Monthly Archives: January 2020

In early January 2020, Snopes readers inquired about the provenance and authenticity of a quotation attributed to former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt that contained her reflections on the word liberal and the importance of the concept of freedom in American society.

On Dec. 31, 2019, for instance, a Facebook account posted a widely shared meme containing a portrait of Roosevelt and the following quote:

Long ago, there was a noble word, liberal, which derives from the word free. Now a strange thing happened to that word. A man named Hitler made it a term of abuse, a matter of suspicion, because those who were not with him were against him, and liberals had no use for Hitler. And then another man named McCarthy cast the same opprobrium on the word We must cherish and honor the word free or it will cease to apply to us. Eleanor Roosevelt.

The same meme was promulgated even further two days later, when the left-leaning Occupy Democrats Facebook page posted it, along with the message Who else is a PROUD liberal?

The quote is authentic and did indeed originate in something Roosevelt wrote: her 1963 book Tomorrow is Now, which was published shortly after her death in November 1962. The relevant section, towards the end of the book, reads in full as follows:

Long ago, there was a noble word, liberal, which derives from the word free. Now a strange thing happened to that word. A man named Hitler made it a term of abuse, a matter of suspicion, because those who were not with him were against him, and liberals had no use for Hitler. And then another man named McCarthy cast the same opprobrium on the word. Indeed, there was a time a short but dismaying time when many Americans began to distrust the word which derived from free. One thing we must all do. We must cherish and honor the word free or it will cease to apply to us. And that would be an inconceivable situation. This I know. This I believe with all my heart. If we want a free and a peaceful world, if we want to make the deserts bloom and man grow to greater dignity as a human being WE CAN DO IT!

The meme shared widely in early 2020 left out certain words taken from this section, but it properly acknowledged that omission with the use of an ellipsis, and the omission did not misrepresent or change the meaning of what Roosevelt wrote. As such, the meme was accurate and authentic and properly attributed the quotation to its true author.

Read the original here:

Did Eleanor Roosevelt Say This About the Word 'Liberal'? - Snopes.com

The self-styled intellectual class is growing excitable. Under the onslaught of Trump, Brexit, Europe-wide populism, and Jordan Peterson, can we be certain, they ask, that the open society will continue? The only way on from liberalism, they believe, is backward into the darkness whence we allegedly emerged. Even those who are not enthusiastic about liberalisms tender mercies are required to moderate their hopes for its demise, lest the new nurse turn out to be worse than the serving one. A lot of people, including people who call themselves conservatives, appear to be concerned about the future of liberalism, and this concern is causing the age to be misread.

For the discussion is bogus to begin with. What is called liberalism here is not liberalism at all, but its direct opposite. It is liberalism only in name, and therefore offers no guarantee of an open society at all. By corrupting the meanings of terms like equality, tolerance, and human rights, the liberal ascendancy of the past three decades has overburdened the skeleton of our civilization, leaving it weakened and susceptible to collapse.

We should stop using words like liberalism as though they were not already subsumed in irony, as though the sense of virtue and good intention that they are supposed to connote remained valid. I believe it has become necessary to prefix certain words in our political lexicon to alert bystanders to their hidden corruption. For three decades I have referred to pseudo-liberalism. What we call liberalism is no longer to be thought upright. If it dies, it will be a cause of celebration, not dismay.

This pseudo-liberalism is founded on a lie: the idea that freedom resides in getting whatever you demand and doing whatever you desire. In the words of the diabolical occultist Aleister Crowley: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. A moments thought reveals such ideas as civilization-threatening. By definition, what one person demands must be taken from someplace where it already benefits others, and doing exactly what you want will invariably be a cost to someone else or, ultimatelybecause of the complexity of the human instrumentto yourself. There are libraries of philosophy and theology on these topics, but as far as contemporary conversations are concerned, it is as though not a word of this is relevant.

The Sixties generation, which introduced these incoherencies into the bloodstream of modern societies, has not been honest about its own experience of these much-vaunted freedoms, which have left a trail of devastation behind them. One symptom of this is that there is virtually no lucid witness to the errors of pseudo-liberalism, not just in the intimate areas of human relations, but in relation to economics and the movements of people in the modern world. For half a century, these converging strands of insipid thinking have dominated Western societies, steamrolling everything and everyone with the help of corporate money and devious propaganda, their incoherencies protected from scrutiny by the influence and dollars of Big This and Big That, by corrupted media and the force field of political correctness. Self-styled liberals have hijacked the idealism of the young, enlisting them for a project that has the outward appearance of virtue but is rotten to the core. They have convinced even our own children that globalism is an unequivocal good and that human safety and well-being can be maintained without the assistance of the civilization that made all these qualities possible in the first place.

