Polarization and misrepresentation of the outgroup

It has become common to blame polarization for a variety of social ills and, while I often disagree with what people say about the causes of polarization (I think they are much deeper than people realize and therefore more difficult to remedy), I usually agree with the effects people ascribe to it. But recently it occurred to me that polarization probably had one negative effect that, as far as I can tell, people don’t really talk about. I thought about that in the wake of the botched interview of Roger Scruton in the New Statesman, which first led to Scruton’s being sacked from his position as a government advisor because of the controversial statements that were ascribed to him in that interview, then to a controversy about how George Eaton, the journalist who interviewed him, had misrepresented some of what he’d said during the interview.

I don’t want to talk about what Scruton said during that interview, because that’s not what this post is about and also because I don’t think it’s very interesting, so let me just show what I think is the most egregious case of misrepresentation by Eaton (it’s hard to know for sure since he didn’t release the audio of the interview, which may reveal further, even more outrageous misrepresentations), who on Twitter summarized one part of the interview in this way:

Roger Scruton on the Chinese: “Each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one and that is a very frightening thing.” 2/4 https://t.co/0LtUN9cZ9e

— George Eaton (@georgeeaton) 10 avril 2019

If you just saw this, you’d probably think that Scruton is repeating the stereotype that Asian people have no individuality in virtue of their race or something like that, but it turns out that it’s not quite what he said.

Indeed, when asked to say more about the context in which Scruton had made this remark, Eaton said this in a tweet that he later deleted:Knowing the context of Scruton’s remark obviously changes things quite a bit.

By editing Scruton’s reply in that way, Eaton invited the reading that he was claiming that Chinese people have no individuality in virtue of their race, not because the Chinese government is making them into replicas of each other. You may think that it’s bad to make that claim even when you offer this particular causal story, which is fair enough, and you may even think that it wouldn’t have been better if Scruton had appealed to some kind of Chinese essence instead, but it was predictable that many people would not and this is precisely why Eaton, who later posed on Instagram with a bottle of champagne congratulating himself for making the British government sack “right-wing racist and homophobe Roger Scruton” (it’s funny how self-appointed defenders of the working class always seem to have a bottle of champagne handy), chose to edit the interview in that way.

It’s true that, in the piece itself, Eaton provided some of the context of Scruton’s remark on the Chinese:

Perhaps most remarkably, he commented of the rise of China: “They’re creating robots out of their own people… each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one and that is a very frightening thing.”

But while this is less misleading, I think it’s still unacceptably misleading. By using the ellipsis where he did, he left open the possibility that the second part of the quote was not in fact presented as a consequence of the first part (it’s also not clear that he’s talking about the Chinese government), but that it’s just something that came later in the interview. The notion that Eaton had to get rid of the seven words that complete the quote for “reasons of space” is preposterous and, by claiming that it’s why he did it, Eaton is just adding insult to injury.

Anyway, I didn’t write this post to explain why Eaton misrepresented Scruton, which many other people have already pointed out. Instead, I want to suggest that, if Eaton did that, it’s partly because the media is increasingly polarized along political/ideological lines. Although Eaton apologized for some of his behavior on social media, he refused to apologize for what he wrote in the piece itself and I have no doubt that his career will not suffer at all from this episode. On the contrary, if anything, I think he’ll probably benefit from it. The problem is that, in a polarized media/political landscape, the incentives to misrepresent the outgroup are even stronger than they usually are, because the people who could punish you won’t mind and those who will mind can’t punish you. If most of your readers are on the same ideological side as you, you aren’t going to lose many because you misrepresent people on the other side, but on the contrary it will probably make you more popular on your side.

It’s actually worse than that. It’s not just that, because of polarization, people are incentivized to misrepresent the political enemy. They are also incentivized not to defend him when he is being misrepresented. I have no doubt that, whenever someone is being misrepresented in the media by one side of the political/ideological divide, there are many people on that side can tell that he is not being portrayed honestly. But they rarely defend him, because if they did, they would immediately be seen as traitors by people on their side and criticized for spoiling their Two Minutes Hate. There is nothing that bring people together as a common enemy they can hate and they usually don’t like it when you point out that the enemy in question is not actually as bad as they make him to be. The enemy has to be as bad as they say he is, precisely because he is the enemy. What is impressive in that case is how impervious to reason people can be. They will use exactly the same kind of fallacious arguments they reject when they are being used against someone on their side.

Conservatives often complain about the habit that liberals have of throwing frivolous accusations of racism at people they don’t like, with excellent reasons because it’s true they do it all the time. But they are perfectly willing to do the same thing when given the chance. For instance, in the past few months, they have been obsessed with Ilhan Omar and don’t miss an occasion to interpret what she says in the most uncharitable way possible. In particular, they insist that totally banal statements she has made are proof of antisemitism, which is absolutely ridiculous:

But when you are a conservative and say that, you can be sure that people on your side are going to criticize you and, at the very least, you will have to waste your time replying to ridiculous arguments.

Even if you don’t really care about people criticizing you, it can be exhausting to have to reply to the same dumb arguments over and over again, especially when they are the same kind of arguments that are constantly being used against people on your side, only they apparently can’t see that when they’re used against people they don’t like. The problem is that, because of polarization, you often end up being alone in that kind of situation. The people from the other side, who agree with you on that issue, are not around to take your side or are reluctant to side with you on any issue even when they agree with you, while the people on your side hate you for what they see as a kind of treason. Since nobody likes to be in that kind of situation, especially since those debates can easily become acrimonious (especially when you are like me and have no patience for nonsense no matter where it comes from), which means that you may end up falling out with people you otherwise appreciate, there is a strong incentive not to say anything when someone on the other side is being misrepresented.

So, to summarize what I have been trying to explain in this post, I think that polarization is probably going to make misrepresentation of the outgroup more common. It changes the incentive structure in a way that makes that more likely, because it means that people are rewarded for misrepresenting their political enemies, while they are being punished for trying to correct the record. (Unless they are on the side of the person who is being misrepresented, but in that case, polarization means that people on the other side are not going to listen to them and they are the ones whose opinion needs to be corrected.) I think it’s a neglected consequence of polarization and that it’s pretty bad, but I don’t really know how it could be fixed, because I think it can only fixed by reducing polarization and I have no idea how to do that.