Media Bias - The Joe Rogan Experience

Hello freak bitches. I feel like we're in a very different space now with the consequences of misinformation. We certainly are. Do you think that they're connected to what we were talking about before where you said that people would rather be electrocuted than to be alone with their thoughts? That we have gotten to this weird place with our society, with our civilization, where we've made things so easy. We've made people so soft, so dependent upon technology. We've slotted out these paths, these predetermined patterns of behavior for people to follow, where they can just sort of plug into a philosophy, whether it's a right wing one or a left wing one with very little room for personal thought at all. Very, very little room for objective reasoning. We sort of made it easy. We babied them. I do think that it's imperative if you want to be a good citizen to have a varied media diet. You're not going to have a clear view of the world. If all you're reading is bright part, more than New York Times. I think you have nothing against the New York Times or bright part, but I think you need to read many things and follow many different sorts of people on Twitter, not just because you want to troll them, but because you actually want to listen to what they have to say and take it seriously. Well, the New York Times really fucked up. What they really fucked up is where they said that they're going to, after the election, they're going to rededicate themselves to reporting the truth and read like, what? Why did you say that? I wish I was there. I wish I was in the office. Why? That just sends the wrong message. Well, I didn't say they weren't into the truth before. Yes. Well, it says they're biased. They fucked up. I mean, like, the truth is they were biased. Yes, you're right. The thing is the enemy is, was so grotesque in this case that it was impossible to not have been biased seemed an abdication of responsibility. I feel it myself. Everything I say against Trump from a Trump person sounds like mere partisan bias. I mean, I've got zero connection to the Democratic Party or to... I mean, there's no partisan bias. I mean, 100% of what I want to say about Trump does not apply to some other Republican who is just stands for things that I don't... Policies I might not like. It's a completely unique circumstance. And yeah, so it's true that to read the New York Times for the longest time, it was reading like just the entire thing had become the opinion page on the Huffington Post or something. Yeah. I just feel like at this stage of our society, there's real consequences to the infantilization, if that's actually a word, of human beings in our culture. We've made it very easy to just go to work and just get home and watch television and just not pay attention to anything and not read anything and not really think and then be manipulated. I mean, I think it's incredibly easy to manipulate people, especially people that are aware that they don't have a varied media diet, people that are aware that they don't have a real sense of the word. And it seems daunting to try to take into consideration like what is involved in foreign policy? What is involved in dealing with Russia? What is involved? How do you negotiate with North Korea? Fuck, it's too much. Put it in the hands of the strong man. I think this is true on both sides of the spectrum though. Because I think we've got folks who slot into just a media diet where they're just hearing things on the left and they're not curious about or I guess just not curious enough to hear things from a different perspective unless it's just some right wing palooka who comes on and then they beat them up. So I really do think, and I think it places, and this is going to be a self-serving argument, but I do think it places increasing importance on media outlets like the one for which I work to be really vigilant about being seen as fair arbiters of fact. Yeah, I mean, I think the consequences have never been greater for that. Absolutely. The reason that so many people on the right, so many Trump supporters feel like they're right is because it has been proven that the media was biased and that they did get it all wrong and they were absolutely wrong when it came to who was going to win. I mean, the Huffington Post had some ridiculous thing where it was the night of the election they said that Hillary had like a 98% chance of winning or something crazy like that. Well, I think, yeah, there were some polls that were bad, but the poll, like, because I remember this because I sent out a tweet which said, like, you know, bye-bye Donald or something like that, you know, the day of. But when I did that, I mean, that wasn't a prediction. The polls that I was going by that most people were going by at that point, it was like 80-20, you know, or at best 75-25 that she was going to win. Now that's not, I mean, you roll dice for a few minutes, you realize 20% chance comes up a lot. Absolutely. That's not infinitesimal odds. Plus Florida. Yeah. But so, but well, you should, you should tell the story about what it was like to anchor the broadcast. Yeah. So I was anchoring the ABC News digital coverage that night. And you know, we, they, they give you the exit polling. You're not supposed to report it publicly, but the exit polling that we were seeing before we went on the air late in the day really made it seem like it was going to be a Clinton landslide. You know, you have all these folks who say, look at the crestfallen faces of the journalists because they're so upset that Trump won. Certainly, that was not the case for the folks on my set. It was that, it was that we didn't see it coming. We weren't prepared for it. Everything that we're seeing in terms of the math made it look like this was a Clinton victory, a shoe in. It was just about just tying a ribbon around it. So when the night became long, there was just confusion about what was going on. How did they get it so wrong? You know, it's, I think it actually goes back to what Sam was saying before that people think when you see numbers like 70% odds that Clinton's going to win, 80% odds that Clinton's going to win that she's definitely going to win. But there's room there for Trump to win. A lot of room. Yeah, a lot of room there for Trump to win. 20% comes up all the time. It's Russian roulette. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, those are bad. If it's Russian roulette, those are bad odds, right? You're not going to take that. You're not going to put one bullet, a single bullet in a five chamber gun and spin it. Yeah. No, that's deer hunter. That's really good odds. I don't think so. It's so much about blaming the polls as it was blaming the overall tenor of the coverage, which made it seem like Clinton was inevitable. Yeah. Yeah. It was so shocking. That's a hit. I think that we can and should take. Yeah. We definitely, you know, I think we weren't giving the 20% or 30% chance a serious enough look. Yeah.