A Rant About Punditry, Propaganda, and the Cost of Misinformation About Society

The airwaves, and the Web, obviously feature lots of people offering their opinions on what's wrong with society, what causes social problems, and how to solve social problems like poverty and gun violence. 

Do these popular television commentators, YouTubers, and radio hosts know what they are talking about? Do they care? Does it matter? No, no it doesn't. The reason is simply that they are peddling misinformation and lies. It does not matter if they know what they are doing, or not. 

What matters is they are polluting the airwaves or the web with ignorance, pseudoscience, and propaganda. This is why we should not engage with trashy "analysts" and "commentators" whether on the Left or the Right. Doing so gives these people increased engagement. They like this because it affects their ad revenue. Many of these "analysts" exist only to make money by selling ads. It was true in the glory days of conservative talk radio and it is true in the glory days of online content creation. 

What's the Problem?

Let's go back to the issues of intellectual dishonesty and intellectual laziness. Which prominent vloggers, podcasters, television pundits, and radio personalities are guilty of each. Most of them are probably guilty of both laziness and dishonesty at different times. But, that is fine. Why?

Why do their programs exist? Education is not the reason. They are not trying to share reliable data and expert analysis so you can understand the debate over guns or immigration or whatever. The point is almost always to keep their audience listening, so advertising time becomes worth more money. Their real job is not to inform but to engage. 

Consequences

How much time have you spent watching X or Y to understand their views or the views of the "other side" in the past year? Arguably, all of that time was wasted. You could have learned about the issue from real sources. Whether the pundits were going on about gun control, climate change, violent crime, illegal immigration, or the Democrats' socialist agenda (which is not something that exists in the real world) you could have learned real things in less time by studying mainstream sources. 

The Futility of Online Engagement

There is little or nothing to be gained by commenting on the videos or Tweeting at them and challenging comments. This is necessarily true for two reasons, one kind of obvious and one not obvious at all. 

First of all, you don't know how well the comments represent the opinions or knowledge of the mainstream. Who comments on these videos and articles? It is hard to know how many of these people are trolls, how many are idiots, and how many are fanatics who miss no opportunity to opine. You see kooks from the Left and the Right chiming in. There are both liberal and conservative equivalents of Young Earth Creationists and Flat Earthers. 

The second problem we face is related to the first one. Do the people who weigh in represent anyone other than the lunatic fringe or the loudest and dumbest segment? You can't possibly know. It would take some savvy research to find out how far off the mainstream the comments have really meandered. 

The more contentious the issue, the more caution is warranted when reading the comments. You might come away from the comments section of an article on gun control believing that most conservatives are fanatics, or most liberals are fanatics. In fact, you've read the comments of a few percent of people who read the article. You may have subconsciously filtered out some neutral comments or some thoughtful pro-gun comments as well.

Fighting Back

If you want to fight the tide of intellectual dishonesty or laziness amongst the pundit class, I am afraid there are no good options. Boycotting their advertisers and writing to tell them why you did that, is a realistic option. 

If you have the resources and skills, start your own podcast and teach people how to think effectively about social issues or climate change, or making good social policy or whatever. Pick a niche and run with it. 

Comment on blog posts and news articles. Here, without much time or trouble, you can share facts or an alternative explanation that's backed up by experts. Point to peer-reviewed research that contradicts the propaganda. Share a lesson on cause-effect thinking or statistical thinking or whatever fits the article or video in question. 

Save Time, Save Trouble

In short, stay away from pundits' shows unless you want some politically-themed entertainment. You might learn a few things about the "other" side but it is important to put realistic limits on what you can learn. 

If you want to know what "the other side" thinks about gun control, look at research from Pew and Gallup. If you want to know about crime and race or crime and guns, look to the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control. 

The Big Picture: Strategies They Use to Confuse

This post builds on my introduction to the topic of propaganda by going into a bit more detail on the sociological and psychological forces that brought us QAnon, All Lives Matter, and more. Settle in and think about what you've read about social problems like immigration, climate change, and violent crime. 

