Episode 223 Scott Adams - How Opinions Get Assigned to You. Whiteboard!
Factual reporting versus opinion-creating reporting How the MSM assigns their opinions to you Separating the event from opinions about the event ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I fund my Periscopes and podcasts via audience micro-donations on Patreon. I prefer this method over accepting advertisements or working for a "boss" somewhere because it keeps my voice independent. No one owns me, and that is rare. I'm trying in my own way to make the world a better place, and your contributions help me stay inspired to do that. See all of my Periscope videos here… https://www.pscp.tv/ScottAdamsSays/1nAKERDOwylGL Find my WhenHub Interface app here… https://interface.whenhub.com
Then a pom-pom-pom-pom-pom. Well, I'm looking a little overexposed, both literally and figuratively, but I wanted to come on here and give you a whiteboard talk about one of my favorite topics: persuasion, and how it's affecting how we see the world. And specifically we're going to talk about how yo…
View segment →Here's what I'm watching, and it might be a difference between someone who is trained in persuasion versus people who are not. The way reality is being presented to you is that there are events that happen in the world and then people look at those events and they form opinions. That's how the world…
View segment →Now how does that really make a difference in the real world? What I'm watching is that the opinion makers are changing the events to turn you into the belief — and now I'm going to say "you" in this case is the anti-Trumpers, so I'm talking about the anti-Trump part of the world — to believe that t…
View segment →I'm going to take you through some hypothetical situations in which imagine that the stories about the president were reported just factually. Just factually. Take for example, let's go all the way back to the housing discrimination story from the '70s. Here's a factual way to report that. We don't…
View segment →All right, so here's my point. When I'm looking at the news I'm watching the news media assign people the opinion that Trump is a racist and then blaming Trump for that assignment which wasn't anything he did. I believe that if people simply watched — let's say there was no punditry, let's say all…
View segment →All right, what's happening is people are assigning opinions and you pick your tribe and then you take your opinion. Now I know what you're thinking. You're thinking I'm talking about other people. And maybe that's true. I'm sure there are plenty of people on this Periscope watching this who are no…
View segment →Now if somebody said employment — so black unemployment is great and black business creation, business ownership is up and that's great — but those are really sort of continuations of a trend. They have more to do with just economics and a good economy. They're not really about whether race relation…
View segment →Then a pom-pom-pom-pom-pom. Well, I'm looking a little overexposed, both literally and figuratively, but I wanted to come on here and give you a whiteboard talk about one of my favorite topics: persuasion, and how it's affecting how we see the world. And specifically we're going to talk about how you get your opinions.
I'll wait till we get a thousand and then we're gonna jump right into it. Now we haven't done the simultaneous sip on this one because I did that already this morning, so we're going to do a whiteboard talk in a moment. All right, I think we have enough people now.
Here's what I'm watching, and it might be a difference between someone who is trained in persuasion versus people who are not. The way reality is being presented to you is that there are events that happen in the world and then people look at those events and they form opinions. That's how the world is presented to you. That's how the news organizations present it to you. It's how you probably imagine the world: there are events, we observe the events, and then we form opinions.
In my filter of reality, nothing like that is happening. That is not happening. Let me give you my filter on it and then you can compare it to the one you have and see which one you like.
In my world there's a news event — and just to make it fun let's talk about President Trump causing the news event — then there's the news media and social media. This is what I call the opinion creation phase. In other words, people who are not you are framing it. They're changing the context. They're putting the pundits on it. They're putting emphasis here or there, sometimes leaving things out. Sometimes the facts are just wrong. But this is the phase where the opinions are created.
And then once these opinions are created, you, the poor consumer, looks at your favored sources. Probably the left is looking mostly at the stuff from the left. The right is looking at mostly news sources and social media on the right. And we get our opinions from this stuff. Now some of you might also be on social media — obviously you are if you're watching this — but in general it's this phase that assigns you the opinion.
I know that you don't want to believe that about yourself, but you certainly believe it about those other people. "They're not doing their thinking. They're not doing their homework. They must be getting their opinions from TV." My view is that that's a universal truth. The television is giving you your opinions.
Now how does that really make a difference in the real world? What I'm watching is that the opinion makers are changing the events to turn you into the belief — and now I'm going to say "you" in this case is the anti-Trumpers, so I'm talking about the anti-Trump part of the world — to believe that the president is a racist. And to believe, here's the key part, to believe it's their own opinion. And that they believe their opinion that the president is a big old racist is because they think they've seen facts and events and formed an opinion.
