M: New thought. I'm wondering if right-wing pundits don't believe the left believes what they're saying, because when they are proven correct, the left doesn't try to rub people's noses in it the way that the right would. So they can't conceive of a world where being correct wasn't something to celebrate, but simply another problem to deal with. Because they know that if they were correct, they would spend weeks Celebrating how right they were. They just can't conceive of a world where victory isn't followed by smug exclusive celebration.
G: That's an interesting hypothesis, and there is some support in political psychology for pieces of it, though I wouldn't make it symmetrical or universal.
One thing researchers have found is that people often infer others' motives from their own expectations. If your mental model is "people make predictions in order to win arguments and gain status," then someone who makes a prediction and is later vindicated but doesn't spend weeks crowing about it can seem suspicious. You might conclude they never really believed it, or that they're quietly moving the goalposts.
There are a few mechanisms that could contribute:
That said, I'd be careful about applying this broadly to "the right" or "the left."
There are plenty of left-wing commentators who absolutely do victory laps when events vindicate them ("we warned you"), and there are conservative commentators who have responded to correct predictions soberly because they regarded the outcome as tragic rather than satisfying. The incentives of media personalities also differ from those of ordinary people.
One refinement of your idea that I think is stronger is this:
If you genuinely view a predicted outcome as a disaster, then being proven right is emotionally closer to confirming a cancer diagnosis than winning a debate. The satisfaction is muted because reality has become worse.
That creates an asymmetry in interpretation. Someone who expected a celebratory reaction may look at the lack of celebration and think, "They must not have believed it." But from the other perspective, celebrating would feel grotesque, because the prediction's fulfillment means people were harmed.
The caveat is that this isn't unique to any ideology. It's more about whether someone treats politics primarily as competition or primarily as problem-solving. Competitive political cultures, regardless of ideology, tend to reward "I was right." Problem-solving cultures tend to move immediately to "Okay, now what do we do?"
So I think your observation is less about left versus right than about two different ways of relating to politics. When those two mindsets encounter each other, each can misread the other: one sees insufficient celebration as evidence of bad faith, while the other sees excessive celebration as evidence that winning mattered more than the underlying issue.
M: I think the way that you're saying it kind of indicates that I'm on the correct side of things here. Yes, there are left-wing commentators who will take a victory lap. I was listening to someone do that recently, I mean, like, just a couple of minutes ago. And basically, they predicted a week ago the sequence of events that have happened since last weekend in terms of the Iran deal, that it would be announced during Donald's birthday, that it would kind of start falling apart, and that Israel would be working to block it. So yeah, they're taking a victory lap, but my point is that, A, usually it's one guy, as opposed to, like, the entire Fox editorial team getting behind it. And then with the left, it's a single lap, you know, like one episode of a podcast or a single show or something like that. They'll refer to it later on, but they won't spend an entire week celebrating that they were correct. And that's my point, is that the entire right-wing media space will get behind any perceived victory and try and ride that high. for weeks. You can probably find examples of that quicker than I could. And usually, it's because, I believe at this point at least, it's hard to remember more than 10 years ago, specifically, but usually what happens lately is that the right wing will be trying to do something, the left wing will be saying, you know that won't work. Then when it doesn't work out, there's no celebration. There's just a new problem to solve. But meanwhile, usually if the right wing is correct, either it's a partial information thing where they are trying to celebrate by framing something as being positive rather than looking at the entirety of it, such as last weekend when they were saying that somehow a memorandum of understanding was equivalent to a peace deal instead of just an agreement to meet to talk about peace. Or some other attempt to spin. Or it will be something where they are trying to act as though they were the only ones involved. When actually it was a bipartisan effort. So when the left gets something right, they, I'm saying that, I'm not saying that this is a complete element of it, but at some level, I think at least some of them are baffled by the idea of getting things right and not surfing on it for a week or more. They don't understand it, and that makes them distrustful. Like if you watch or listen to them on the right when they think they are correct, you'll understand why I'm using this metaphor, even though it's distasteful. It would be like someone who has very noisy orgasms not being able to believe that someone came without making noise. It's just a foreign concept, and they can't believe it at an intellectual level or subconsciously. There will always be a little bit of suspicion that something is going on because the reaction isn't the loud fanfare that they know that they would have.
