Thank you for your segment on pink slime, but more to the point, for a discussion on the treatment of animals in factory farming. It was great to see that get some genuine attention--it's a national disgrace. Bittman was excellent. Just two additional comments: 1. a dog owner would be sent straight to prison if he or she did even slightly to his or her pet what corporations do routinely to billions of animals every year; 2. industrial animal slaughter is a disaster to the environment--this industry the single biggest contributor to greenhouse gasses and global warming. Thank you for the discussion!

Hayes' analysis employs a theory about the relationship between language and epistemic points of view.

"If the epistemic terms upon which you view things does not allow for the possibility of asymmetry, it is impossible to communicate said asymmetry, so people do not see it as asymmetry. Because asymmetry itself is defined out of bounds of how this is actually reported. So the mandate is a perfect example. When you say that "He moved to the left to support the mandate", that is because you cannot come up with any kind of objective metric, anything outside the frame of who is saying what on each side to compare things to what is extreme- what is right and what is left, right? They don't have the vocabulary to do that. To say that moving to the left is embracing the mandate to me shows this fundamental sort of absence of the proper vocabulary and perceptual skills to actually have the conversation." (4/07 Up! @0:09 minutes)

Consider Zimmerman's asymmetric polarization of the situation with Trayvon Martin. Is this any different? Was this because Zimmerman didn't have the proper vocabulary to understand that his Manichean frame for the situation was flawed, and that the dark skinned black he was observing might not be one of "these a-holes [who] always get away".

Maybe the players do have a vocabulary, but what if the vocabulary is not used publicly? How can the press report on intent that it only suspects but cannot prove? History shows the vocabulary is well understood and employed at the highest levels:

PRESIDENT: You think, you think we want to, want to go this route now? And the--let it hang out, so to speak?

DEAN: Well, it's, it isn't really that--

HALDEMAN: It's a limited hang out.

DEAN: It's a limited hang out.

EHRLICHMAN: It's a modified limited hang out.

PRESIDENT: Well, it's only the questions of the thing hanging out publicly or privately.

A "limited hangout" is spy jargon for a gimmick to withhold key information when a cover has been blown. There are many more terms- the "Big Lie" is applied to Climate Change. Ideographs are virtuous terms or phrases used to disrupt critical thinking. Nixon projected an opposition between the "principle of confidentiality" against the "rule of law" to offer himself an avenue for rejecting Congress's subpoena of White House documents. "Historical revisionism" would have us believe that Reagan did not raise taxes, the debt limit or expand government; and that the GOP has not advocated the positions it now labels as leftist. Not surprisingly, a practitioner of asymmetrical polarization, Glenn Beck, wrote a book on moving the Overton Window but the concept is not new. In 1868, Anthony Trollope wrote,

"Many who before regarded legislation on the subject as chimerical, will now fancy that it is only dangerous, or perhaps not more than difficult. And so in time it will come to be looked on as among the things possible, then among the things probable;–and so at last it will be ranged in the list of those few measures which the country requires as being absolutely needed. That is the way in which public opinion is made." (in Phineas Finn, by Anthony Trollope)

These are just a few examples of the vocabulary of disinformation and propaganda.

Do we seriously believe that the Right is not fully equipped with a rich vocabulary for understanding what it is doing? News organizations have standard operating procedures, and the practice of manipulating opinion is the subject of a great deal of marketing research. Is it possible that journalists have been gamed?

This is an important question for the survival of the republic. Can the press effectively deal with propaganda, or are condemned to be the pawns of modern molders of public opinion?

Amanpour addressed the danger in her reporting of the Balkans war:

"Some people accused me of being pro-Muslim in Bosnia, but I realised that our job is to give all sides an equal hearing, but in cases of genocide you can't just be neutral. You can't just say, 'Well, this little boy was shot in the head and killed in besieged Sarajevo and that guy over there did it, but maybe he was upset because he had an argument with his wife.'

Does journalistic integrity and neutrality require that unlikely accounts be treated with equivalence?

Is the solution for reporters to report on who is creating propaganda and the techniques they are employing? If the practitioners of these "arts" have the vocabulary, shouldn't the victims be armed with the same vocabulary. Should opinion manipulators be constantly called out for instances of dishonest tricks to deceive and mislead the public? Or would that course merely re-enforce the message of the Right- that the news is mostly filled with lies- especially so if the information does not conform to your political point of view..