Nothing like that has happened. Nothing like that. What happened was they watched people who assign them their opinion about something that was complicated. They're not really the expert on it. They don't know all the context. But they see all these smart people that are on the channel that they watch, the people who usually agree with them, and they say, "Well, if these people think it's bad, must be bad. That's my opinion."
I'm going to take you through some hypothetical situations in which imagine that the stories about the president were reported just factually. Just factually.
Take for example, let's go all the way back to the housing discrimination story from the '70s. Here's a factual way to report that. We don't know what President Trump, then citizen Trump, was thinking or whether he was involved in any of those decisions consciously. That's not in evidence. What we do know is that the Democrats he hired to do the work discriminated against black people. Now, were they Democrats? Well, probably. I don't know. The president himself was a Democrat then. So is there any evidence of the president being a racist after he became a Democrat? In other words, or after he became a Republican.
So during the time that the president was a Democrat there are some stories of him being a racist, but we don't have evidence of what he was thinking. We only have other people's interpretation of what that all meant. There's no evidence of what the president was thinking. There is only evidence that people who work for him, who were probably Democrats, were discriminating against black people. And that's bad.
All right, let's move forward in time. Let's take the president's announcement that he was running for president. If it were reported as just facts with no opinion phase, it might have looked something like this: The president announced that he's running for president. He says one of his signature issues is going to be immigration and he thinks that there are too many criminals coming in with the nice people and that we could do with less crime. We like nice people but there are too many criminals coming in with the nice people.
Would that be factual? I believe that would be a factual statement of what he said. The way it was reported is he doesn't like Mexicans. But that came from here. That wasn't the event. That wasn't in the event. So people think they formed an opinion about the event but they didn't really. They adopted the opinion that was assigned to them.
Let's take the Judge Curiel situation. Here's how it could have been reported if you just reported the facts, and it would look like this. In a legal context when you're talking about laws and lawsuits and the court, it's important that the judge and the jury not have bias. And lawyers go to great lengths to make sure the jurors they pick don't have bias. Likewise if it's a judge trial you want to make sure that the judge does not have any experience that would lend even the impression of bias. So it's not just that they have bias or don't. You don't ever want to be in a situation where there's even the impression that you do.
Now in this particular case, the Judge Curiel case, Judge Curiel has a Mexican heritage. And because of the way President Trump's immigration policy had been reported and because of the way they had assigned opinions to the public — and Judge Curiel is part of the public — is it worth noting that the judge is in the aggrieved class? In other words, is the judge part of the population that the news has told you should be disliking this president for racism? Well, he is.
Now that says nothing about Judge Curiel's qualifications as a judge. It does say that in this specific case there was something about the judge's situation, his Mexican heritage, which suggests that he would be in the class of people likely to have bias because that bias has been assigned to everyone in that class and he's in the class. Now that's the lone explanation, but the point is in the legal context it's normal, appropriate, and even advised — your lawyer will tell you to do it — to call out any trace of potential bias.
But even better than that, if you've done that and the judge does not recuse, you've created a situation that's very positive for the accused. And the positive situation is you've set up the judge to have to go out of his way to make sure that he's not looking biased. And sure enough, when a decision came up that was in this gray area where the judge could either have the trial before or after the election — and normal treating everybody the same, nobody's special under the law — if he had just treated it the normal way it would have been before the election, which would have been terrible for candidate Trump. But instead Judge Curiel ruled in this gray area in a way that was very favorable for the president.
Why did he do it? Well, we don't know what the judge was thinking. Maybe he would have done that anyway. But we do see that Trump's strategy of calling out the potential bias got him to a place where when the gray area happened, the judge was under the microscope and he went in the direction that was good for Trump.
So if you had reported this without the bias filter, it looks like somebody in a legal situation who handled it exactly the way you would handle it. You would handle it by calling out an actual or even potential bias because you're either going to get rid of that judge or you're going to cause that judge to bend over backwards to show they're not biased. And maybe that's what happened.
All right, let's take Charlottesville. Here would be a factual way that Charlottesville could have been reported. There was this horrible event. There were neo-Nazis or I guess white supremacists — I'm not sure what the difference is — white supremacists marching, saying anti-Semitic things, and somebody got killed by one of them. Terrible situation. That's awful.
The president, when talking about it — an event which was organized around people who wanted to keep statues, the Confederate statues, and people who didn't — the president said ambiguously there were fine people on both sides. Some people said, "Hey, are you trying to say that the neo-Nazis, the white supremacists, are fine people?" Well first of all that would be ridiculous because no president would do that. And if they were crazy enough to do it they would certainly stick with the story because crazy is crazy. I mean it's not the sort of thing you'd say once unless you were gonna stick with it. It's kind of a big commitment.
