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.
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