Right From the Source (The Abdication of Cognition: Part III)
(This is the third post of the Abdication of Cognition series, wherein I detail the irrational thought patterns that I see being used within the MAGA movement.)
Before you can begin debating interpretations of the things that happen in the world, you need, at the barest of minimums, to establish the concrete, objective, observable events themselves. No deeper discussion can take place about an event unless all parties agree at the outset on the facts related to it. This is obvious; it was not possible, for example, to debate the appropriate response to the Sandy Hook shooting with the subset of Republicans who denied that it ever actually happened1. In a perfect world, there would be little question as to the veracity of the things we see, hear, or read in the media, but this blog wouldn't even exist in a perfect world.
One of the many pernicious effects of fake news is that its mere existence provides an easy out for people who want to deny news that is decidedly not fake. Under the guise of "doing one's own research" and "thinking independently," the simultaneously overly credulous and myopically hubristic have free reign to zealously scan any source of information for any conceivable reason to discredit it. For V, the pseudonymous close associate I occasionally discuss politics with, the preferred criterion for dismissing a source is "bias." Not that I can pin the fault for this entirely on her; for many people of every political persuasion, "bias" might as well be synonymous with "malice" or "inaccuracy." This conflation is understandable, to a certain extent, but, for reasons I will explain later, the presence of bias within a source ought not be treated as definitive proof that it is untrustworthy.
What sort of things stand out to V and lead her to perceive bias? The answer is, at once, anything and nothing, because the standard is not applied with consistency. V will declare an article from a mainstream news outlet to be biased and not worth consideration if she perceives that it, its parent company, its sources of funding, its headlines, or its average viewer are Left-leaning. Meanwhile, any Right-leaning (or, even better, pro-Trump) slant is interpreted as evidence that the source is objective, factual, intellectually rigorous, and trustworthy2. There is no room for consideration about journalistic integrity or third-party analysis as ways to discover how trustworthy a source might be, nor is there any actual effort to judge an article based on its own content. An article constructed entirely by AI or riddled with typos and grammatical errors, sourced from LibtardsSuckBalls.xyz, is weighted equally to an article from a respected, longstanding publication with verifiable sources3. The only thing that matters when determining the trustworthiness of a source is how deferential it is to President Trump. Any potential weak link in the verifiability of a Left-leaning source is scrutinized (though never hard enough to determine if it passes muster), while the same is casually waved away for a Right-leaning source. For example, if a Liberal think tank has come within five degrees of funding a publication, it is the sort of fake news that Trump has been warning his flock about, while a blog whose news consists only of references to tweets and to the work of other, more prestigious organizations is beyond reproach if it is funded proudly and directly by an explicitly Right-leaning think tank. Any consideration beyond whether a source adheres to V's preexisting beliefs is irrelevant when it suits with her but absolutely damning when it doesn't. This asymmetry, when acknowledged at all, is justified as merely incidental to the fact that all of the sources which agree with her just so happen to be the ones which are "unbiased" and factual. (Occasionally she'll go a step further and insist that, because all of the trustworthy sources are those which align with her, it must therefore be the case that her convictions are the correct ones. The circular nature of this reasoning is not acknowledged.)
Essentially, the idea of bias becomes a scapegoat to justify dismissing sources she wants to believe are illegitimate, and also an inerrantly self-serving tool she can use to demonstrate the validity of those she prefers. It's a quintessential "heads I win, tails you lose" situation, except instead of picking teams at recess, it's used to shape her entire worldview.
Of course, I am obliged to admit that there are plenty of sources which are legitimately biased against Trump4. If one accepts the notion that a source being biased at all is grounds to dismiss it entirely, the intellectually honest reader must write off virtually, perhaps literally, every single source that has ever existed and could ever exist. Bias can shine through in your editorial decisions even when you try not to let it. If you treat its presence as a clear-cut boolean between "trustworthy" and "untrustworthy," you place yourself in a nightmarish dystopian hellscape of unwavering ignorance and absolute ideological relativism, where every claim and idea is equally as valid as any other. Until America's dwindling literacy rates and the proliferation of corporate AI slop finish that job for us, we should at least attempt to reclaim our capability of discernment.
To put it less glibly, the fact that a source is biased does not in and of itself render it untrustworthy. For example, we would consider it understandable, perhaps even preferable, for a news article about a child molester to be biased in favor of the notion that child molestation is bad, or for a book about the Holocaust to take a hardline stance against such atrocities ever happening again. Provided that such bias doesn't begin to cloud the information being presented with redundant moralizing, its mere presence doesn't indicate that we ought to immediately dismiss something, and, in fact, might well be judged as an indication that its source is conducting itself appropriately5. Therefore, if bias at all is not sufficient to dismiss a source, we must ascertain what level of bias we find acceptable. It is here that truth sets us free: We are now open to judging a source on its merits, taking into consideration all relevant factors and taking care to formulate our view of the world with only the best, most accurate information.
And if the best, most accurate information leads one to MAGA, then such is life, and I can scarcely call foul. But it doesn't appear to me that it often does.
Information about the shooting; information about its denialists.↩
This way of thinking pervades almost every subject for V. She once asserted, in a discussion about a mutual friend opting to purchase an electric car, that anyone who concludes that electric cars are a good decision under any circumstance have obviously not done enough research. For V, the Venn diagram of objective truth and her current beliefs is just a circle.↩
As it stands, one domain registrar I checked is offering www.LibtardsSuckBalls.xyz for only 99 cents the first year, in case any enterprising MAGA folk are looking for a new self-hosted home.↩
Quite some time ago I stopped using bias as a proxy to judge legitimacy, and now use it only as something to take into consideration. There is no reason why LibtardsSuckBalls.xyz couldn't, in theory, present a factually foolproof and rationally slam-dunk argument, but, for obvious reasons, someone searching for such an argument would be wiser to look elsewhere first.↩
One can imagine the satirical headline—"Child molestation: Good or bad? It's up to YOU!"↩