I have started reading the piece by Uri now and it basically confirms what I was imagining.
"He declared that diversity—on our staff and in our audience—was the overriding mission"
"Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system."
Pretty much guaranteed that they were trying to hit race/gender quotas.
I always find it on the nose when “diversity” is used to mean “aligned with modern leftist political ideals”. That’s just not what that word means.
If NPR wants actual diversity (of opinion), they should consider tracking the political affiliation of the people they interview in their database. But in my experience, DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) never seems to include a diversity of political views. I find that very suspicious.
I think you’re right. But that isn’t actually what diverse means. The opposite - lefty non-white, non-straight and mostly non-male people are a specific political group.
I think it’s quite on the nose for organisations to cater to that community explicitly. And the wider population is far more diverse than that.
It is strange to me. It seems obvious to me that it would result in more diversity to have say, a latino network with all latino reporters who interviewed latinos, and a different network which was multi-ethnic, and a Fox News like network which was white as heck, than it is to just have the 2nd.
Diversity is implemented in a strangely homogenous way where there is only one monoculture. One correct, diverse way to run such an organisation.
Most of their reporting does have a left bias, and of course opinion even more so.
But they do have some serious, thoughtful conservatives in their opinion pages. Like David French and Ross Douthat. And they have reported on controversial issues like the dangers of medically transitioning minors. David Leonhardt points out the places where conservative arguments have facts on their side, like how closing schools during Covid for so long greatly damaged learning outcomes and was a bad decision overall.
It eliminates blind spots that come from only considering views confirming an ideology and thus getting important stories wrong.
I don't read the NYT as much as I used to, but I'll be a NYT subscriber for the rest of my life because they're the only media source creating content of quality and depth across such a wide range of American society (and of the rest of the world).
Some of their editorials are nutz but many, on both the left and the right, are exemplars of journalism.
Those guys (and Brooks, Stephens) represent a moribund strain of conservatism with zero organic support. They speak for spooks and think tanks, nobody else. They provide diversity in the same way that the Washington Generals play basketball.
I think publications like Unherd, Compact, and of course Taki's Mag have their fingers closer to the pulse. I don't endorse the contents and can't even vouch for the quality of the writing, but it's not an ideological dead-end in the way the NYT, Atlantic, and National Review are.
No, those people represent a common strain of conservative view, they just don't represent a faction which holds much power in either political party at this moment. But don't confuse the power balance of factions within parties as a representation of what views people actually hold. A two party system with first past the post primaries makes it likely that the parties will be controlled by their extreme factions, while most people are disaffected and dissatisfied with their general election choices.
Those other publications do indeed have their fingers on the pulse of the dominant populist faction on the right, just like their progressive counterparts have their finger on the pulse of the populist left. But those aren't the only (or in my view, at all) interesting things to read about.
You're framing unrepentant neoconservatism as some underrepresented moderate alternative that a disaffected middle America is secretly clamoring for. I have not met any normal people who think the way French and Stephens do.
I don't think the words "middle America" or "secretly clamoring" show up in my comment.
It's fine (good, even, IMO) that you disagree with conservatives (I do as well), but that doesn't mean they don't exist. The "normal people" that you've met, or that I've met, are not a good sample of the range of political viewpoints that exist.
The people who voted for Reagan and HW Bush and John McCain - who was way more popular than any current Republican leader, and put up a strong showing against Barack Obama, the most popular politician of our era - and Mitt Romney haven't all died or joined Trump's weird and actually pretty tiny cult of personality. They're still out there stewing about what has happened to the Republican party.
> But they do have some serious, thoughtful conservatives in their opinion pages. Like David French and Ross Douthat.
You do a serious disservice to David French by including him in the same boat as Ross Douthat. Mr. French does often post thoughtful pieces from a conservative viewpoint, but most of what I’ve read from Mr. Douthat is quite the opposite.
Indeed, most of what I’ve read from Mr. Douthat is just a thinly-veiled sermon that paints “liberals” as one-dimensional characters that (along with our whole society) just need to find god. A conservative catholic god, specifically.
Really, he’s a religion columnist masquerading as political commentator. And not a particularly good one, at that.
Why do you think religion isn’t important enough to be discussed in a major newspaper?