Got it?

Our Minds Work Against Us

We like to think of ourselves as rational and independent thinkers largely unburdened by nonsense, superstition, and silliness. This is not true. Sorry. Our minds lead us astray in several ways. There is really far too much psychological research to even summarize in a couple of posts, but there a few concepts in psychology that can be super useful in understanding how and why we misunderstand social problems. You may recognize some of these so-called cognitive biases from other things you've heard or read. 

Confirmation Bias - We like to think of ourselves and rational and perceptive people guided by logic and common sense. Common sense is not a useful concept but never mind. What really happens is that we tend to hold positions based on habit, emotion, and personal experience. Then we try to reinforce those positions by looking for evidence that our hard-core attitude toward illegal immigration is correct, for example. 

The Recency Effect - Things you experienced or learned about recently tend to loom larger in our minds than things further in the past. Something you learned about the effectiveness of gun control weeks ago, might be overshadowed by a case of a homeowner defending himself from armed intruders a couple of nights before. 

So, yeah, those cognitive biases are more than abstract concepts psychologists talk about to make themselves feel important. 

Other People Work Against

I've mentioned availability entrepreneurs in other blog posts. To review, an availability entrepreneur is an activist, vlogger, talk show host who focuses on making sure his or her audience is aware of certain behaviors that paint a certain picture that appeals to the audience. Conservatives share stories of feminists or environmentalists or Blacks behaving badly. Liberals share information on gun owners accidentally shooting the wrong people, Trump supporters being nasty, and so on. 

These things don't paint an honest and accurate picture of reality. Rather, a steady stream of those stories just reinforces whatever worldview or perspective the availability entrepreneur wants to present. If you are already biased in the direction of thinking gun owners are cavemen or Blacks are less evolved than Whites, then these stories tend to stick. This is how belief bias works. Belief bias is like the smug intellectual cousin of confirmation bias. 

Politicians are good at oversimplifying and misrepresenting. 

The straw man or woman gets dragged out at every debate and in almost every online discussion. Conservatives attack a non-existent liberal plan to ban guns. Liberals attack a nonexistent conservative plan to end all regulations on gun ownership. Neither side really has the claimed position. Liberals don't want to ban all guns or pay for ALL abortions with tax money. Conservatives don't really want to end environmental regulations or destroy unions. But, attacking straw men is easier than attacking real arguments. 

Moving the Goalposts - Most of us have done this and all of us had this done to us more than once over the years. 

Social Forces Work Against Us

Pundits online, on the radio, and on television tend to be rewarded for keeping people tuned in. The more attention they get, the more money their networks can charge for advertising. If you support your YouTube "news" channel with ad revenue, you are going to work hard on getting attention. Sorry to say, but getting lots of attention is antithetical to sharing valuable information and analysis. 

Modern life keeps people busy. This is not a criticism of the modern world. We get tons of benefits from our technologically advanced, capitalist society. We also have less time than we might like for thinking about things and researching things. We naturally look for shortcuts. Sometimes those shortcuts mislead us. 

How to Protect Your Mind, An Introduction

The political sphere is full of nonsense and deliberate obfuscation. This is the first of a series of posts that focus on, well, on propaganda. Not on how it works or why the MSM is propaganda or anything like that. This series is about the ways that politicians and pundits mislead people with a variety of shady tricks. 

Beware of Availability Entrepreneurs

For every issue, there are groups on both sides misrepresenting the opposition and elevating marginal voices to where they seem to represent mainstream views. 

These people are called availability entrepreneurs. They are the dope dealers, "get rich quick" hucksters, and law of attraction kooks for the social world. They feed us what we want to hear and give us evidence that:

• gun control causes crime
• the patriarchy sucks
• feminists are stupid
• liberals hate America

Many people buy these lies and misrepresentations because they don't know how to spot the lies and misrepresentations. Many people, for example, don't know there is a difference between a theory in science and a theory in common usage. Many people don't know how to use rates, proportions, and statistics to understand a social problem. 