Thus, pseudo-liberalism seeks to turn upside-down the value system of the civilization that once was Christendom, attacking its core institutions and mocking and censoring its history. It justifies genocide in the form of abortion and is clearly intentsometimes unwittinglyupon engineering the cultural and moral demolition of the West itself, by dint of godless relativism, induced migration, the elimination of distinct nations, and the destruction of the nuclear family.

And although this is quite clearly the most intolerant ideology to have emerged in the West since World War II, signs of the demise of this liberalism are met with handwringing from people who ought to know better. All right-thinking people must agree that populism is a bad thing. We must, while admitting its minor blemishes, still accept that what is called liberalism offers the one best way forward for Western societies.

Liberal-progressivismto give it its most informative nameis actually an advanced form of colonialism, imposing itself not just on territories but also claiming dominion over all future time, brooking no dissent and remorselessly punishing recalcitrant doubters. In this sense it is deeply totalitarian, insisting on one best way that cannot be questioned.

In his 1987 essayStories and Totalitarianism, Vclav Havel defined the mechanism of totalitarianism as the assassination of history to achieve both nihilisation of the past and mastery over the future. The instrument of this process he identified as the removal from history of the possibilities of human choice, mystery, and autonomy: History becomes a fixed sequence of unfolding inevitabilities, and the role of human beings is merely to acquiesce and embrace what is pressed upon them.

To put this another way, under the new colonialism the future is a city already constructed, waiting to be moved into. There is no space for human discussion or disagreement. It is already decidedand not, we are archly informed, by some arbitrary human authority but by the mechanistic mind of time, which ordains the course of history according to immutable and unchallengeable laws.

We are now, it is certain, seeing the early stages of the disintegration of this pseudo-liberalism. This liberalism has promised untrammeled economic growth, itself an example of its incoherence: Increasing growth never delivers increasing happiness. Moreover, in ignoring the inevitability of boom-bust, this promise provides an example of pseudo-liberal dishonesty.There is no final glorious destination.

This pseudo-liberalism also promises free speech, while curtailing it in the name of civilityemploying sophisticated abuses of language to impose censorship so as to protect its own incoherence, and arrogating to itself the right to stifle anything that offers a significant threat to itself.It also promises increasingly purer forms of democracy but in reality is pushing us ever closer to mob rule.

Pseudo-liberalism lays claim to the universalization of human rights, but it requires just a moments reflection to realize that what is meant by this is not universal in the least, but a highly ideological recalibration of the balance of power between establishments and minorities, which provide human shields for the prosecution of an undeclared war on what is.

Moreover, it is precisely the pseudo-liberal insistence on a selective understanding of human rights that lies at the heart of the current threat to Europes future. For if universal rights are to trump rights of culture, history, place, locality, home and hearth, the outcome will be the destruction of all culture, loyalty, and trust, creating an intercontinental incontinence that will sweep all order and coherence before it.

What is called liberalism attacks what is most precious in our tradition of community solidarity, opposing those values we have held dearestlove of God, nation, and familyin favor of an empty and faithless materialism and the pseudo-laws of the new ideologies. The flaws of this pseudo-liberalism amount to an indictment that far outweighs even the sum of the promised benefits, for it amounts, in truth, to the negation of democracy, free speech, and meaningful liberty.

It is true that there are actors waiting in the wings who represent something even more illiberal than the present dispensation. But we should not cling to a nurse for fear of something worse.Perhaps somewhere about the precincts of this paradox lies the explanation of why liberals have so far supported the influx of Muslims into Europe: This is part of the liberal program of disintegrating the culture, traditions, and civilization of the West. Often one is forced to wonder if liberals know anything about the nature of Islam and its ambitions, whether they are aware that the Islamic concept of the infidel disqualifies all such peoples from what they think their entitlements. No sane person could ever have accused these pseudo-liberals of being far-sighted. Still, here they have surely surpassed themselves with their willful myopia and stupidity. If they wish to imagine how it will end, I recommend they have a quiet read of Michel HouellebecqsSubmission, which tells of the capitulation of a future French establishment to the blandishments of Islam.

