TLDR: The media’s liberal bias bubble has burst

by FiveThirtyEight (these highlights provided for you by Annotote)

The media had a liberal bias, and the bubble has burst

“ [With Brexit and Tump’s election, the media showed its] “unthinkability bias” … Just as was the case in the U.S. presidential election, voting on the referendum had split strongly along class, education and regional lines, with voters outside of London and without advanced degrees being much more likely to vote to leave the EU. The reporters covering the Brexit campaign, on the other hand, were disproportionately well-educated and principally based in London. They tended to read ambiguous signs [with considerable bias]

“ [In his book, The Wisdom of Crowds,] Surowiecki argues that crowds usually make good predictions when they satisfy these four conditions:

1. Diversity of opinion: “Each person should have private information, even if it’s just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.”
2. Independence. “People’s opinions are not determined by the opinions of those around them.”
3. Decentralization. “People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.”
4. Aggregation. “Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.”
   #crowdsourcing #echo chamber #groupthink #filter bubble

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“ Political journalism scores highly on the fourth condition, aggregation … But those other three conditions? Political journalism fails miserably

“ 92% of journalists have college degrees [vs] just 70% [in 1982] and only 58% in 1971.

“ only 7% of them identified as Republicans (although only 28% called themselves Democrats with the majority saying they were independents) … only 3% endorsed Trump. By comparison, 46% … endorsed Romney in 2012.

“ Decentralization? … the political news industry has become increasingly consolidated in Washington and New York

“ The share of total exposure for the top five news sources climbed from roughly 25% a decade ago to around 35% last year, and has spiked to above 40% so far in 2017 … the digital age hasn’t necessarily democratized the news media [after] the decline of independent blogs
#consolidation

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