An alternative to that perilous course might be for journalists to adopt the methodology for the contest between ideas in science. Like journalists, scientists believe they must be scrupulously empirical, unbiased and neutral when reporting facts. However science does not believe that the truth lies somewhere in the middle between competing hypotheses. Far from the ideal voice of journalistic neutrality, science expects that scientists champion a hypothesis that explains the data the best. Science journals perform peer review on papers before publishing, but the measure for them is not whether the author has balance their article with opposing points of view. On the contrary, good papers explain why other hypotheses are false and why the narrative that their paper describes is a better explanation of the data.

Ironically, this sort of reporting would be referred to in journalism circles as an "opinion piece".

Perhaps some news organizations will figure it out.

The President failed to point out the larger dimensions of the press’s failure. Current journalistic practice tends to validate false equivalencies even in questions where what is being discussed is a matter of science, not political positioning. The President is pointing out to the press corps something that researchers and neuroscientists have long discussed about the failure of journalistic norms.

Chris Mooney has been on Lawrence and Alex’s shows describing why the "He said, She said" norm of journalistic "neutrality" is nonsense. Amanpour is not an outlier, and a new approach to journalism is required not just for special cases of genocide. Mooney makes the case this can be clearly seen when the press reports on Science news like Climate change or Genetics research. It’s high time Mooney become an Up! Guest. Despite the politically provocative theme of Mooney’s current book, Hayes will find that Mooney has also pointed out (in Mother Jones) that science skepticism is a phenomenon of the left as well- you will hear as many Vaccine conspiracy theories like those of Michele Bachman at a Whole foods store as you will at an evangelical church. **

Mooney likes to cite Raymond Pingree, professor at University of Wisconsin who introduced the notion of Epistemic Political efficacy. From the summary of his dissertation on it:

EPE is an important and neglected aspect of political efficacy, an existing construct that in past research has been conceptualized as confidence in one's own ability to affect politics, whereas EPE is conceptualized as confidence in one's own ability to understand it. As such, the EPE construct promises to better explain why some citizens tune out of politics, as well as why some of them tune in to politics in a way that disregards truth, for example by accepting dishonesty by politicians they support, and therefore failing to hold them accountable for it. Furthermore, it promises a point of leverage for addressing these problems, because, as this research shows, journalistic practices can affect levels of EPE among audience members.

Pingree points out that journalism has been played for saps before in disinformation campaigns against science. The tobacco industry waged a 40 year assault on the scientific findings about the link between cigarettes and cancer. (link)

It is a shame that the failure of journalism in being gamed by the Right is not getting very much coverage. In a time of reduced budgets for research staff, journalists are cowed into submission and far less frequently will make statements of fact, due to the lack of confidence regarding the data.

And that is precisely about what disinformation wars are about. To cow the opposition into inaction- by appealing to their impartiality. Meanwhile, the base on the right, who are intellectually unbound by constraints of fact or rules of logic can have that kind of Bush II style of incuriousity, but feel a strong urge to be certain. Orwell satirized this as "Bellyfeel" in his dystopian journalism language he called Newspeak.

It is high time we see how close to 1984 the Reagan revolution took us- particularly in the relationship between "news services", the literature of politics, actors and the illusion of "EPE" knowing.

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Notes:

With all due respect to Hayes, this phenomenon is not due to the decline in respect for institutional authority, because such a twilight of the elites thesis harkens to some mythical “good old days” when such elites were idolized. It’s nonsense. The Enlightenment was not some kind of Immaculate Conception. Revolutions take centuries, and it should come as no shock that significant segments of the public do not embrace a style of consciousness which places high value on the rigor of empiricism and methodical application of the rules of logic. During the heyday of Church elites in the middle ages, the laity continued with their pagan beliefs despite the dissonance with what the elites were telling them century after century. To this day, there are countless Nancy Reagans who profess faith in Astrology though it is pagan in the eyes of the authorities of her Christian beliefs. Same pattern of slow evolution of collective memes, of co-occurrence of antithetical narratives dissonantly switched between in a double think manner. This is what consciousness does. Mooney cites Antonio Damasio about the fundamental neurological substrate for this cognitive activity that guides perceptions, and it would be quite interesting to have both Mooney and Damasio on in the same show. Regarding the “Values” conclusion to his MJ article, consider having on Jonathan Haidt, someone Damasio makes frequent reference to. Mooney’s current theme takes the stance of physiological determinism. An author like George Lakoff makes a reduction to metaphoric themes rather than neurology (going at the patristic father-punisher in “Political Mind”) Anyway, having Haidt, Lakoff, Mooney, and Damasio putting the Right on the couch would be a killer, killer show. After the GOP display of mental illness in the Primary, and the votes against recognition of the science of evolution or climate science, this is fair play for journalistic reporting.