But the problem does not lie merely with pseudo-liberalism. Paradoxically, a dangerous tendency of thought has arisen in late times among conservatives: the idea that any flaws of liberalismsuch as, one presumes, its blind utopian globalism and politically correct excessespale compared to the barbarism to be observed elsewhere in the world. They take this to mean that we should not raise a fuss about what is happening in the West, but rather express gratitude for the openness we enjoy and the tolerance liberals extend to their opponents. This, too, is bogus. Tolerance here, like equality, means something different than it used to. Once, tolerance meant not interfering with, or attempting to suppress, beliefs that contradicted ones own, but this response has given way to a dictatorship of intolerance wherein everything is tolerated except the views of those who do not subscribe to the tenets of pseudo-liberalism.

Liberals speak of what they call the liberal order as though its virtues were self-evident. This allows them to adopt a tone of moral sanctimony. Those who disagree, therefore, mustipso factosuffer from some kind of pathological perverseness: They oppose the good out of fear, vexatiousness, or worse. But the pseudo-liberal sense of the good is selective and self-serving, and has no good plans for those who dissent from it. We have seen this, again and again, and what we have seenat the hands of social justice warriors, LGBT activists, #MeTooers, and the likeprovides evidence of what the liberal end of history would actually look like.

So let us not be frightened into shoring up that which is finally disintegrating. Pseudo-liberalism is finally disintegrating under belated retaliation from those it treats with contempt, as well as the weight of its own senselessness. The liberal state of affairs is a bit like the current state of rock n roll: Though on its last legs, no one can imagine what, if anything, comes next.This for a time appeared to be the strongest card of the self-proclaimed liberals: that they did indeed represent the end of history.Now, what is (often pejoratively) calledpopulismhas arisen to put paid to that idea.

This populism may represent the future, in one form or another, or simply the precursor to something we are not yet able to imagine.Butwhatever it is, it seems our only hope. The choice we face is not between left and right, orstill lessliberal and far right. Certainly, the choice is not between a continuation of the present pseudo-liberalism or a descent into Islamismthe first willinevitably give way to the second. Rather, the choice is between civilization and its antithesis. It could hardly be more serious.The time has come tolet the delusions of the Sixties finally die in their dilapidated beds.

John Watersis an Irish writer and commentator, the author of ten books, and a playwright.

More here:

The End of Pseudo-Liberalism | John Waters - First Things

To Scott Morrison,

I decided to write to you as my family lay face-down in the sand, covered in wet blankets on Malua Bay Beach as hot embers rained down on us on New Years Eve to escape the Clyde Mountain bushfire.

Most of my family (not mum) and I have voted for the Coalition for as long as I can remember. I helped hand out flyers at the 2019 state election. However, after what my family went through the last three days, I can no longer support a government or party that choose to remain on the sidelines on climate change and the devastating effects it causes.

The Liberal party considers itself the natural party of government and its past achievements certainly give credence to that assertion. But any party or government that recklessly endangers lives and the environment is not fit to lead.

By not recognising climate change as a credible threat, you fail to take action on the many side-effects that climate change causes to our community. The one that I have personally witnessed is an increase risk and severity of bushfires. I took a screenshot of the life-saving Fires Near Me app and found most of the New South Wales coast was on fire. Anyone who could think this was status quo either has a hidden agenda or is delusional.

Through inaction you place first responders in ever-increasingly dangerous situations made worse by climate change. By not recognising climate change as a serious threat you fail to prepare overworked, underappreciated (by government not communities) first responders for larger, more frequent bushfires that devastate communities.

I can no longer hope that the adults are back in charge. You have failed to act and you have failed to lead. I have committed myself to ensure my family and as many people as I can manage will never be endangered by events that we fortunately lived through.

I present you a choice: stand up, lead and take action. Make Australia a global leader in the fight to prevent climate change and make the necessary preparations to build resilient communities and be remembered as the leader who provided hope to future generations. Or stay your current path and be remembered as one who could not lead, could not act and doomed future generations.

