Unlock a month’s worth of unlimited online and app access by subscribing today for free. And then we take the fateful step of believing it is, as opposed to calling it what it really is: a shameful attempt at manipulation.
#Unherd vaccine free#
We believe in free trade, hence, we want an EU-Japan deal to be true. The uncritical reception of the EU-Japan trade story is a good example of what psychologists refer to as confirmation bias, a tendency to filter out everything that is not consistent with our beliefs.
So at a time when fomerly-straight newspapers are invested in a line of argument – Trump evil! Brexit a calamity! – and distort the news to fit their agenda where can you go to find out the actual facts? As Munchau put it:. But many titles were so enraptured by the idea of the EU and Japan shafting Trump and Brexit that it was written up as a finished free-trade deal. In fact, it was a so-called ‘political agreement’, a staging post to a free-trade deal that may or may not arrive in two years’ time. Let’s take Wolfgang Munchau’s example: we read a fortnight ago that the EU and Japan had struck a free-trade deal. Or that the rest of Europe is surging ahead. And the people they liaise with in foreign capitals also read these titles (the New York Times very much included) and get the impression that Britain is falling apart. The titles who they’d normally look to for unbiased in-depth coverage, he said, are now fulminating against Brexit. He asked where his team is supposed to find unbiased news, a balanced report about Brexit. Last week, I spoke to a UK ambassador working in a major foreign capital. There is certainly a demand for in-depth, Brexit reporting from a non-hostile slant – conducted with the same resources that the FT and Economist are able to deploy. You can certainly see a herd mentality, which UnHerd explicitly defines itself against. This is a fascinating development in the industry. The proud declarations of Brexit bias from reporters, rather than commentators, is also new. The editorialisation of news has long affected political reporting on certain titles but not – until now – financial and economic reporting. This polarisation of debate, that happened in Scotland in 2014, is happening over economics now. To not just disagree with the other side, but to dismiss it as nonsensical – and probably malign. Accentuate the negative and eliminate the positive – or vice versa. But we’re in a strange stage of the debate, where people feel the need to gravitate to an extreme. It depends on how the government uses its greater powers. Brexit is the removal of a constraint: things could be better after we leave the EU or much worse. And the bias certainly exists on the other side: there are a great many writers who think Brexit means everything will be fine. The Daily Mail is one of the world’s most successful newspapers and it editorialises news. So if you read a p2 lead in the FT saying inflation will hit 4pc due to Brexit you learn to ignore it, assuming this is an outlying prediction chosen for its sensationalism. But nowadays the reader needs to adjust, to filter out the bias. As for the FT, I read it now more than I’ve ever done (and I used to be a financial journalist) it boasts several writers who are, on their own, worth a year’s subscription. Few have changed as successfully as The Economist – and it’s evolving now, in a way that is recruiting thousands of new subscribers. Fair enough: I suspect most of its readers see it the same way, and any publication exists to serve readers. The Economist, for example, makes no pretence at being unbiased: its correspondents happily declare that they ‘consider Brexit a national catastrophe’ and the endeavour is reported in that way. Brexit has had a profound effect on the reporting of finance, economics and foreign affairs. At a time when the anti-Brexit press is infected by what Wolfgang Munchau calls confirmation bias there’s a need for a more dispassionate analysis. He is a former Liberal Democrat donor and a Brexit backer – but, unlike the others, has not run away from the field. It has no paywall all articles will be free to read with the costs covered by an endowment from Sir Paul Marshall. UnHerd is also marked out by its financing model. The latest brainchild of Tim Montgomerie, founder of ConservativeHome, it has launched with a mission statement to ‘dive deep into the economic, technological and cultural challenges of our time’. Its launch blogs show a wide mix of subjects: a YouGov poll revealing the low regard with which the public view traditional news media, Peter Franklin on why we should get ready for Prime Minister Corbyn, James Bloodworth on the crash ten years on and Graeme Archer on how meat-eating may come to be seen as barbaric by our grandchildren. A new star is born today into the centre-right blogosphere: UnHerd.
0 kommentar(er)
