Coffee & COVID: On Spotting Propaganda

Jeff Childers, attorney and author of the daily newsletter Coffee & COVID, comments on a story in The New York Times that reports on the booming economy while poo-pooing that Trump’s tariffs have anything to do with it. Whether or not you agree with Childers take on the effects of the tariffs, he makes a valid point about how The Times and other news outlets shape their stories to steer you to the opinion they want you to have.

When reading this type of ‘news’ critically, balance is the first thing you should look for. Here’s the formula: the articles report a scrap of actual news (e.g., the economy is booming), and then round up several “experts” to tell readers what to think about the news.

If the “expert” portion of the story is unbalanced, then you are reading propaganda, not news. Corporate media uses experts to publish its own opinions —its bias— while hiding in the bushes behind the carefully curated people who all magically agree with its perspective. By publishing a totally lopsided group of voices, the reporter hopes to fool the reader into assuming expert “consensus” exists— without ever having to explicitly make that dubious argument.

Assuming you are masochistic enough to consume corporate media’s articles, when reading this type of piece, always first ask: “do all the quoted sources agree with each other, and varying expert opinions are conspicuously absent?” If so, you can safely ignore all the quotes and focus just on the factual reporting of what actually happened.

Believe it or not, this kind of reporting is what is most responsible for killing legacy media and driving people to social media for news. On social media, folks actually find the diversity of voices and opinions that is lacking in contemporary corporate media. Even allowing for all the noise of misinformation, outright lies, silliness, and unintelligent commentary, Twitter’s “town square” beats whatever the Times is serving up.

At least the bias is obvious on Twitter/X, which is all anybody asked for anyway.

It would be trivially easy for big news publishers like the Times to give readers right-click access to quoted experts’ biographies, previous comments, publication history, and political donation records. But they don’t. Think about that. And think about the claim that publications like the Times allegedly exist to “inform” us.

I’m old enough to remember “the good old days” when the news would offer more than one set of expert opinions. Now they refer to people who disagree with the experts they’re pushing as “deniers”, “discredited”, “debunked” and so on. Recently a lawyer friend told me he could almost always find an expert who would support the position the lawyer was taking in his case. Seems that’s exactly what our “news” media does too.

The Fallacy of Mind Reading + The Ladder of Misinference

In his book Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America, Scott Adams (creator of the Dilbert cartoon series) says: “We humans think we are good judges of what others are thinking. We are not. In fact, we’re dreadful at it. But people being people, we generally believe we are good at it while also believing other people are not.” (I highly recommend Adams’ book.)

Today’s edition of Coffee & COVID newsletter provides a typical example of mind reading.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal defecated a hurt-feelings story headlined, “Alarm Spreads Among U.S. Allies Over Trump’s Demand for Greenland”

In short, the Journal’s ‘news’ article reported that Trump is being mean to European élites, again, and it is making them feel unsafe, again. “Europeans are afraid of Trump,” said Pascal Boniface, director of the Institute for International and Strategic Affairs, a think tank in Paris. The Journal’s inelegantly implied theme, or thrust, was that European leaders’ fear of Trump explains why they didn’t criticize the recent arrest of Venezuelan narco-terrorist Maduro.

This is journalistic misdirection, and I’ll tell you why. The Journal was imputing a motive (fear of Trump) on all European leaders, without admitting that it was editorializing, [NOTE: emphasis added] to diminish the significance of the leaders’ apparent agreement with the move and thereby prevent it from legitimizing Trump’s actions. They only went along because they were afraid, was the Journal’s implied argument, which was dressed up as ‘news.’

Mind reading is one of the most common cognitive errors I see in critical thinking and news reporting.

On a related topic Alex Edmans points out two other common errors in his excellent book May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases – And What We Can Do about It. As he says in the Introduction: 

We’ll take a deep dive into two psychological biases – confirmation bias and black-and-white thinking – that are the two biggest culprits in causing us to misinterpret information.

Edmans, professor of Finance at London Business School, introduces his Ladder of Misinference. This paragraph in the Introduction summarizes this ladder.

We accept a statement as fact, even if it’s not accurate – the information behind it may be unreliable and may even be misquoted in the first place. We accept a fact as data, even if it’s not representative but a hand-picked example – an exception that doesn’t prove the rule. We accept data as evidence, even if it’s not conclusive and many other interpretations exist. We accept evidence as proof, even if it’s not universal and doesn’t apply in other settings.

May Contain Lies takes a different approach than many of the books I’ve read on critical thinking. Those other books talk about common fallacies and cognitive biases. Edmans plows new ground by offering a new way of looking at statements and claims. Highly recommended!

Loserthink and May Contain Lies are two of my favorite books on critical thinking and being objective. They will help prevent us from falling into thinking traps.