More here:

I've always voted Liberal, but after sheltering my family on a beach I cannot support this government - The Guardian

Compost and recycle bins are seen during the 2019 Outside Lands Music And Arts Festival at Golden ... [+] Gate Park on August 11, 2019 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by FilmMagic/FilmMagic)

When they cycle short distances rather than jump in their cars, residents of liberal American cities may consider themselves ecologically sound,but the greenest cities are often politically conservative.

Conservative communities that are more isolated have some of the lowest carbon footprints, points out Chris Jones, director of the CoolClimate Network run from the University of California in the eco-woke city of Berkeley in San Franciscos Bay Area.

For instance, Blackford, Kentucky, is a low population density community thats mostly self-contained, and it has a household carbon footprint many times below those of supposedly green locales. (Kentucky is a deep red state, voting for politicians such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.)

Your political ideology and belief or non-belief in climate change dont have a lot of impact on your emissions overall, reveals Jones.

Many of the U.S. cities with low carbon footprints are what Jones calls micropolitan areas.

Isolated micropolitan areas have the lowest carbon footprints overall, he says.

Low carbon-footprint U.S. cities have jobs and entertainment and shopping and everything that they need all within one micropolitan region.

Out of 32 climate-impacting factors he has studied, Jones says the top six contribute 92% of the variation between carbon footprints of locations.

In order, these are the number of motor vehicles owned, annual income, the carbon intensity of electricity supplied to a city, the size of homes, and the number of people living in each of those homes. As the size of cities increase, the size of carbon footprints tends to go up overall because some residents often drive long distances, adding spice to their lives by searching out options not available in smaller cities.

In larger cities, youve got this new world of possibilities open to you, admits Jones.

This expands your potential to spend money and to travel and take advantage of new opportunities.

(The Cool Climate networkresearchers from around the world specializing in carbon footprint analysis, behavior change and greenhouse gas mitigation policyhas an online calculator to work out your personal carbon footprint.)

Evian recycling bin, New York City. (Photo by Roy Rochlin/Roy Rochlin)

The carbon footprint concept was created in 1990 by Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. It has become the standard measure for visualizing how much of natures resources humans exploit through production and consumption.

Only about a third of the average individuals carbon footprint is under their direct control. The majority of our footprint is determined by the buildings we use, the transport modes available to us, and the source of energy provided by the locality. These are all things directly under the control of local governments. Overnight a city could switch to renewable electricity or, over a longer timescale, a city could remove car lanes and, in their place, install light mobility lanes to encourage cyclists, e-scooter users, and cargobike riders.

(In urban geography a city is defined as a contiguous population cluster and may not correspond directly to the precise legal jurisdiction for what you or I might define as a city.)

The first Hydrogen bus in France aimed at connecting Versailles and Jouy-en-Josas, west of Paris. ... [+] (Photo by ERIC PIERMONT / AFP) (Photo credit should read ERIC PIERMONT/AFP via Getty Images)

If cities switched tomore efficient energysourcing electricity from renewable sources rather than coal, for instance, or made their public buses electric or hydrogen-poweredthey could cut their emissions by at least 25%.This is according to Californian environmental economist Dan Moran, a researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

On a CO2 [emissions] map, [carbon consumption] is concentrated in Northern Europe, the U.S. Eastern seaboard, a few other U.S. cities, Japan and eastern China, states Moran, curator of the Global Gridded Model of Carbon Footprints.

Its starkly visible how unequal it is between whos driving the problem and whos poised to bear the brunt of it.

But cities do not have to become fun-free zones, says Moran.

Im not against consumption. I enjoy the modern world: I love traveling to new places, eating amazing food, having a good laptop that works. Consumption itself is not an evil.

But, Moran adds, concerted action by a small number of local mayors and governments could significantly reduce national total carbon footprints.

See the original post here:

Why The Conservative City Is Often Greener Than The Liberal One - Forbes

Complaints about press bias are as old as the press itself, but in recent decades, conservatives have pushed one complaint above all other: The media is biased against them because it is overwhelmingly staffed by liberal journalists. A new study, forthcoming in Science Advances, provides the strongest evidence ever that theyre half-right but only the least important half: Yes, reporters overall are significantly more liberal than the general population. In fact, almost one in six are more liberal than Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, based on who they follow on Twitter.But no,that doesnt matter even for the most liberal cohort of them. The title of the study says it all: There is No Liberal Media Bias in the News Political Journalists Choose to Cover.

