Little tidbits that an ideological narrative spinner drops so the reader can orient against the subject of the piece, even if - or especially if - the article is otherwise neutral or charitable.
little sidebar in the New York Times magazine interview with Pinker where they footnote a few topics and names mentioned. The footnotes are mostly irrelevant to the story (which is why they have to be footnotes to begin with - they’re clearly tangents) and only really serve to backfill the reader about into how they should feel about the noted item. Nozick’s name comes up, there’s a footnote about how he’s written pro-libertarian works. Pinker’s history of run-ins with SJWs comes up, there’s a footnote mentioning how there have been a large number of complaints that something he write is racist.
When papers like this are writing about topics entirely within their ideological narrative angle, they don’t provide these footnotes. If the reader fills in the space of ignorance with in-narrative assumptions, that’s fine by them. But in a case when they’re purporting to be charitable to “another side” they make sure to also highlight a few details that might help orient the reader against the subject. So if these suspected maybe they didn’t like this topic, here are a few good confirmatory pieces of red meat to help bias yourself.
I tweeted this and also put it on bitclout around 2021-09-13
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this also works across time. priming for how you should react to things in the future. like this: https://apple.news/AWV7MQn_mQLuiBfHXITR0IA “people are going to be irresponsible in the future, here’s how you should feel about it when you see it”