(no subject)

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

Ashley Judd Slaps Media in the Face for Speculation Over Her ‘Puffy’ Appearance

There's more than one issue raised in this article, but for this post I wanted to continue the point from my last post.

A brief analysis demonstrates that the following “conclusions” were all made on the exact same day, March 20, about the exact same woman (me), looking the exact same way, based on the exact same television appearance. The following examples are real, and come from a variety of (so-called!) legitimate news outlets (such as HuffPo, MSNBC, etc.), tabloid press, and social media:

The journalists (and non-journalists) being called out here are making speculations and writing them as firm conclusions. This is a pattern we see over and over again on any topic. Whether it's merely to sell papers/magazines/blog ads or whether it's truly believed, the social effect is the same; the self-reinforcing cycle of bias continues and society is worse off for it. Journalists continue to claim to be unbiased, but regularly show otherwise and those people who pay attention learn to distrust them and those who don't are led astray by trusting too much.

Comments

[musicpsych.livejournal.com]

Like anything, it depends. Sometimes they take an extreme example and try to pass it off as representative of what everyone faces. I think that's manipulative. But often, they just want to show how this might affect someone like the reader. Or give a real life example to show how whatever high level policy ideas are affecting people in real life. It seems like a pretty common story framing device to start an article with a human example, go into the issue itself, and then come back to the human example at the end.

[stewstewstewdio.livejournal.com]

The lady doth protest too much, methinks -William Shakespeare

Ashley Judd has striven to become a celebrity and has profitted greatly from it, as other celebrities have. That's the nature of the industry she has chosen. Lady Gaga could probably make the same kind of claims as could someone like Brad Pitt. The difference is that Lady Gaga has learned to celebrate her natural look (http://allieiswired.com/archives/2011/09/lady-gaga-goes-au-natural-for-harpers-bazaar-photos/)

Ashley Judd seriously needs to get over herself. I have always contended that if you just did what you wanted to do in your business, it wouldn't be business. It would be a hobby. And her reference was to US Magazine, a notorious Hollywood gossip rag. She also makes these comments in The Daily Beast. This is publicity that most people don't have this kind of access to. The claim that she is everywoman is ridiculous.

Yes, the mainstream media is not sterile and dry. That is part of the appeal. It seems your major complaint with it is that it isn't biased in the direction you personally would want it to be.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Did she actually strive to be a celebrity, or is that merely the industrial biproduct of an acting career?

[rasilio.livejournal.com]

She grew up in a celebrity family and knew exactly what she was getting into when she chose her career

[houndofloki.livejournal.com]

If she was doing it out of love for the acting craft, she would be on broadway or in serious theater. Hollywood actors and actresses are pursuing money and celebrity. Which is fine (their prerogative) but to turn around and complain about it once they've got it is pretty ridic.

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

So you are of the opinion that celebrities are no longer people then? Yeah, that's part of the problem too.

It seems your major complaint with it is that it isn't biased in the direction you personally would want it to be.

Your impression is wrong.

[stewstewstewdio.livejournal.com]

So you are of the opinion that celebrities are no longer people then? Yeah, that's part of the problem too.

Correlation, not causation

Your impression is wrong.

[Citation needed]

[oportet.livejournal.com]

A few things...

Persuasive writing is much more fun to write, and read, than informative. Maybe the latter should be emphasized more by editors, publishers, and journalism schools, but I'm not sure it would change what the actual writers and readers are interested in.

The size, placement, and date of your average retraction is a joke. Raising the expectations for these might also raise journalism standards, probably not much - but every little bit counts. I have no idea how you could enforce it though.

[rasilio.livejournal.com]

69 channels of all news 24 hours a day 7 days a week backed up by 3768 talk radio stations and 70 bazillion web, print and blog sites means a need for a staggering amount of content leaving journalists to manufacture stories where none exists and audiences do not particularly enjoy watching a dozen people sitting around talking about a subject they clearly don't know any more about than the audience themselves.

Is the subject matter right in this case? No not really, even separating out my complete lack of understanding of the whole celebrity gossip phenomenon we still should not be judging women solely on their looks however this has been a constant of humanity in all cultures across all times and has nothing whatsoever to do with "Patriarchy", it is simply a fact of human existence and it is magnified by 1000 for female celebrities, especially those like Judd who have used their appearance to make a living.

[oslo.livejournal.com]

Of course, you're doing the same exact thing the "media" does; you're drawing a "firm conclusion" about the way the media generally works based on limited evidence consisting of isolated examples. This helps to perpetuate your own "self-reinforcing cycle of bias," causing people who pay attention to "distrust" what you have to say about the matter.

The conservative attack on the media increasingly strikes me as a more fundamental attack on epistemology. It's as though conservatives think that we can't know anything about the world, because everything we can know about it comes through inherently biased sources, and the only response conservatives seem to have regarding such bias is to "distrust" the source.

But then I realize that there are sources that conservatives do trust, including and in particular sources that are plausible bases justifying the above epistemic skepticism. So, for example, here you take Ashley Judd's own explanation and defense as completely authoritative and refuting everything that's been said about her by "legitimate news outlets," causing you to distrust the news outlets, but not Ashley Judd. We can think of other recent examples that you obviously want to reference but don't particularly want to address directly (for whatever reason), including the recent Martin/Zimmerman stories, where conservatives have proven quick to rely on new or existing "evidence" only if and when it tends to refute earlier impressions created by the media coverage. That kind of evidence passes through a conservative's filters without comment.

Bottom line - it doesn't make sense to rely on the media for evidence that your skepticism about the media is justified.

