#GlennLoury's new memoir will be published tomorrow! I've been waiting years, listening to him recount anecdotes as he's worked on the book. Quite the life he's led, going from the South Side of Chicago to youngest member of the Harvard Economics Department, offered a position in the Reagan Administration and author of a book opposing mass incarceration...
There's nobody controlling mainstream media, but the incentives are corporate. While they rarely lie and have the budgets and connections to do better work than others, the people that work there are chosen for their worldview. And they can be fired. It biases which subjects get covered and how. Any mistakes made tend to be universal. That they are so dominant in reach therefore biases the entire public to a degree. The public must have more say but also be more responsible in what it demands.
"The deepest insight for understanding the lenses people use to understand the world comes from Arnold Kling in his superb, concise book, The Three Languages of Politics. Simple idea. Liberals see the world as a struggle between oppressor and oppressed. Conservatives see the world as a struggle between civilization and barbarism. Libertarians see the world as a struggle between government coercion and personal liberty."
In the essay linked to above, #RussRoberts explains how outsiders perceive the present war between #Israel and #Hamas based on the first two narratives.
Below is a link to another essay he's written, about what it was like for him to be in Israel when Hamas attacked.
"The siren soon stopped its nagging, whining cry and we returned home. I went to services. A friend there told me a terrible rumor. That we had been attacked by Hamas from Gaza and that five people had been kidnapped. Israel has a bad history of kidnappings by its enemies. Google “Gilad Shalit” and you will learn that Israel goes crazy when a single soldier is a captive. Five people? We both shuddered."