Check out the Matter of Opinion podcast. Douthat is very comfortable engaging in give and take with liberals who have very different views. He presents orthodox Catholic opinions yes, but he’s intelligent enough to understand what’s a good or a bad argument.
I don’t appreciate the conflation of conservative views and religious views, which is my main problem. I never said it wasn’t important to discuss; don’t put words in my mouth.
My other problem is that I just find his writing and rhetoric to be very weak.
Where do you draw the line around what voices need to be included? Conservative politics have moved so far to the right that centric liberal politics is what old conservative politics used to be (because democrats are big tent, and the republicans have been shedding voters due to extremism).
Balance isn't positive or useful when it shifts things further one direction, especially when there's such a massive shift.
Indeed. While you might dislike Neo-liberalism, Reagan-ism, or Bush's "Compassionate Conservatism," as Walter Sobchak said: at least it's an ethos.
Trumpism believes in nothing but suborning yourself to Trump's will and needs. Sure there's some vague isolationism and xenophobia, and some pandering to Christian nationalism, but the only consistent policy position is fielty to Trump. That's why there aren't any interesting Trumpist pundits. The House is twisting itself in knots right now because they can't decide what he wants or will tolerate regarding Ukraine funding. A real party with a policy would have an articulatable agenda, probably with some dissenters on this or that, but all the current Republican party can agree on is how great dear leader is, and Democrats are bad.
Yes and: what ever their pre Trump "conservative" bonafidas, neither French or Douthat land any where near today's mainstream movement conservatives (MAGA).
They have conservative bonafides, no scare quotes necessary. The Republican party mainstream (MAGA) is not attempting conservatism, it is right wing populism. The word "conservative" does not have a new definition, the change has been that it no longer applies to the political party it once did (at least more so).
A news organization that chased “diversity of opinion” would not be a good news organization.
Some opinions are not worth entertaining. If NPR were broadcasting the rantings of flat earthers, Sasquatch hunters, and anti-vax weirdos, it may be entertaining but it wouldn’t be news.
Also: the reason DEI initiatives ignore “diversity of political views” is because that is not a trait you are born with.
Sure; but its a mistake to throw the baby out with the bathwater here. Its true that I don't want any of my news to come from flat earthers. But if all of my news (or all of my friends) share the same set of political biases, I'll end up wrong about important things and unable to connect with people around me.
Its a balancing act. Like every balancing act, you can fail on both sides - by being too open minded (and believing Alex Jones or whatever), or by being too closed minded.
I think if you live in a country where half of the population has some particular view of the world, you're being a bad democratic citizen if you don't take the time to understand that point of view.
Hoping that people consume a variety of news sources sounds naively optimistic to me. And when a single news station 100% caters to their audience's biases, you end up in situations like Fox News knowingly lying to their audience over the idea that the election was stolen. (If they told the truth as they saw it, they would have lost viewers. So they chose to back Trump's lie.)
I think its much healthier when news sources actively struggle against the pressure to be an echo chamber. And be self aware enough to know their own biases & make them clear to their readers. I also like hearing the reasonable arguments against their position: "We endorse candidate A, but here are some reasonable criticisms of A that their opponents bring up."
The Economist does this. Other commenters in this thread mention the New York Times does this. Generally, I want to follow journalists who know more about the topic than I do, and can help me see a bigger picture.
> Also: the reason DEI initiatives ignore “diversity of political views” is because that is not a trait you are born with.
Is that true? You're born from your parents[0]. I don't think it's actually much of an important distinction that you would have different socialization if you were adopted. Younger LGBTQ/NB people don't agree with this nearly as much as they used to, for instance. Several of those groups are just things you decide to do.
> If NPR were broadcasting the rantings of flat earthers, Sasquatch hunters, and anti-vax weirdos, it may be entertaining but it wouldn’t be news.
Surely you can see the difference between airing the view that it's reasonable and expected for the modern IRS to have significantly fewer employees per capita than they did before the advent of computers, and airing the view that autism is caused by Lizardmen.
Computers remove the need to have an army people to open envelopes and file all of the tax returns of the many millions of people who aren't getting audited and now file electronically, and electronically process payments or tax refunds, and validate the numbers on each tax return against the 1099s and W2s submitted by employers to make sure they match etc. All of these things used to be done by hand and it should certainly not require anywhere near as much labor to do them electronically.