Personally, I think the appropriate stance to take with respect to the media is the appropriate stance to take to any question about what we know about the world. You draw your best conclusions on available evidence, with appropriate caveats, and remain open-minded with respect to alternative accounts and additional evidence. It's silly and irresponsible to say of any "news outlet" that, just because it snipped out a part of an audio recording or speculated on a celebrity's appearance, cannot be trusted on anything else; we don't do that when our friends misremember a story, when our senses deceive us, or when a coworker tells a self-serving version of office events. Even when they do this regularly, we learn to sift between the sorts of assessments we feel we can rely on and what assessments needs additional support. We almost never take the position that any other source of knowledge, once we've decided it's "biased," which itself is a contentious and value-laden term, is one that we must simply "distrust" - and not just one that we must distrust, but that everyone should distrust - and completely discount as a potential source of knowledge. That's just a childish way to think about it.

[jonathankorman.livejournal.com]

Well said. The word “bias” itself has become decoupled from any stable meaning.

it doesn't make sense to rely on the media for evidence that your skepticism about the media is justified

Robert Anton Wilson memorably referred to this as a “strange loop”.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

A blast from the past: I encountered references to Wilson in the recently published diaries of Philip K. Dick. It was a fascinating read.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

You draw your best conclusions on available evidence, with appropriate caveats, and remain open-minded with respect to alternative accounts and additional evidence.

Bingo. I'm getting tired of the 'you can't know anything' meme that I constantly get whenever I bring up an opinion formed by observations. It's not a legitimate argument, it's just a conspiracy theory based on paranoid delusions, and when that same person claims to know the objective truth in the same breath, delusions of grandeur.

[weswilson]

Precisely. We can never know the truth about anything, but we can judge input from multiple sources based on relative credibility on the subject at hand.

If the NAS makes a public declaration about something scientific, I can be pretty sure that their stance has more credibility than some random scientist writing a paper somewhere. This does not mean NAS isn't wrong, just that there will need to be significant evidence to have their effort removed as the null hypothesis. Major media outlets also have a wide array of subjects where their credibility is significantly higher than that of some random blog.

All that being said, credibility on catty beauty commentary is universally low.

(frozen) (no subject)

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

Of course, you're doing the same exact thing the "media" does; you're drawing a "firm conclusion" about the way the media generally works based on limited evidence consisting of isolated examples. This helps to perpetuate your own "self-reinforcing cycle of bias," causing people who pay attention to "distrust" what you have to say about the matter.

Wow, that's really moronic of you. You're so far off that I don't even know where to start.

The conservative attack on the media increasingly strikes me as a more fundamental attack on epistemology.

As opposed to your continual war on conservatives as evidenced by bringing this up in a post that is completely unrelated to conservatives in any way. Simply amazing.

So, for example, here you take Ashley Judd's own explanation and defense as completely authoritative and refuting everything that's been said about her by "legitimate news outlets," causing you to distrust the news outlets, but not Ashley Judd.

She would certainly be a primary source for herself, compared to unrelated people who are merely looking at pictures to come to conclusions. That you would rather trust a news outlet over the person says a lot about your lack of reasoning.

It's silly and irresponsible to say of any "news outlet" that, just because it snipped out a part of an audio recording or speculated on a celebrity's appearance, cannot be trusted on anything else;

Good thing I didn't say that then.

[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

'It's as though conservatives think that we can't know anything about the world, because everything we can know about it comes through inherently biased sources, and the only response conservatives seem to have regarding such bias is to "distrust" the source. '

You have created a strawman and defeated it most excellent.

You're not using "know" correctly and getting irate when others correct you on it.

What you "infer" from evidence isn't what you "know" when multiple explanations exist for evidence. Because you look at a house where you can see two sides and make claims about what the other two sides look like, doesn't mean you "know" what the rest of the house looks like.

You want to bring up Zimmerman? Okay.

His critics KNEW he was lying about injuries and cited a grainy video. It's absolutely correct to deride their analysis when the injuries may not be evident on low quality video. Later enhancements done on the contrast (designed to make differences more evident) showed the trepidation his defenders had with the video were well qualified.

The Zimmerman case has been an excellent example of how improperly people can process evidence to create an argument. The whole time as evidence new things were introduced, Zimmerman's critics parsed them in such a way as to narrow their focus when at no point did any evidence that contradicted Zimmerman come out.

It's really an indictment on how poorly formed the modern left is in their intellectual capacity to process, parse, and create arguments. Which ultimately explains their increasing anger. Often times when someone has completely failed in their assessments they either fall back to introspection or lash out in anger. The left has decided to be angry and lash out rather than build up their cognitive skills.

It's a shame really.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

I blame Ronald Reagan. He took aim at the Fairness Doctrine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_Doctrine). This does not apply to print journalism, but it did serve to create broadcast media infotainment.

What Judd complains about is not so much the reporting as the general cultural attitude that renders such reporting acceptable.

[dwer.livejournal.com]

this is political, but Levi Johnston is not?

Ok.

Ashley Judd is a public figure. And no one is unbiased; that the media must be is a construct anyway.;

[telemann.livejournal.com]

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

this is political, but Levi Johnston is not?

I brought in the political aspect. The Levi Johnston post did not.

[musicpsych.livejournal.com]

While we're on the subject, I thought this was interesting: http://theweek.com/article/index/226354/the-trayvon-martin-case-4-things-the-media-got-wrong

There does seem to be a tension between taking time to fact-check and wanting to publish as soon as news is available.

[kayjayuu.livejournal.com]

I'm not quite sure why the original point of the article -- how the media and society paint women's appearances -- would not be considered "political." Posts about the church are allowed without question. But posts about women's issues -- and the society that creates those issues -- are somehow a gray area?

Help me understand this.

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

It could be political, I just didn't feel like discussing that aspect right now. Also, I didn't think very many people would disagree with it.