Even though journalists are dominantly liberal and often fall far to the left of Americans, the paper itself was emphatically clear in its conclusion:

In short, despite being dominantly liberals/Democrats, journalists do not seem to be exhibiting liberal media bias (or conservative media bias) in what they choose to cover. This null is vitally important showing that overall, journalists do not display political gatekeeping bias in the stories they choose to cover.

In a way, thats not that surprising: Journalists place a high value on objectivity and balance. Avoiding ideological bias rates very high among journalists, lead author Hans Hassell of Florida State told Salon 8.5 on scale of 10 in the survey these researchers conducted. As Hassell acknowledged, A response you give to a survey may be very different from the actual behaviors that you express in the things that you do.

So the authors Hassell, John Holbein of the University of Virginia and Matthew Miles of Brigham Young University turned to a correspondence experiment, which Hassell said was essentially an experiment to test for biases that individuals may not be willing to explicitly state, because it may be socially unacceptable to be biased in a certain way, or they may even be unintentionally biased.

Historically, these kinds of experiments are "commonly used to detect racial bias, Hassell said. (Its primarily been used in employment studies, where it can detect gender bias as well.) Using this technique to detect ideological bias among journalists broke new ground.

We created a fake state legislative campaign," Hassell explained. "We created an email account that purported to be from an individual in the community who was going to announce his candidacy for state legislature. Then we posed as a staffer for that campaign and sent an email to every single individual asked to participate in the survey, Hassell explained.

The email provided basic candidate information and asked whether reporters they "would be interested in sitting down with the candidates and talking about their positions with regard to state government. Crucially, researchers randomized whether employees of a given publicationreceived an email that indicated whether the candidate was a strong conservative, a moderate conservative, a moderate progressive or a strong progressive.

The texts of the emails were the same in all cases, with the only differences being the candidate biographies included at the bottom of the emails. We might expect progressives to be more interested in covering progressives and conservatives more interested in covering conservatives, Hassell said, with a liberal bias predominating, simply because there are more liberals in the population at large. Instead, they found no significant evidence of bias, either for the respondents as a whole, or broken down by ideology or by the partisan leaning of the counties they served. In short, the premise that the profession still has governing standards was fully borne out by the experiment.

The overall results are shown in the following figure:

The paper explains:

As can be seen, there is no statistical or substantive difference in the probability of a journalist responding to the email based solely on the treatment conditions. Comparing the two poles, strong conservative candidates are, on average, a mere 0.4 percentage points less likely to get a response than strong progressive candidates. This effect is minuscule (being equivalent to 0.47% of a standard deviation) and is far from significantly different from 0 (p=0.87).

One possible explanation for the lack of bias might simply be journalists responding to the marketplace they serve giving more coverage to conservatives in counties that voted for Trump, for example, and more coverage to progressives in counties that voted for Clinton. But in fact that wasnt the case:

[W]e find that a journalist working for a newspaper in a county that voted for Trump is just as likely to respond to a request for an interview with a progressive candidate as they are to a request from a conservative candidate. This shows that even in spite of powerful economic incentives from the readership of ones newspapers, journalists still show no signs of ideological gatekeeping bias in what they choose to cover.

The authors also divided journalists into three ideological categories exploring the possibility that we might not see evidence of bias overall, but, instead, we would see polarized coverage but the differences observed were barely perceptible, and even those minimal variations didnt fall into a clear pattern: [W]e find that journalists regardless of their own ideology treat candidates from different ideological backgrounds the same.

These findings are all the more striking, given how liberal journalists as a whole were found to be. First, the authors conducted an extensive survey, emailing a list of just over 13,500 journalists with working email addresses. We got about a 13% response rate, which is about in line with most surveys of political elites, and about double that of surveys of journalists that have been published in recent years, Hassell said. There are two significant problems: First, a large number of journalists report being independents and/or report no ideology, and second, a large majority dont respond to surveys. So the question is, Are the journalists who are not part of the online response going to be different in some ways?

To address these two problems, a team of eight undergraduates gathered all the Twitter handles they could find about half the 13,500 journalists originally identified. Then the accounts were analyzed using a technique developed and validated by Pablo Barber in a 2015 paper, Birds of the Same Feather Tweet Together: Bayesian Ideal Point Estimation Using Twitter Data. As the paper explains:

The logic of this methodological technique is that individuals display their preferences (in this case, for ideological homogeneity) through their actions (in this case, who they follow on Twitter), just as they do with many revealed preferences.