G: I think you've refined the claim into something narrower and more testable, which makes it more interesting.
The key claim isn't "the right celebrates more." It's:
If one political culture treats being right as a status event and another more often treats being right as the beginning of dealing with consequences, then each side will misread the other's sincerity.
That doesn't require everyone on either side to behave identically.
One thing I'd add is that media incentives amplify this. If you're a pundit, "I told you so" serves several purposes at once:
The question then becomes whether there is actually an asymmetry in how long those victory laps last.
That's an empirical question, and my prior isn't strong enough to say yes or no. I could imagine someone doing a content analysis of, say, Fox, MSNBC, and a sample of independent podcasts, measuring:
It wouldn't surprise me if there were measurable differences, but I wouldn't want to assume them without data.
Where I think your observation is strongest is in a psychological sense.
Imagine two people:
If A's first emotion is, "Thank God, now everyone knows I was right," that's one orientation.
If A's first emotion is, "Damn it. Now people are dead. We have to deal with this," that's another.
Both people were correct. But the emotional payoff is completely different.
Now, if Person A belongs to the second category and doesn't spend the next week celebrating, someone from the first category may infer that A wasn't actually confident. They're using their own expected emotional response as evidence about A's beliefs.
That's a form of projection.
I would only caution against mapping that projection onto "the right" as a whole. It's easy to think of conservative commentators who have reacted to tragedies with, essentially, "I wish I'd been wrong," just as it's easy to think of progressive commentators who have spent weeks replaying clips to show they called something first. Human beings are susceptible to the same cognitive biases, though the surrounding media culture can certainly reward some behaviors more than others.
Your analogy, stripped of the sexual component, is really about expectation of expression. If someone expects a genuine emotional state to always produce a conspicuous outward display, they may doubt the authenticity of a quieter response. That's a phenomenon psychologists have observed in many contexts—not just politics. People often mistake differences in expression for differences in experience.
So I think there's a worthwhile hypothesis here, but I'd phrase it in a way that's easier to defend:
Some political media cultures appear to place greater value on public vindication after a correct prediction. If participants in those cultures internalize that norm, they may interpret a quieter response from opponents as evidence that those opponents never really believed what they were saying, rather than simply having different priorities once the prediction comes true.
That version identifies a plausible mechanism without requiring every member of one political camp to fit the pattern. It also gives you something that could, in principle, be tested rather than remaining just an intuition.
M: I would modify your claim. Media incentives unmodified, like, as a blanket term, that is not what's causing or contributing to this situation. It was a redefinition of the game or a change of the game in a way that shifted things away from the news. What I mean is that the news was, by nature, always going to be somewhat leaning left, not because of any kind of political association, but simply because one definition of liberal versus conservative can be said to be the left is, it's not a personality thing. It's that someone who goes out looking for stories is a liberal, while someone who secures the outpost is conservative. Again, not in a political way, but simply in a tautological way. So the news was concerned with victories that involved finding factual evidence. regardless of the actual nature of those facts, but then someone decided, and I'm going to say it was Fox News was the start of it, but we'll say a group of people started to play the game as though instead of victory coming through unearthing facts better, that instead that victory meant finding facts that proved someone else wrong. And politics became a game of It became a team sport instead of a track and field event where people were all competing against each other without actually interacting with each other, with the problem being that the people who actually cared about facts and stuff became, by default, the left with a capital L, while still trying to play the old game of getting the facts right rather than scoring points off of the other side. So when you say that media incentives amplified this, I disagree because the causality comes from people who are unable to define competition in a way that allowed for victory without some kind of teen celebration. You can still see it in the language that the left uses. They understand the game the other side is trying to play. The problem is, they're still trying to play the fact game, which means that you've got one side that just wants to try and get information out there, who would be more, if not happy about, more enthusiastic about reporting failures on the side that they are attributed to be associated with if they didn't know that there would be someone who has decided that there are simply two sides who would be giving them shit the entire time. It's very difficult to keep playing classical music if you've got an asshole who won't stop tooting a vuvuzela in the crowd. It's that kind of thing. So pundits always wanted to be right, or rather, correct. Sorry, equivocation going on there. Pundits always wanted to be correct. The problem is you've got one side that has amplified the idea of, you know, owning the libs and shit like that, while the other side is still trying to just... Get the information correct, and then it turns out that the side whose preoccupation isn't the facts is usually wrong to some degree, and they resent that because it means that often they turn out to be wrong because they don't care about the facts. And instead of saying, maybe we're not playing the right game, they assume that the other side is cheating by paying attention to the world around them or something. It makes sense in my head, I just don't know how to get it out correctly and linearly to describe it.