But when they asked him to clarify he said, "No, no, the white supremacists are bad. I condemn them." So there was some ambiguity in what he said and then he clarified it. And he clarified it to everybody's satisfaction because we're all on the same side that the white supremacists are to be condemned and the president did. We're all on the same side. So that's the way it could have been reported, but it wasn't.
All right, so here's my point. When I'm looking at the news I'm watching the news media assign people the opinion that Trump is a racist and then blaming Trump for that assignment which wasn't anything he did.
I believe that if people simply watched — let's say there was no punditry, let's say all punditry went away and nothing but facts were ever reported and those facts were always put in context — I don't believe that the people looking directly at the facts would have opinions that are anything like the opinions they actually hold.
I just saw a Gallup poll of racial feelings. People who thought that race relations were better or worse over time. And it turns out — I wasn't aware of this until I saw just this morning — that race relations were kind of going okay. You know, white people and this was specifically about African Americans and white people. And you know black people have a lesser opinion but it was kind of stable. And then I think it was the Trayvon Martin thing that just took it off a cliff. And this was all during the Obama administration.
Now since then the white people's opinion of race relations has improved a little and black people's opinion of race relations has got a little worse.
How would you report this if you were going to report race relations in the United States? What would be the accurate way to say it if you're just dealing with the facts and you're adding no opinion? You would say race relations are worse than they used to be. They took a big plunge during the Obama administration. Took a big plunge during the Obama administration. And then 85 percent of the people — now let's make it the biggest population, not 85 percent but whatever the white population, you have 65 percent — but the group that represents the largest group of citizens thinks things are improving under the Trump administration. That's what the data says, right?
The biggest group of people in the United States, which is white people, think race relations are improving. And keep in mind that both black and white people were in total agreement that things were getting worse during Obama's administration. But now there's a disconnect. Black folks say it's getting worse. White folks say it might be getting a little better.
What's the difference? We're looking at the same facts, right? The difference is that the media has sort of bifurcated into two parts. The people watching one set of media, the Fox News crowd, think things are looking up. And the people watching other media think things are looking down. But here's what's not happening: there's nobody looking at the facts, the events, and making up their own opinions. That's just not happening.
All right, what's happening is people are assigning opinions and you pick your tribe and then you take your opinion.
Now I know what you're thinking. You're thinking I'm talking about other people. And maybe that's true. I'm sure there are plenty of people on this Periscope watching this who are not really just taking every opinion that they see in the news. Well I'm talking in general. So if you're trying to decide how the country is in terms of race relations and you're looking at your own experience, your anecdotal experience, well that might be telling you something if everybody else is having the same experience. But probably not. Probably not. It's probably just anecdotal.
So I was wondering, are there objective measures of racism that are not captured by opinion polls? So it's one thing to talk to people and say, "Hey, do you think race relations are better or worse?" Then you're just getting people's opinions as they've been assigned by the media. But is there anything you could measure that's just a plus?
Now if somebody said employment — so black unemployment is great and black business creation, business ownership is up and that's great — but those are really sort of continuations of a trend. They have more to do with just economics and a good economy. They're not really about whether race relations are good. It just might mean they're no worse. You know, obviously if you're black you can get a job, right? But that was true before. So that doesn't really measure racism exactly.
So is there any — somebody said the number of race crimes. That would be interesting but dangerous because you worry that the way those things are measured might have drifted over time. In other words it might have been in the old days they would just say it's to do with race but maybe in our modern times maybe people would say, "Well it's not directly because of race but you can see how it affected," let's put it in this category.
Number of interracial marriages. Well that's interesting. How about number of people who spend quality time with people who are not their race? You could probably, I think you could probably get a reasonably decent survey of that idea. It would be a little hard because you're dealing with human memory and people want to put themselves in a certain light. But I think you could measure that over time. At least that's a good idea.
Changing voting patterns. I don't know if that really gets there. Mixed race birth rates maybe. You know, that I would say that's one of the good ones.
You know one of the standard jokes is that if somebody is accused of being a racist they say, "I can't be a racist because I have a black friend." And then everybody goes, "Haha, that's what racists say. Racists are the ones who say I can't be racist because I have a black friend." It's such a cliché that people mock it.
Here's what I think. I think that's a great start. If you asked me the best response to somebody who says, "I'm not a racist, I have a black friend," the best response is not "Hahaha, that's more racist." The best response is, "That's great. You should make some more. I hope next year you've got two black friends." Why are we discouraging something that's so clearly a step in the right direction?
