Chris Peterson

This video of Matt Damon responding to a reporter from Reason.TV, an arm of the libertarian Reason Magazine, has been making the rounds today.

Put the video itself aside for a moment. Because what’s really interesting are the reactions to it.

See, the video above was posted to YouTube by GLteachers, the YouTube account of a Minnesotan teacher’s union, presumably because the teachers believed, as did I, that Damon won this particular exchange by speaking compellingly to the integrity of public school teachers and the frustrating tendency to reduce talk of teachers to platitudes about incentives.

But this video was itself an excerpt of a longer one posted by ReasonTV of the rally, compiled of several interviews. Given Reason’s ideological orientation – and the reporter’s confrontational tone with Damon – this was apparently done in order to editorialize, for their viewers, how wrong or ridiculous ardent supporters of public education are.

When I edited my high school newspaper I remember being admonished to just report the unbiased facts. Of course, the “reporting the unbiased facts” is a conceptually incoherent ideal. It’s not only unachievable, it doesn’t make any sense. Being an editor means imparting bias. Imparting bias – at the very least a bias as to what is newsworthy and why – is an editor’s function. It’s what editing is. News, like the law, is a bramble bush; a skilled editor, like a skilled lawyer, is just choosing what to be bound by, and what to escape from.

But what struck me about the reactions – the complete and utter opposite reactions – to this video was something else about the process of digesting information. Even after the editorial spin has been spun, different people, coming from different perspectives (cough hermeneutics cough), will understand the same content in wildly different ways. Put thusly, the observation is obvious. But this is one of clearest practical demonstrations of the principle I’ve ever seen. Two different groups, watching the same video, coming to wildly different conclusions.

Cass Sunstein worried that the Internet would fracture deliberative democracy by splintering the common civic experience into echo chambers and radical cells. He feared that the “Daily Me” – news and views tailored to your own preexisting interests and beliefs – would make true conversation impossible. If folks don’t have (and can’t operate from) the same facts, his argument goes, they can never even hope to come to some sort of resolution.

Sunstein wasn’t wrong. But he might have been irrelevant. Studies have shown confirmation bias to be so strong that, when presented with information demonstrating popular political misconceptions to be factually incorrect, subjects’ belief in the validity of their misperceptions strengthened. Put another way: showing people that what they believe politically is incorrect doesn’t make them deliberatively and thoughtfully reconsider their beliefs. It makes them double down on their wrongness.

I don’t think you can find a better example of the power of confirmation bias – that is, the power of prior beliefs to drive different understanding and interpretations of data, even objectively identical data – than the two vastly different interpretations of this video.

That said, I personally am of course completely unbiased and completely correct. I am also an ardent supporter of public education – the correct position – and so I thought that Damon got the better of the ReasonTV reporter.

And, because I’m never above snark when it comes to libertarians who hate on public education, I would also note that Reason is thus not only wrong on the facts (i.e. the value of public education), but also wrong on the commentary about the facts (i.e. the argument the Reason reporter lost to Damon), and ALSO wrong on the metacommentary about the commentary about the facts (i.e. whether or not the reporter won or lost, as evidenced by their decision to post the video to their website).

In a Twitter mood today. #ReasonTV #AnalysisFail