Internet Comments Teach Us About...Not Much

I don' know who needs to hear this...but Internet comments are not a valid survey of public opinion. It can be tempting to read comments and conclude Republicans are evil or Democrats are stupid. Insert the group of your choice there, and nothing changes. You can't learn anything about a group by reading some comments on a news story.

The comments on political stories and questions and videos are mostly nonsensical ranting and raving. You have no idea if the posts are from mainstream conservatives or liberals or feminists or gun owners. You just get the views of people who could be bothered to stay on that page and opine. 

It gets worse. Others will jump into the discussion and pretend we've learned about the "liberal views" or the "Republican view" when we really only know the opinions of people who bothered to share. And we have to assume they are honest to even say that. Some people are trolling. 

Principles and Practices:

Pretend to confuse cause and effect. Never assume anyone with a college degree is confused about how this works. They are hustling you to get your money. Just because X happened and then Y happened, don't believe that X caused Y or had anything to do with Y. The cause and effect relationship has to be established with some additional data, and logic. Anyone who skips over either of those things is trying to pick your pockets. 

Boiling down a continuum to this or that...Let's go back to gun control. How many liberals want to take all of the guns? How many conservatives think all gun control laws violate the Constitution? In both cases, the answer is the same - very few. Let's see why. 

Polling organizations have asked dozens of gun control questions, at least, and just in the past 20 years. What have these researchers found? That liberals hate guns and conservatives love the Second Amendment? No! Let's look at some relevant examples: 

An April 2021 Pew Research poll found that 20% of people who are Republican or lean Republican want existing gun laws to be more strict, in contrast to 81% of respondents who are Democrats or lean Democratic. 

An October 2019 survey found that over 90% of Republicans AND Democrats want to make it harder for people with mental illnesses to get guns. 

If you do a Google search on "gun control" and "Pew" or "Gallup" you will find other studies that show a variety of opinions by political orientation. You will almost certainly find predictable differences between Republicans and Democrats. What you won't find is widespread support for the idea that liberals are coming for all of the guns. 

"But, you see all these quotes from liberal politicians like Pelosi and Schumer." No, you don't. This is a dishonest hustle that activist on the Right and the Left use to confuse people. You can string together a series of quotes from politicians over X number of years to "prove" almost anything. I could use this trick to "prove" that Republicans want to ban atheism. Of course, this would be utter nonsense, and if you are a smart conservative, you will recognize it as utter nonsense. 

Now, try the same logic when someone tries to con you with a list of "crazy shit" gun grabbers say. Have enough respect for yourself to tune out these messages. Don't watch these hustlers on TV and don't listen to their shows or YouTube videos. 

So, there isn't a huge gulf between conservative and liberal Americans. You are going to find a similar phenomenon on abortion, college, same-sex marriage, and other issues. Don't take my word for it - that's one of the big problems we have today, people just nod and go along with people who tell them what they want to hear. 

Abusing Fact and Logic to Sell Lies

Politicians and pundits have many techniques for selling bad ideas and spreading misunderstanding about, well, all sorts of things that I described previously. Dishonest politicians, but I repeat myself, have a variety of techniques they use. 

Decision Science Abuse - We can use two different criteria for making decisions about our own actions and about things like gun control policy. We can focus on the values or the moral principles at stake. Or, we can consider the consequences of our decision, and decide whether those consequences are acceptable. Most people operate on a combination of consequences and moral principles when making decisions. 

Do we ban abortion? Assuming this was possible, should it be done? Did your answer come from an abstract principle or from considering the likely consequences of banning abortion. 

Statistics Abuse - Pretending to not know about rates, percentages, means, and medians. Abusing terms like "theory" as in "I have a theory that liberals hate rich people because they keep trying to raise taxes." A real theory would help us predict what people will say about various social issues, based on their answers to some carefully selected and thoroughly tested questions about their political orientation. 

Change the subject, usually by saying "What I know is..." followed by something irrelevant.