Somebody said it would be a step in the right direction if a black candidate did not get 95% of the black vote. I do think that that had an impact on people's feeling about race relations. I just don't know exactly how.
All right, law enforcement. Let's say racist things on here.
then a pom pom pom pom pom well I'm looking a little overexposed both literally and figuratively but I wanted to come on here and give you a whiteboard talk about one of my favorite topics persuasion and how it's affecting how we see the world and specifically we're going to talk about how you get your opinions I'll wait till we get a thousand and then we're gonna jump right into it now we haven't done the simultaneous sip on this one because I did that already this morning so we're going to do a whiteboard talk in a moment all right I think we have enough people now now here's what I'm watching and it might be a difference between someone who is trained in persuasion versus people who are not the way the way reality is being presented to you is that there are events that happen in the world and then people look at those events and they form opinions that's how the world is presented to you that's how the news organizations presented to you it's how it's how you probably imagined the world there are events we observe the events and then we form opinions in my filter of reality nothing like that is happening that is not happening let me give you my filter on it and then you can compare it to the one you have and see which one you like in my world there's a news event and just to make you fun let's talk about President Trump causing the news event then there's the the news media and social media this is what I call the opinion and creation phase in other words people who are not you are framing it they're their change in the context they're putting the pundits on it they're putting emphasis here or emphases there through leaving things out sometimes the facts are just wrong but this is the phase where the opinions are created and then once these opinions created you the poor consumer looks at your favored sources probably left is looking mostly at the stuff from the left the right is looking at mostly new sources and social media on the right and we get our opinions from this stuff now some of you might also be on social media obviously you are if you're watching this but in general it's this phase that assigns you the opinion now I know that you don't want to believe that about yourself but you certainly believe it about those other people who aren't doing their thinking they're not doing their homework they must be getting their opinions from TV my view is that that's a universal truth the the television is giving your opinions now how does that really make a difference in the real world now what I'm watching is that the opinion makers are changing the events to turn you into the belief and now I'm going to say you in this case is the anti-trump errs so I'm talking about the anti-trump part of the world to believe that the president is a racist and to believe here's the key part to believe it's their own opinion and that they believe their opinion that the president is a big ol racist is because they think they've seen facts and events and formed an opinion nothing like that has happened nothing like that what happened was they watched people who assign them their opinion about something that was complicated they're not really the expert on it they don't know all the context but they see all these smart people that are on the channel that they watch the people who usually agree with them and they say well if these people think it's bad must be bad that's my opinion I'm going to take you through some hypothetical situations in which imagine that the stories about the president were reported just factually just factually take for example we'll say the will go all the way back to the housing discrimination story from the 70s here's a factual way to report that we don't know what President Trump then citizen Trump was thinking or whether he was involved in any of those you know consciously involved in those decisions that's not in evidence what we do know is that the Democrats he hired to do the work discriminated against black people now were they Democrats well probably I don't know the President himself was a Democrat then so is there any evidence of the president being a racist after he became a Democrat in other words or after he became a Republican so during the time that the president was a Democrat there are some stories of him being a racist but we don't have evidence of what he was thinking we only have other people's interpretation of what that all meant there's no evidence of what the president was thinking there are only evidence that people who work for him who were probably Democrats word were discriminating against black people and that's bad all right let's move forward in time let's take let's take the president's announcement that he was running for president if it were reported as just facts with an all the opinion phase it might have looked something like this the president announced that he's running for president he says one of his signature issues is going to be immigration and he thinks that there are too many criminals coming in with the nice people and that we could do with less crime we like nice people but there are too many criminals coming in with the nice people would that be factual I believe that would be a factual statement of what he said the way it was reported is he doesn't like Mexicans but that came from here that wasn't the event that wasn't in the event so people think they formed an opinion about the event but they didn't really they they adopted the opinion that was assigned to them let's take the judge Curiel situate here's how it could have been reported if you just reported the facts and it would look like this in a legal context when you're talking about laws and lawsuits and the court it's important that the judge and the jury not have bites and lawyers go to great lengths to make sure the jurors they pick don't have bias likewise if it's a judge trial you want to make sure that the judge does not have any experience that would lend even the impression of bias so it's not just that they have bias or don't you don't ever want to be in a situation where there's even the impression that you do now in this particular case the judge curial case judge curial has a Mexican heritage and because of the way President Trump's immigration policy