Honestly no, because cuts to the IRS have clearly and blatantly been motivated by lobbying and the desire to make the IRS less effectual at tax collection.
The vast majority of the contemporary debate revolves around the defunding of the IRS's legal team and their ability to hire external council, and the observed fact that they have been pursuing less and less tax cases over time against large companies in particular.
there's a number of reasonable "defund the IRS" arguments I could entertain, such is "tax collection is bad", but the idea that computers simply means the cuts in IRS employees is "reasonable and expected" just ain't so. The cuts were directly agitated for by lobbying groups like CEETA, of which Microsoft is a member, Microsoft having a massive pending IRS tax case.
> Honestly no, because cuts to the IRS have clearly and blatantly been motivated by lobbying and the desire to make the IRS less effectual at tax collection.
The other side of this coin is that every time the IRS audits anyone, they have to incur significant uncompensated costs to deal with the audit even if they've done nothing wrong. Anyone subjected to this obviously and reasonably is not going to like it, and allowing the government to convert all of the efficiency gains from computerization into more staff to impose those costs on innocent people is not inherently the right thing to do.
> The vast majority of the contemporary debate revolves around the defunding of the IRS's legal team and their ability to hire external council, and the observed fact that they have been pursuing less and less tax cases over time against large companies in particular.
How many staff they have and who they target with those resources are two separate issues.
> the idea that computers simply means the cuts in IRS employees is "reasonable and expected" just ain't so.
If they had N employees doing audits and M employees doing clerical work, and now computers mean they only need 10% as many employees to do clerical work, it is completely reasonable to say that they should now be able to do the same work as before with 10% as many clerical employees because that is what happened.
>How many staff they have and who they target with those resources are two separate issues.
They may be two separate issues, but they are two interconnected issues, as with limited legal resources its more profitable to audit average people than to audit the wealthy who can evidently hold you up in court for decades, whereas with more legal resources there's more of an incentive to go after the high-hanging fruit since you'll already have the low-hanging fruit covered and have exhausted their resources already.
It's the "having exhausted their resources already" which is the problem.
Suppose the IRS can audit a thousand small businesses and they recover more from this than their own costs. But at the same time most of the small businesses are innocent, and the audits collectively cost them several times as much as the IRS "profits". This is not a socially beneficial undertaking because the net costs across society exceed the net benefits, even if it has higher margins to the IRS than auditing large companies.
If you specifically want the IRS to target large companies then you can have them do that regardless of whether the margin of that to the IRS is less lucrative than the behavior that imposes more uncompensated costs on smaller businesses.
Maybe give them a collar and throw them a bone in the same legislation? I feel strongly like large companies have successfully lobbied and propagandised to conflate funding the IRS enough to effectually go after their rampant tax evasion with hurting small businesses.
It's not really all that hard to earmark a certain amount of IRS funds to only go after companies over XX size. I think this is actually essential under neoliberalism because one of the fatal flaws of neoliberalism is giving large companies more wealth & power and then expecting to be able to tax that back to fund the welfare state, which generally falls on its face as you've just given large companies all the wealth and power in the world to stop that from even happening. If neoliberalism is to survive as a political ideology and for us to not end up adopting socialism (which is bureaucratic and corrupt and inefficient), it's sort of essential that organisations like the IRS have a decent amount of power and for them to direct that power at large institutions.
Everyone does. Even as a baseline of "Things that almost all members of it can agree on", our society is incredibly biased in how it views the world.
So is every other society in history. I'm sure ancient Greeks were convinced that they had it all figured out, too.
Fish don't have a word for water. Spend a significant part of your life immersed in a society with a radically different worldview, and it'll be very clear just how arbitrary team blue/red complaints about bias are.
You don't actually want unbiased reporting. It would be either useless, or make you extremely uncomfortable all the time. You're just unhappy that it's got the wrong bias.
I have started reading the piece by Uri now and it basically confirms what I was imagining.
"He declared that diversity—on our staff and in our audience—was the overriding mission"
"Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system."
Pretty much guaranteed that they were trying to hit race/gender quotas.