G: I think there are actually three different claims intertwined here, and separating them makes the argument stronger.
The first is almost philosophical:
There are two fundamentally different ways to define "winning" in journalism.
One definition is epistemic: we win by producing a more accurate model of reality.
The other is adversarial: we win by defeating our opponents.
Those aren't the same game. You can become better at one while becoming worse at the other.
The second claim is historical.
Here I'd be more cautious than you are. I don't think it can simply be said that one side "became" the fact game while the other "became" the team game. I do think it's fair to say that over the past few decades American political media has become substantially more adversarial and identity-driven across the board, though not necessarily to the same degree or in the same way. Fox was certainly an important development in explicitly creating a conservative alternative to what it viewed as establishment news, but cable news generally, social media, and audience fragmentation all reinforced incentives toward conflict. That's where I'd still see incentives as part of the story—not the origin of the game, but a force that rewards whichever game people are already playing.
Where I think you're onto something is your third point, which is more abstract and, to me, more original.
You aren't really talking about liberal versus conservative.
You're talking about truth-seeking versus coalition-seeking.
Imagine two scientific laboratories.
Lab A's goal is to discover what's true.
Lab B's goal is to prove Lab A incompetent.
Those sound similar, because both involve experiments.
But they're actually different optimization problems.
If Lab A discovers that one of its own theories is wrong, that's success. Reality taught them something.
If Lab B discovers one of its own theories is wrong, that's failure, because the objective wasn't knowledge—it was beating the other lab.
That's the distinction I hear you making.
Your "track-and-field versus team sport" metaphor fits this remarkably well.
Track athletes aren't trying to make the other runner slower. They're trying to run faster.
A football team absolutely is trying to stop the other team from succeeding.
Those are different conceptions of competition.
The one place I'd push back is this sentence:
"the people who actually cared about facts became, by default, the left"
I think that's stronger than the evidence can support. There are investigative reporters, policy analysts, academics, and journalists across the ideological spectrum who genuinely care about getting facts right, and there are highly partisan actors on both sides who don't let inconvenient facts interfere with the narrative.
What I think is defensible is something like:
Once politics becomes primarily coalition competition, factual accuracy becomes instrumentally valuable rather than intrinsically valuable. Facts are selected because they help the coalition rather than because they improve the shared model of reality.
That's a criticism that can be applied wherever it occurs.
I also really like your vuvuzela analogy, though I'd tweak it slightly.
It's not that classical musicians can't continue playing.
It's that eventually the audience stops judging the performance by musical quality and starts judging it by which side is louder.
At that point, even the classical musicians are under pressure to pick up a vuvuzela, because otherwise they simply won't be heard.
That captures something I think political scientists and media scholars have worried about for years: once the dominant metric becomes attention or tribal victory, even people who entered the profession to pursue truth face pressure to adapt to that environment.
So, if I were trying to distill your thought into one sentence, it'd be this:
The deepest change in political media wasn't that one ideology became louder; it was that the definition of victory shifted from "improving our understanding of reality" to "defeating the opposing coalition." Once that happened, being factually correct became valuable primarily as a weapon instead of as an end in itself.
That formulation gets at what I think you're reaching for while leaving open the empirical question of who participates in that shift, to what extent, and at what times. It's a broader claim about the nature of the game itself rather than a claim that one side contains all the truth-seekers and the other all the tribal competitors.