Overemphasis on extreme behavior and making it look mainstream. A woman with shaved head and nose ring yells about taking the guns and gets famous on the right-wing Web. An articulate, conventional-looking Leftist female explains why we need red flag laws, and she gets very little attention. Why? It helps conservative pundits keep their audience hooked. 

But for...We would have the best school system in the world, but for certain urban school districts. Drawing an imaginary line around groups or areas you'd rather not talk about does not make them go away. Impoverished, underperforming school districts exist in the United States regardless of some political hack's wish they were in another country.

So, I hope you appreciated this little preview of our own thinking, and our lovely "influencers" undermine our ability to think about social problems. If you do, please subscribe and comment. I plan to delve deeply into every area mentioned here, and some more. 

Thinking About Guns, VIolence, and Gun Control

 More mass shootings have made the news in the USA. As usual, those events kicked off a flurry of activity on social media. This happens every time a mass shooting happens. 

Every time it happens, the same bad arguments and dishonest claims emerge. We're told that the Democrats want to ban guns, probably so they can enslave the population. We are told that Republicans don't care about people getting murdered. Second Amendment absolutists say we have too many gun laws as it is. Some people demand a ban on assault rifles (whatever they are) right now before this happens again. Gun rights advocates make numerous questionable claims. Gun control advocates fixate on mass shootings instead of on violent crime. 

Gun Control Arguments - Bad and Dishonest Overall:

Gun control opponents want to make guns look as unimportant as possible. Is it because access to guns is not that important? Or, do gun control opponents change the subject knowing they are misleading people? Hard to say, though the smart money says that "influencers" in the gun rights space know exactly what they are doing. They discount gun violence in three ways. 

• Suicide - Most people who commit suicide with guns will find another way. We know this isn't true. We also know that guns are far more effective than other means of suicide. The more guns in circulation, the higher the suicide rate is likely to be. 
• Accidents - Responsible gun owners are responsible, right up until they accidentally shoot someone, or themselves. The more guns in circulation, the more accidents there will be. 
• Murder - "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." You can't kill someone with a gun, you can only shoot them, or try to shoot them. Most gunshot victims live. But a gunshot wound is more likely to kill you than a stab wound or a whack on the head with a steel pipe. Gun control opponents minimize the value of having a gun, if you want to murder people, by pointing out that murders will just use knives, or sticks, or cars. 

If you read social media, you will learn that gun violence isn't that serious in the United States, because stats on fatal shootings include suicides and accidents, and most of the homicides are just gang-bangers killing each other. 

Banning Guns or What?

No one cares that much about banning guns. A ban on handguns or assault weapons or whatever is just one approach to a goal. What is the goal? Without getting into loaded political rhetoric, the goal is to get dangerous weapons off the streets. Almost every news story, news commentary, and blog post focuses on banning guns. Sometimes, writers and pundits talking about the government buying weapons. 

However, the default approach to banning handguns or assault weapons seems to be a ban. Ban people from buying, selling, or otherwise transferring them after a given date. That doesn't help with all of the legal guns and illegal guns on the streets. Offering to buy the guns can work, but not really. Logic dictates that criminals won't accept the "no questions asked" offer. You'll mostly collect old pistols that hardly shoot anymore, and some shotgun a hunter left to his wife when he died. 

Many legal gun owners will realize the low-ball offer isn't worth it. If I had a Bushmaster rifle in excellent condition, I would probably not sell it for $600. Would you?

Other gun owners insist that they need a gun for protection. Sometimes gun owners say they need guns for defense against tyranny. That argument is way beyond the scope of this little essay, so let's look at self-defense in more detail. Please don hip waders if you have them because the stuff is about to get deep. 

The Risks and Benefits of  Self Defense:

Law-abiding citizens use guns to defend themselves or other people thousands of times a day. Right? Well, no one knows. This might be a deliberate effort to muddy the waters. If we don't know how often people use guns for self-defense, we can't have an intelligent discussion about the issue. Experts have studied this topic and reached a range of conclusions. 