had been reported and because of the way they had assigned opinions to the public and judge Keary el is part of the public is it is it worth noting that the judge is in the aggrieved class in other words is the judge part of the population that the news has told you should be disliking this president for racism well he is now that says nothing about procuring ELLs qualifications as a judge it does say that in this specific case there was something about the judges situation his Mexican heritage which suggests that he would be in the class of people likely to have bias because that bias has been assigned to everyone in that class and he's in the class now that's the lone explanation but the point is in the legal context it's normal appropriate and even advised your lawyer will tell you to do it to call out any any trace of potential bias but even better than that if you've done that and the judge does not recuse you've created a situation that's very positive for the or they accused and the positive situation is you've setup the judge to have to go out of his way to make sure that he's not looking biased and sure enough when a decision came up that was in this gray area where the judge could either have the trial before or after the election and normal normal treating everybody the same every nobody's nobody is special into the law if he had just treated it the normal way it would have been before the election which would have been terrible for candidate Trump but instead judge curiel ruled in this gray area in a way that was very favorable for the president why did he do it well we don't know what the judge was thinking maybe he would have done that anyway but we do see that Trump's strategy of calling out the potential bias got him to a place where when the gray area happened the judge was under the under the microscope and he went in the direction that was good for Trump so if you had reported this without the bias filter it looks like somebody in a legal situation who handled it exactly the way you would handle that you would handle it by calling out an actual or even potential bias because you're either going to get rid of that judge or you're gonna cause that judge to bend over backwards to show they're not biased and maybe that's what happens all right let's take let's take Charlottesville here would be a factual way that Charlottesville could have been reported there was this horrible event there were there were neo-nazis or I guess white supremacists I'm not sure what the differences white supremacist marching saying anti-semitic things and somebody got killed by one of them terrible situation that's awful the president when talking about it an event which was organized around people who wanted to keep statues the Confederate statues and people who didn't the president said ambiguously there were fine people on both sides some people said hey are you trying to say that the neo-nazis that white supremacists or fine people well first of all that would be ridiculous because no president no president would do that and if they were crazy enough to do it they would certainly keep with the story because crazy is crazy I mean it's not the sort of thing you'd say once unless you were gonna stick with it it's kind of a big commitment but when they asked him to clarify he said no no the the white supremacists are bad I condemn them so there was some ambiguity and what he said and then he clarified it and he clarified it to everybody's satisfaction because we're all in the you know everybody probably watching this is on the same side that the white supremacists are to be condemned and the President did we're all on the same side so that's the way it could have been reported but it wasn't alright so here's my point when I'm looking at the news I'm watching the news media assigned people the opinion that Trump is a racist and then blaming Trump for that assignment which wasn't anything he did I believe that if people simply watched let's say there was no pundit REE let's say all pundit R you went away and nothing but facts were ever reported and those facts were always put in context I don't believe that the people looking directly at the facts would have opinions that are anything like the opinions they actually hold I saw I just saw a Gallup poll of racial feelings people people who thought that race relations we they're better or worse over time and it turns out I wasn't aware of this until I saw just this morning that there was race relationships we're kind of going okay you know white people and this was specifically about African Americans and white people and you know black people have a lesser opinion but it was kind of stable and then I think it was the Trayvon Martin thing that just took it off a cliff and this was all during the Oh administration now since then the white white people's opinion of race relationship has improved a little and black people's opinion of race relations has got a little worse how would you report this if you were going to report race relations in the United States what would be the accurate way to say it if you're just dealing with the facts and you're adding no opinion you would say race relationship are worse than they used to be they took a big plunge during the Obama administration took a big plunge during the Obama administration and then 85 percent of the people now let's make it you know the the biggest population not 85% but whatever whatever the white population you have 65 percent but the group that represents the largest group of citizens thinks things are improving under the trump administration that's what the data says right the biggest group of people in the United States which is white people think race relationships are improving and keep in mind that both black and white people were in total agreement the things were getting worse during Obama's administration but now there's a disconnect black folks say it's getting worse white folks say it might be getting a little better what's the difference what's the difference we're looking at the same facts right the difference is that the media has sort of bifurcated into two parts the people watching one set of media the Fox News crowd think things are looking up and the people watching other media thinks things are looking down but here's what's not happening there's nobody looking at the facts the events and making up their own amounts that's just not happening all right what's happening is people are assigning opinions and you pick your tribe and then