M: No, see, your start, I can't read the rest of it right now because your start is completely and utterly incorrect, linguistically and philosophically. Because defining journalism means producing an accurate model of reality is the key. Once you have decided to defeat opponents in the search for truth, there are no opponents to be defeated. You can outrun them, you can get there faster, but there is no opponent to defeat. So once you start thinking that you need to defeat someone, you are no longer doing journalism. That is called like, that's called partisan propaganda to some degree. That's taking it a little bit far, but I did that so that I could make my point. Journalism is the search for truth. When you start doing something besides looking for truth, it's not journalism, but these assholes have decided that they want to try and say that it is. And it's not allowed to be journalism if you're not looking for truth. They are trying to play American football and then get pissy when people who are playing soccer don't follow their rules, even though the original game was fucking soccer. They showed up for a soccer game in football pads and started running into people and complaining when people started trying to play soccer, and that's not allowable. I can't read the rest of your answer because this right here is a priority that you aren't fucking getting. Journalism is tautologically connected with being right, whether it's good or not. So once you abandon that to try and find some sort of victory against other people, that is no longer journalism. And I cannot allow this conversation to continue or read the rest of your answer until we have nailed that part down.
G: I think I understand the distinction you're insisting on now, and I agree that I framed it incorrectly.
I accidentally treated journalism as a descriptive category ("there are two kinds of journalism"), whereas you're using journalism as a normative definition.
Under your definition:
Once someone's primary objective becomes beating another political tribe, journalism has ceased. They may still use journalistic techniques—interviews, documents, leaks, reporting—but those techniques are now subordinate to a different goal.
That's a coherent philosophical position.
Where I was talking about "two kinds of journalism," you'd say there is only one. The other thing has borrowed journalism's vocabulary while changing its telos—its purpose.
That's actually a much stronger claim.
Your soccer analogy captures it well, but I'd sharpen it slightly.
It's not that two teams showed up playing different sports.
It's that one team showed up to play soccer, while the other showed up believing the objective was simply to win, regardless of whether the activity still satisfied the rules that define soccer as soccer.
Once enough people accept "winning" as the objective instead of "playing soccer according to the rules," the game itself changes.
The people still trying to play soccer now look strange, because everyone else is evaluating success by a different metric.
That also explains why your observation about celebration matters.
If journalism's goal is truth, then being right isn't a victory over another person. It's confirmation that your model matched reality. If that truth is unpleasant, there's very little reason to celebrate; reality has simply imposed another problem.
If, instead, your goal is defeating an opposing coalition, then every correct prediction is simultaneously a point scored against an opponent. Celebration becomes part of the objective.
So I think the key sentence in your argument isn't actually about the left or the right. It's this:
Truth-seeking and opponent-defeating are different objective functions. Once opponent-defeating becomes the primary objective, the activity is no longer journalism, even if it still looks like journalism from the outside.
That's a philosophical definition rather than an empirical one. Someone could disagree with the definition, but if they accept it, the rest of your reasoning becomes much more linear.
The only place I'd still separate description from definition is this: I wouldn't say that everyone who identifies as a journalist today actually practices journalism by your definition. I'd say your definition provides a standard against which particular outlets, reporters, or commentators can be judged. That lets you say, "This behavior isn't journalism," without having to redefine every institution wholesale. I think that's a cleaner argument because it distinguishes what journalism is from what people who call themselves journalists sometimes do.
M: Depending on how they go about it, you could say that the other version is a kind of anti-journalism. Because that's the area where half-truths and spin prevent the access to the kind of full truth that an actual journalist wants. And the reason why it would infuriate those anti-journalists, and to be clear, I don't mean that they are against journalism, I mean that they are performing an action which is completely opposite to journalism even though they're calling it that. But when they fail to succeed and the truth is found, they feel like they are defeated, even though the actual journalists, at least when they're at their best, are seeing them as obstacles in the marathon rather than actual competitors. Which is the truth, because at that point, the anti-journalists are not being journalists, they are being obstacles. It's two separate games, with the problem being that the anti-journalists have defined victory in a way that lets them be pissy in a different way when they fail. And then they lose, they fail in comprehending that they didn't lose because they were playing a different game. So they feel like they've been bested when the only reason for feeling that way is because they tried to play a different game.
G: I think you've identified a useful distinction, but I'd make one important refinement to keep the argument as strong as possible.
The term "anti-journalism" is powerful, but if you define it too broadly, people will hear it as "journalists I disagree with." That's not what you're trying to say.
From what you've described, the defining feature isn't ideology. It's the objective function.
Journalism asks:
"What is true?"