In order for a gun to be useful in self-defense, it seems like three conditions need to be met:

1. The gun has to be readily available when needed. 

2. The owner has to be somewhat proficient in using the gun. 

3. This logically follows from #2, but you must be able to carry the gun in most places. 

Points one and two in particular raise some issues. In the first place, safe gun storage is important. But a gun that is secured isn't easy to access in the event of a home invasion. If the gun is easy to access and loaded, then it introduces new risks into the home. The most obvious risk is that someone will accidentally shoot themselves or someone else. The second risk is that someone will intentionally kill themselves. 

Gun control opponents like to say that a person bent on suicide will do something else if they can't get a gun. That might not be true. A Harvard University study illustrates this point. The researchers compared 15 states, grouped into low gun ownership and high gun ownership states found that suicides were much more common in high gun ownership states. The two groups had comparable populations, 39 million versus 40 million, so population alone can't explain much. 

However, the relationship between gun ownership rates and suicide rates may be an illusion. Something that influences both suicidal thinking AND gun ownership may be at work. The authors of the Harvard study mentioned differences between rural and urban mindsets to explain why there is a difference in suicide rates. So, the availability of guns may not be the only important variable. Like most any social problem, then, there are several variables at work. 

What about self-defense though? Isn't it common? Well, here's the problem. No one knows what "common" means. And, is there a standard definition of what legal self-defense is? We can try to conduct email surveys or mail surveys or something, but survey research raises many issues. Here are a few:

1. Will people lie about owning guns, for fear of unwanted attention from authorities or just because it is nobody's business if they have guns?

2. If the person is not permitted to own a gun, and use one in self-defense, should it count?

3. If the individual was illegally carrying a concealed firearm and use it to defend yourself, does it count?

4. If someone pulls a gun to diffuse a violent confrontation that THEY STARTED, should that count?

5. You hear noise and possibly whispers outside. You loudly announce that you're getting your shotgun, and the noise stops. Does that count?

6. Dave shoots an aggressive dog that rushed him and tried to bite. Does this count?

Research on defensive gun use produces varying statistics. One report has it happening a few thousand times A DAY. Other studies yield smaller numbers. A review study from Harvard School of Public Health suggests that defensive gun use is often illegal or socially undesirable. Real cases of citizens lawfully defending themselves or others appear to be rather rare. (Read all about it: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-threats-and-self-defense-gun-use-2/). 

Alternatives to Tougher Gun Control Laws:

If we can't have more gun control, how can we make society safer? Both sides of the gun control debate offer some alternatives. 

1. Background Checks - Most firearm transfers (gifts and sales) have to go through a federal background check system now. The problem here is that some dishonest people will buy a gun legally and then transfer it to someone who is not allowed to own a gun. 
2. More Gun Carriers - All states allow adult citizens to carry guns either openly or concealed. Concealed carry laws, we're told, make a place safer because criminals never know if they'll be confronting an armed citizen. 
3. More Law Enforcement - Spend more money preventing gun crimes. Put violent criminals behind bars for a long time. Don't let anyone get a violent felony reduced to a serious misdemeanor through plea bargaining or some other maneuver. 
4. Moral Awakening - Several arguments around morals, ethics training, and religious faith come up. Someone needs to describe how this would work, what would be done, how we know their version of a moral awakening would work, and why their "program" is a good idea. 
5. Health Care - Mental health and substance abuse contribute to a fair amount of violent crime. The cure might be to provide more counseling or treatment services. How would people pay? Gun control opponents might say we need more mental health care without saying how it would be paid for. And money aside, how do you compel an adult to get help? 

All of those steps might help, a little. So would restricting access to guns. 

Violence is a Tough Issue:

This should be obvious, but many on both ends of the political spectrum seem to ignore that. Instead, they talk about simple solutions that are anti-gun or pro-gun. We need more people carrying guns. We need to ban "weapons of war" so that gun violence declines. Both arguments have major issues, issues which I hope you understand a little better after reading this summary article. 

(Footnote: Many arguments against gun control are out there on the Web. Many of the arguments are so dumb that I don't want to waste your time describing them here.)