middle East as your
| typical journalist, the magnitude of the difference in opinion
| between journalists and average people would only _increase._
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