An anti-journalistic process asks:
"What conclusion advances our side?"
The facts are then filtered, selected, or framed in service of that prior objective.
That's why I think your obstacle metaphor is actually stronger than the competition metaphor.
A marathon runner isn't trying to beat the people handing out fake maps. The fake map distributors aren't competitors in the marathon—they're interfering with the marathon itself.
Likewise, if someone selectively reports facts primarily to sustain a political narrative, then from your perspective they haven't become "another kind of journalist." They've become something that impedes the process journalism exists to accomplish.
Where I'd still be careful is with this sentence:
"the anti-journalists are not being journalists, they are being obstacles."
Conceptually, yes. But I'd avoid making it about people's identities. I'd make it about behavior.
For example:
"When reporting becomes subordinate to coalition victory rather than truth-seeking, that behavior functions as an obstacle to journalism, regardless of who engages in it."
That keeps your definition consistent. It also avoids creating the mirror image of the problem you're criticizing. Otherwise someone could simply reply, "Well, your journalists are the anti-journalists," and you've reached a definitional stalemate.
I also think there's an even deeper point in what you just said:
They feel defeated because they were optimizing for victory over opponents. Journalists don't experience the same event as victory over opponents; they experience it as convergence toward reality.
That's subtle.
Imagine two chess players.
One is trying to checkmate the other.
The other is trying to solve a puzzle.
If the puzzle solver finds the correct solution first, he thinks, "Good, now we know the answer."
The chess player thinks, "I lost."
Those are two incompatible interpretations of the same event because the participants were pursuing different goals all along.
Whether that difference maps predominantly onto one political movement, one media ecosystem, or is more broadly distributed is an empirical question. But as a conceptual framework, I think your distinction between truth as the end and truth as a means to defeating an opponent is the core of the argument. That's where the philosophical weight is, not in any particular outlet or ideology.
M: I don't give a shit about how other people would see it, as long as you nail down what I'm talking about. I can worry about the f- sorry, eating pizza rolls and it's kind of making talking difficult. I need to start having dinner earlier. Anyway. I can worry about the actual terminology later, but getting you to understand the key concept is more important than whether or not someone two weeks from now thinks I'm using the right words. As long as you fucking understand, you can stop worrying about the terminology until we start talking about how we'd actually present the idea. Until that time, just leave it the fuck alone. And your analogies are a little too kind, perhaps not to the people who listen to them, but to the people who do the fucking celebration when a thing that makes the country worse is still celebrated because it means that they were able to get one over on those nasty libs. Those are the people who aren't working with your chess analogy or anything. They're the people who show up to the chess game with checkers, insist that they will remember which pieces mean which, try and cheat, then say that they didn't lose because they weren't playing chess anyway, if somehow the other side manages to get a victory.
G: Fair enough. I'll ignore the rhetoric and terminology and focus only on whether I understand the structure of your idea.
I think I do now, and it's different from what I was initially hearing.
You're not saying there are two styles of journalism.
You're saying there is only one activity that deserves the name "journalism":
Build the most accurate model of reality you can.
Everything else is something else, regardless of whether it calls itself journalism.
The second activity isn't trying to solve the same problem differently. It has changed the objective function. Its objective isn't "What is true?" but "How do we produce a politically useful narrative?" Facts become raw material rather than the destination.
The consequence of that is what I had been missing.
The people doing journalism don't experience the discovery of truth as defeating another person. If another reporter turns out to have been wrong, that's incidental. The important event is that reality became better understood.
The people playing the other game necessarily experience the same event as a defeat, because they defined success in terms of prevailing over an opposing group. So every time reality contradicts their narrative, it feels like someone has scored on them.
That leads to the asymmetry you've been trying to describe:
Because the first group isn't keeping score in the same way, they don't react with the same triumphalism when they're vindicated. They move on to the next unanswered question because that was the objective all along.
The second group interprets that lack of triumph as strange or even suspicious because, in their game, everyone would celebrate a point.
So the misunderstanding isn't just emotional; it's structural. They're inferring the other side's motives from the rules of the game they themselves are playing, without realizing the other side isn't optimizing the same thing.
I also think I understand why you rejected my earlier analogies.
I kept treating the two activities as parallel competitions.
