Thank you - this is something I do give a lot of thought.
No, I’m sorry, it’s absolutely a bad thing. Why? Because it’s propaganda. I’m not saying this lightly, mind you - it’s literally a well-known propaganda tactic. I know it best as the “chinese robber fallacy”, but given a large enough sample size, it is piss-easy to make any group look awful if you strip the context. You can do it to literally anyone - in fact the article opens with the example of cardiologists, and very aptly demonstrates how easy it is.
If you spend all day long searching for things that are bad or things that conservatives find disagreeable in academia, even if all you find is a few examples per day (the website only publishes a few articles per day), it’s easy to blow this up into what looks like a maelstrom of liberal bias everywhere in the country… Even if there are absolutely a similar number of things liberals find disagreeable in academia, you won’t hear about them, so it’ll sound like it’s only awful for conservatives. Even if most of these issues are overblown nonsense, and you’d expect a certain amount of things that piss conservatives off just as a baseline given that there are 5,300 colleges in the US and some 16 million college students.
You are not immune to propaganda, and this kind of narrative-building is not harmless. I mean, for crying out loud, you started this thread wondering about hypothetical abuse conservative students suffered at college. Numerous people within various colleges pointed out that that kind of discrimination is exceedingly unlikely, and I even offered a study that showed the same. So where did that pernicious, false idea about conservatives being the targets of discrimination on campus come from? Think on that one for a moment, and see if you can’t spot the serious cognitive dissonance here. You’re insisting that this form of propaganda is harmless… while very obviously being a victim of exactly this form of propaganda!
One more thing on this. Lots of people don’t read the alternate views. In fact, the right-wing media sphere explicitly tries to dissuade people from looking at alternative views, constantly slagging off any mainstream outlet as “liberal propaganda”, to the point where even trustworthy sites like Snopes aren’t accepted by many on the right. What do you reckon the odds are that the average Campus Review reader has seen that PSMag article I linked above? Or the Vox articles? Or this excellent Guardian article on political correctness? Or is it more likely that most of them get most of their news from other sites who are ideologically aligned with Campus Reform, and which get much of their funding from the same places?
(Actually, since the website uses Disqus comments, you can sorta check this. Look into some of the commentors, click on their names, and it’ll show you their Disqus profiles, as well as their five most-visited sites. I clicked through some five, and the most common sites I saw were “Daily Caller”, “Breitbart”, and “Gateway Pundit”, all of which are hard-right propaganda pages with long records of lies and mistruths.)
I actually didn’t say anything about liberal newspaper columnists bringing attention to liberal campus bias. In fact, any liberal newspaper columnist who goes out of their way to bring more attention to this psyop is doing their readers a disservice, because it is already completely overblown at every conceivable level (cough Johnathan Chait :mad: cough).
But the complaint that it’s not done “on the front page” is both unproven and nonsensical. Look at the recent output of Campus Reform. Which of those articles do you think is front page news? And what would you bump from, say, today’s edition of the new york times to make room for it? Maybe we could push that article about Biden being unclear why he’s running for president off to make room for a piece about how a university is counseling its students to be careful about fake news on an important scientific issue. Maybe we could shift the scuba trip fire that killed 20 to page A3 to talk about how GWU is changing its mascot. :rolleyes: And today isn’t exactly a huge news day, either.
Most of what Campus Reform publishes is vacuous crap, barely even relevant enough to make the local news. It doesn’t belong on the front page, any more than my personal grievances of the trains being late belong on the front page of the Süddeutsche Zeitung. But when you’re a propaganda outlet that exists to make universities look bad and biased, that’s most of what you’ll end up with - vacuous bullshit.