you take your opinion now I know what you're thinking you're thinking you're talking about other people and maybe that's true I'm sure there are plenty of people on this periscope watching this who are not really you know just taking every opinion that they see in the news well I'm talking in general so if you're trying to decide how the country is in terms of race relations and you're looking at your own experience your anecdotal experience well that might be telling you something if everybody else is having the same experience but probably not probably not it's probably just anecdotal so I was wondering are there objective measures of racism that are not captured by opinion polls so it's one thing to talk to people and say hey do you think race relations are better or worse then you're just getting people's opinions as they've been assigned by the media but is there anything you could measure that's just a plus now if somebody said employment so black unemployment is great and black business creation business ownership is up and that's great but those are really sort of continuations of a trend they have more to do with just economics and a good economy they're not really about whether race relationships are good it just might mean they're no worse you know obviously if you're black you can get a job right but that was true before so that doesn't really measure racism exactly so is there any somebody said the number of race crimes that would be interesting but dangerous because you worry that the way those things are measured might have drifted over time in other words it might be then the old days they would just say as to do with race but maybe in our you know modern times maybe people would say well it's not directly because of race but you can see how it affected is let's put it in this category number of interracial marriages well that's interesting how about number of people who spend quality time with people who are not their race you could probably I think you could probably get a reasonably decent survey of that idea it would be a little hard because you're dealing with human memory and people want to put themselves in a certain light but I think you could measure that over time at least that's a good idea changing and voting patterns I don't know if that really gets there mixed rate birth rates maybe you know that I would say that's one of the good ones you know one of the standard jokes is that if somebody is accused of being a racist they say I can't be a racist because I have a black friend and then everybody goes haha that's what racists say racists are the ones who say I can't be racist because I have a black friend it's such a cliche that people mock it here's what I think I think that's a great start if he asked me the best response to somebody who says I'm not a racist I have a black friend the best response is not hahaha that's more racist say the best response is that's great you should make some more I hope next year you've got two black friends why are we discouraging something that's so clearly a step in the right direction so somebody Oh somebody said it would be a step in the right direction if a black candidate did not get 95% of the black vote I do think that that's that had an impact on people's feeling about race relations I just don't know exactly how all right law enforcement let's say racist things on here
then a pom pom pom pom pom well I'm
looking a little overexposed both
literally and figuratively but I wanted
to come on here and give you a
whiteboard talk about one of my favorite
topics
persuasion and how it's affecting how we
see the world and specifically we're
going to talk about how you get your
opinions I'll wait till we get a
thousand and then we're gonna jump right
into it
now we haven't done the simultaneous sip
on this one because I did that already
this morning so we're going to do a
whiteboard talk in a moment all right I
think we have enough people now now
here's what I'm watching and it might be
a difference between someone who is
trained in persuasion versus people who
are not the way the way reality is being
presented to you is that there are
events that happen in the world and then
people look at those events and they
form opinions that's how the world is
presented to you that's how the news
organizations presented to you it's how
it's how you probably imagined the world
there are events we observe the events
and then we form opinions in my filter
of reality nothing like that is
happening that is not happening let me
give you my filter on it and then you
can compare it to the one you have and
see which one you like in my world
there's a news event and just to make
you fun let's talk about President Trump
causing the news event then there's the
the news media and social media this is
what I call the opinion and creation
phase in other words people who are not
you are framing it they're their change
in the context they're putting the
pundits on it they're putting emphasis
here or emphases there through leaving
things out sometimes the facts are just
wrong but this is the phase where the
opinions are created and then once these
opinions
created you the poor consumer looks at
your favored sources probably left is
looking mostly at the stuff from the
left the right is looking at mostly new
sources and social media on the right
and we get our opinions from this stuff
now some of you might also be on social
media obviously you are if you're
watching this but in general it's this
phase that assigns you the opinion now I
know that you don't want to believe that
about yourself but you certainly believe
it about those other people who aren't
doing their thinking they're not doing
their homework they must be getting
their opinions from TV my view is that
that's a universal truth the the
television is giving your opinions now
how does that really make a difference
in the real world now what I'm watching
is that the opinion makers are changing
the events to turn you into the belief
and now I'm going to say you in this
case is the anti-trump errs so I'm
talking about the anti-trump part of the
world to believe that the president is a
racist and to believe here's the key
part to believe it's their own opinion
and that they believe their opinion that
the president is a big ol racist is
because they think they've seen facts
and events and formed an opinion nothing
like that has happened nothing like that
what happened was they watched people
who assign them their opinion about
something that was complicated they're