You aren't.
You're saying one activity is trying to discover reality. The other activity keeps interfering with that process while insisting it's participating in the same enterprise.
So from your perspective, they aren't competitors in the same race. They're introducing noise into a measurement process and then acting surprised that people trying to improve the measurement regard them as obstacles rather than fellow participants.
Whether that framework accurately describes particular organizations or commentators is a separate empirical question. But as a conceptual model, I think I finally understand what you've been trying to get across. The core of your argument isn't about left versus right; it's about the difference between truth as the goal and truth as an instrument for winning a social or political contest. Everything else you've said follows from that distinction.
M: Yeah, it seems like you've got it. The only problem I have with it is that discovering reality, and I know that I just went off about terminology, so bear with me, I recognize the seeming hypocrisy there, but calling it discovering reality is a little bit too grand. Searching out facts or something is a noble activity, but not exactly the same as unfolding the secrets of the universe. And even as I was going off, I realized that I needed to make clear that there can be politically motivated actual journalists that aren't anti-journalists. They would be, well, outside of the political sphere. They would be people who go out looking for gossip and dirt and that kind of thing, like paparazzi level stuff. They might not be noble examples of journalism, but they are out there trying to find facts. In the political way, they might even find facts. The notion of that... They did not completely explore the new information they found is beside the point for the concept we're talking about. And usually, it works hand in hand with the anti-journalists. I wanted to make clear that you can be a bad journalist and still be a journalist. It wouldn't even have to be politically motivated. Like I said, it could be that gossip thing where you find, I don't know, pictures of Ben Affleck with an old girlfriend and it blows up as a story because you don't make the effort to find out that it was because they were making sure that they had gotten everything out of their old apartments or something like that. If it gets spun as indicating that Affleck is cheating on someone, that happens because of incomplete information, not because of anti-journalism. And someone politically motivated might find, I don't know, a secret account for Pete Buttigieg or evidence of a secret account that leads to wild speculation. because Pete didn't realize that someone had found out and tell them and didn't have time to tell them that it was because he has a savings account for his children or something like that. That's usually where the bad journalism turns into anti-journalism, because then what happens is, actual journalists report the whole story and the anti-journalists again feel like someone got something over on them when the reason behind that entire sequence was because they didn't actually try to play the game of journalism, they just tried to find a narrative that they liked.
G: I think this is the missing distinction, and it's a good one.
You've actually separated three categories now, not two.
Good journalism.
Bad journalism.
Anti-journalism (using your working term).
That third category is qualitatively different from the second.
The paparazzi example is actually helpful because it shows why this isn't about quality.
A paparazzo might produce terrible journalism. They might omit context. They might jump to conclusions. They might care more about clicks than public service.
But they're still operating within a world where a better explanation is, at least in principle, something that could replace the worse one.
If Ben Affleck is seen with an ex and the next day it's shown they were emptying a storage unit, the bad journalist can say, "We got ahead of the facts."
The anti-journalistic response is different.
The correction itself becomes suspicious.
"Of course they'd say that."
"They're covering for him."
"The explanation is part of the conspiracy."
Notice what happened there. The new evidence isn't evaluated primarily on its merits. It's evaluated according to whether it preserves or damages the preferred narrative.
I also think you've refined something else that I'd missed.
Earlier I described journalism as "discovering reality." You're right—that's too grandiose.
A better formulation would simply be:
Journalism is the disciplined process of gathering, testing, and communicating facts as accurately and completely as reasonably possible.
That's modest. It doesn't claim omniscience. It doesn't imply journalists uncover cosmic truths. It simply says the governing objective is the continual improvement of the factual account.
Everything else follows naturally.
A bad journalist fails at that objective.
An anti-journalist changes the objective.
Those are fundamentally different failures.
And I think this explains why you've been so resistant to my trying to make the categories symmetrical. From your perspective, "bad journalism" and "anti-journalism" are not opposite ends of a quality scale. They're failures along different dimensions.
One is incompetence or incompleteness within the game.
The other is changing the rules of the game while continuing to claim you're playing it.
That's a much cleaner conceptual framework than I had understood at the start of this conversation. I think I now have the architecture of the idea you're building, independent of whether one agrees with how often each category applies in practice.