Barber showed that this method produces ideology measures that are strongly correlated with other measures both self-reported ideology and party registration records among both the public and elites in the U.S. and five European countries. Hassells team found they correlated strongly with self-reports of those who responded to their survey, as well. Thus, theres high confidence in the validity of this measure, the results of are summarized visually here:

So if journalists actuallyreflecting their own views in covering the news, conservatives would have a strong case for bias. But as weve just seen, thats not what Hassells team found: There was no significant bias at all.

Because these results are both surprising (even unbelievable) to some, and significant, its worth explaining a bit more about what the experiment reveals, and the thinking that went into it. Identifying gatekeeping bias is difficult, the paper notes, because identifying the full population of news from which journalists could select stories is difficult. As Hassell put it, It could be that there arent an even number of liberal and conservative stories available for journalists to choose from. The correspondence experiment responds to that difficulty by ensuring balance, and presenting a simplified representation, where the potential for bias is well-defined and measurable.

Its also both sensitive and realistic. They didnt want to do anything that could violate ethical standards "presenting a scandal seemed unethical, Hassell noted. So we settled on this because we felt it was something that was logical in terms of something that would commonly happen, and where judgment and discretion were involved. Some stories are so compelling that everybody has to cover them," he observed, "and then there are other things that are not news at all, so this is kind of in the middle in the realm of journalistic discretion. It was also something he knew from the other side, he later told me, which is part of why it was chosen. As a student, I worked on a couple of election cycles working for a campaign, and I remember the candidates complaining, Why can't I get coverage? Why won't the paper cover me? What's going on?

Another factor to consider is that state legislative races are themselves gateways to partisan politics: Its plausible that someone youve never heard of could not just enter, but win such a race, and doing so could have long-term political consequences, depending in their subsequent career. Many state legislators go on to Congress, and a few to the Senate and national prominence. So, this experiment taps into something central to the way American politics works.

Still, experimental evidence is always stronger when support comes from lines of inquiry. In this case, Hassells team did some of that themselves. In the original survey, they presented journalist respondents with two pairs of hypothetical candidates who were announcing their candidacy for governor in the state, but with a set of limitations, so that only one could be covered. Who would that be? This randomized test also found minimal evidence of bias. If anything, they are more predisposed to cover Republican candidates, the paper reported, although the effect was deemed "not statistically significant."

But a stronger form of supporting evidence would come from asking a different sort of question entirely. I asked about that. I think absolutely there should be other ways to do this, Hassell said. Then he described some of the difficulties in doing so, starting with ethics. You don't want to damage a journalist's reputation with a false story lead, and you don't want to waste his or her time and resources "following up a story that really doesn't exist. One idea Hassell suggested might work was to pose as a researcher announcing a new study, varying the topic. Some topics are more conservative or more preferential to liberals, he said. That way you're not forcing the journalist to go out and do any research on it. You can be the researcher.

From a broader perspective, one can certainly question how adequate this kind of evidence is, however. As Ive noted before, we can understand this in terms of Daniel Hallinsthree-sphere modelof how the media functions, from his 1986 book "The Uncensored War":

At the center is the sphere of consensus, mom-and-apple-pie country. Surrounding that, like a donut, is the sphere of legitimate debate, where journalists attention is usually focused, where there are two sides to every story and a need for objectivity and balance to be maintained.

Beyond that, though, is the sphere of deviance, the outer darkness in which dwell political actors and views which journalists and the political mainstream of society reject as unworthy of being heard.

In that piece, I went on to discuss the shoddy fact-checking" directed at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post, which reflected "a boundary-policing instinct, and an outdated one, considering that the entire political landscape has been irrevocably changed.

All three of Hallins spheres can be problematic for journalists. Those rejected in the sphere of deviance might actually have the most accurate, and most important things to say: I cite a number of examples of how this applies to Ocasio-Cortez, but, for historical perspective one could also consider the earlyfeminists who convened at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848.

The sphere of legitimate debate can be problematic as well: Objectivity and balance can be sharply at odds with one another, as another example I cited pointed out:

As far back as 2004,a study foundthat US prestige-press coverage of global warming from 1988 to 2002 has contributed to a significant divergence of popular discourse from scientific discourse, and that the prestige press's adherence to balance actually leads to biased coverage of both anthropogenic contributions to global warming and resultant action.