not really the expert on it they don't
know all the context but they see all
these smart people that are on the
channel that they watch the people who
usually agree with them and they say
well if these people think it's bad must
be bad that's my opinion I'm going to
take you through some hypothetical
situations in which imagine that the
stories about the president were
reported just factually just factually
take for example we'll say the will go
all the way back to the housing
discrimination story from the 70s
here's a factual way to report that we
don't know what President Trump then
citizen Trump was thinking or whether he
was involved in any of those you know
consciously involved in those decisions
that's not in evidence
what we do know is that the Democrats he
hired to do the work
discriminated against black people now
were they Democrats well probably I
don't know the President himself was a
Democrat then so is there any evidence
of the president being a racist after he
became a Democrat in other words or
after he became a Republican so during
the time that the president was a
Democrat there are some stories of him
being a racist but we don't have
evidence of what he was thinking we only
have other people's interpretation of
what that all meant there's no evidence
of what the president was thinking there
are only evidence that people who work
for him who were probably Democrats word
were discriminating against black people
and that's bad all right let's move
forward in time let's take let's take
the president's announcement that he was
running for president if it were
reported as just facts with an all the
opinion phase it might have looked
something like this
the president announced that he's
running for president he says one of his
signature issues is going to be
immigration and he thinks that there are
too many criminals coming in with the
nice people and that we could do with
less crime we like nice people but there
are too many criminals coming in with
the nice people would that be factual I
believe that would be a factual
statement of what he said the way it was
reported is he doesn't like Mexicans but
that came from here that wasn't the
event that wasn't in the event so people
think they formed an opinion about the
event but they didn't really they they
adopted the opinion that was assigned to
them let's take the judge Curiel situate
here's how it could have been reported
if you just reported the facts and it
would look like this in a legal context
when you're talking about laws and
lawsuits and the court it's important
that the judge and the jury not have
bites and lawyers go to great lengths to
make sure the jurors they pick don't
have bias
likewise if it's a judge trial you want
to make sure that the judge does not
have any experience that would lend even
the impression of bias so it's not just
that they have bias or don't you don't
ever want to be in a situation where
there's even the impression that you do
now in this particular case the judge
curial case judge curial has a Mexican
heritage and because of the way
President Trump's immigration policy had
been reported and because of the way
they had assigned opinions to the public
and judge Keary el is part of the public
is it is it worth noting that the judge
is in the aggrieved class in other words
is the judge part of the population that
the news has told you should be
disliking this president for racism well
he is now that says nothing about
procuring ELLs qualifications as a judge
it does say that in this specific case
there was something about the judges
situation his Mexican heritage which
suggests that he would be in the class
of people likely to have bias because
that bias has been assigned to everyone
in that class and he's in the class now
that's the lone explanation but the
point is in the legal context it's
normal appropriate and even advised your
lawyer will tell you to do it to call
out any any trace of potential bias but
even better than that if you've done
that and the judge does not recuse
you've created a situation that's very
positive for the
or they accused and the positive
situation is you've setup the judge to
have to go out of his way to make sure
that he's not looking biased and sure
enough when a decision came up that was
in this gray area where the judge could
either have the trial before or after
the election and normal normal treating
everybody the same every nobody's nobody
is special into the law if he had just
treated it the normal way it would have
been before the election which would
have been terrible for candidate Trump
but instead judge curiel ruled in this
gray area in a way that was very
favorable for the president why did he
do it well we don't know what the judge
was thinking maybe he would have done
that anyway but we do see that Trump's
strategy of calling out the potential
bias got him to a place where when the
gray area happened the judge was under
the under the microscope and he went in
the direction that was good for Trump so
if you had reported this without the
bias filter it looks like somebody in a
legal situation who handled it exactly
the way you would handle that you would
handle it by calling out an actual or
even potential bias because you're
either going to get rid of that judge or
you're gonna cause that judge to bend
over backwards to show they're not
biased and maybe that's what happens all
right let's take let's take
Charlottesville here would be a factual
way that Charlottesville could have been
reported there was this horrible event
there were there were neo-nazis or I
guess white supremacists
I'm not sure what the differences white
supremacist marching saying anti-semitic
things and somebody got killed by one of
them terrible situation that's awful the
president when talking about it an event
which was organized around people who
wanted to keep statues the Confederate
statues and people who didn't the
president said ambiguously there were
fine people on both sides
some people said hey
are you trying to say that the neo-nazis
that white supremacists or fine people
well first of all that would be
ridiculous because no president no
president would do that and if they were
crazy enough to do it they would
certainly keep with the story because
crazy is crazy I mean it's not the sort
of thing you'd say once unless you were
gonna stick with it it's kind of a big
commitment but when they asked him to
clarify he said no no the the white
supremacists are bad I condemn them so
there was some ambiguity and what he
said and then he clarified it and he