Another problematic aspect of this sphere was pointed out to me by Jim Naureckas, the editor of FAIR.org, the website of Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting:

The traditional model of "objectivity" followed by corporate media uses the two major parties as the two poles that journalists are expected to drive their stories straight between. This "both sides" approach often leaves out several other sides either to the left or right of the two big parties, or looking at politics from a different angle entirely.

One of the biggest biases we find in political coverage is toward seeing politics as a spectator sport. Sometimes when reporters are covering protests and other grassroots efforts to influence policy, I'm reminded of sports reporters writing about fans running onto the field.

This way of dismissing the very citizens who should be central to a democracy is hardly conducive to a healthy democracy over time. It stands in stark contrast to the kind of active engagement that health require.

Finally, the sphere of consensus at any point in history may be wildly at odds with what it was a generation or two earlier or later. Theres a reason we find past eras unfathomable at times: their spheres of consensus baffle us.

None of this is to question the value of Hassell and his colleagues' work. But the good news that it reveals the extent to which journalists are guided by professional standardsstrongly suggests the potential power of revising those standards to address the above-noted shortcomings, and other failings, to achieve the kind of objective, reliable reporting to which journalists aspire.

In addition, the innovative combination of approaches used in the study calls out for further breakthroughs that may help us better understand these broader sorts of challenges. I was reminded of a number studies Ive written about here, such as UNC sociologist Christopher Bails book, "Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream" (author interview here), which used big data techniques to understand how factually deficient political actors came to have such disproportionate media and political influence, actually enabled by common media practices. There was also the Columbia Journalism Review study, "Dont blame the election on fake news. Blame it on the media" (Salon story here) with this astonishing factoid: The New York Timesran as many cover stories [10] about Hillary Clintons emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election.

As these two examples (along with coverage of the climate crisis) suggest, supposedly neutral media practices can be heavily tilted toward conservative points of view,regardless of individual journalists attitudes. The fact that conservatives have a highly salient, although groundless, narrative of bias surely complicates matters for journalists trying to report the truth. They should take this study to heart as a validation that they are doing exactly what they claim, under extreme duress, and that charges of bias are unfounded at best, and quite likely deliberate attempts to manipulate reporters and shape coverage.

Such problems are especially vivid in matters of religion, where conservatives make a deeper claim: Liberals misunderstand them and thus systematically misrepresent them. In fact, the big problem is arguably the reverse. The media tendency to take the religious right at its word is arguably the greatest barrier to accurate reporting. For some insight on this I contacted author Frederick Clarkson, senior research analyst at the progressive think tankPolitical Research Associates.

Reporters and editors are often in a tricky spot. Clarkson said. Sometimes they lack the knowledge and vocabulary in this dynamic field. This can be particularly challenging when political figures or their prominent supporters are profoundly motivated by their religious views.

He cited the example of the 2012 Republican primary, the early stages of which featured two candidates, Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, who were unambiguously influenced by overtly theocratic ideas and figures from well-established theocratic camps called Christian Reconstructionism and the Pentecostal, 'dominionist' movement called the New Apostolic Reformation.

Leading figure in NAR, for example, staged a prayer rally of 30,000 people in Houston to launch Perry's campaign. Journalists who had written accurately, about all this became the targets of a smear campaign," Clarkson said. "They were (falsely) said to be tarring evangelicals in the broader sense, and media coverage of dominionism collapsed.

Clarkson continued: This turning a blind eye to the theocratic politics animating much of public life remains more the rule more than the exception. Even though evangelical historian John Fea described Ted Cruz as a Dominionist in anessayfor the Washington Post, reporters did not much follow his lead.

Such willful blindness is difficult to square with any coherent notion of objectivity, and has contributed significantly to the ongoing state of bewilderment that Trump retains such high levels of support from white evangelicals. The coverage of all American politics directly suffers from this blindness.

This study may help empower the media profession to be less easily intimidated going forward. There is a great deal that needs repair and renewal in American democracy, and journalism has a vital role to play in that process. By recognizing its own strengths, as revealed in this study, and building on them to address its weaknesses, the press can once again perform its democratic duty, and help the American public to navigate dark times.

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Not fake news: Major study finds no "liberal bias" in media but there are other problems - Salon