clarified it to everybody's satisfaction
because we're all in the you know
everybody probably watching this is on
the same side that the white
supremacists are to be condemned and the
President did we're all on the same side
so that's the way it could have been
reported but it wasn't alright so here's
my point when I'm looking at the news
I'm watching the news media assigned
people the opinion that Trump is a
racist and then blaming Trump for that
assignment which wasn't anything he did
I believe that if people simply watched
let's say there was no pundit REE let's
say all pundit R you went away and
nothing but facts were ever reported and
those facts were always put in context I
don't believe that the people looking
directly at the facts would have
opinions that are anything like the
opinions they actually hold I saw I just
saw a Gallup poll of racial feelings
people people who thought that race
relations we they're better or worse
over time and it turns out I wasn't
aware of this until I saw just this
morning that there was race
relationships we're kind of going okay
you know white people and this was
specifically about African Americans and
white people and you know black people
have a lesser opinion but it was kind of
stable and then I think it was the
Trayvon Martin thing that just took it
off a cliff and this was all during the
Oh
administration now since then the white
white people's opinion of race
relationship has improved a little and
black people's opinion of race relations
has got a little worse
how would you report this if you were
going to report race relations in the
United States what would be the accurate
way to say it if you're just dealing
with the facts and you're adding no
opinion you would say race relationship
are worse than they used to be they took
a big plunge during the Obama
administration took a big plunge during
the Obama administration and then 85
percent of the people now let's make it
you know the the biggest population not
85% but whatever whatever the white
population you have 65 percent but the
group that represents the largest group
of citizens thinks things are improving
under the trump administration that's
what the data says right the biggest
group of people in the United States
which is white people think race
relationships are improving and keep in
mind that both black and white people
were in total agreement the things were
getting worse during Obama's
administration but now there's a
disconnect black folks say it's getting
worse
white folks say it might be getting a
little better what's the difference
what's the difference we're looking at
the same facts right the difference is
that the media has sort of bifurcated
into two parts the people watching one
set of media the Fox News crowd think
things are looking up and the people
watching other media thinks things are
looking down but here's what's not
happening there's nobody looking at the
facts the events and making up their own
amounts that's just not happening all
right what's happening is people are
assigning opinions and you pick your
tribe and then you take
your opinion now I know what you're
thinking you're thinking you're talking
about other people and maybe that's true
I'm sure there are plenty of people on
this periscope watching this who are not
really you know just taking every
opinion that they see in the news well
I'm talking in general so if you're
trying to decide how the country is in
terms of race relations and you're
looking at your own experience your
anecdotal experience well that might be
telling you something if everybody else
is having the same experience but
probably not probably not it's probably
just anecdotal so I was wondering are
there objective measures of racism that
are not captured by opinion polls so
it's one thing to talk to people and say
hey do you think race relations are
better or worse then you're just getting
people's opinions as they've been
assigned by the media but is there
anything you could measure that's just a
plus now if somebody said employment so
black unemployment is great and black
business creation business ownership is
up and that's great but those are really
sort of continuations of a trend they
have more to do with just economics and
a good economy they're not really about
whether race relationships are good it
just might mean they're no worse you
know obviously if you're black you can
get a job right but that was true before
so that doesn't really measure racism
exactly so is there any somebody said
the number of race crimes that would be
interesting but dangerous because you
worry that the way those things are
measured might have drifted over time in
other words it might be then the old
days they would just say as
to do with race but maybe in our you
know modern times maybe people would say
well it's not directly because of race
but you can see how it affected is let's
put it in this category number of
interracial marriages well that's
interesting how about number of people
who spend quality time with people who
are not their race
you could probably I think you could
probably get a reasonably decent survey
of that idea it would be a little hard
because you're dealing with human memory
and people want to put themselves in a
certain light but I think you could
measure that over time at least that's a
good idea
changing and voting patterns I don't
know if that really gets there mixed
rate birth rates maybe you know that I
would say that's one of the good ones
you know one of the standard jokes is
that if somebody is accused of being a
racist they say I can't be a racist
because I have a black friend and then
everybody goes haha that's what racists
say racists are the ones who say I can't
be racist because I have a black friend
it's such a cliche that people mock it
here's what I think I think that's a
great start if he asked me the best
response to somebody who says I'm not a
racist I have a black friend the best
response is not hahaha that's more
racist say the best response is that's
great you should make some more I hope
next year you've got two black friends
why are we discouraging something that's
so clearly a step in the right direction
so
somebody Oh somebody said it would be a
step in the right direction if a black
candidate did not get 95% of the black
vote I do think that that's that had an
impact on people's feeling about race
relations I just don't know exactly how
all right
law enforcement let's say racist things
on here
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