Dumpster Diving for the News

One of my mentors, Ron Dart, made a humorous comment about the propensity for certain people to read odd religious literature in the search for "truth." He called it dumpster diving. In the same way people "dumpster dive" some news outlets looking for the latest political or world news. The effect is the same in either case. Some people find a piece of crap, and decide to eat it.

Let me give you an example from someone who I usually agree with, Paul Craig Roberts. It was noticed that Belgium was buying a lot of US treasury debt all out of proportion to what it should have been able to buy. Obviously a straw buyer was involved. The usual explanation was that the Chinese or the Russians were using Belgium to hide their US bond purchases. Roberts, a former assistant Treasury secretary and former editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal, came to the bizarre conclusion that the Federal Reserve was the real buyer. No proof was offered, and in fact despite Roberts' insistence, such a purchase, if secret, would have been illegal. Here is his defense of this. 

With the recent chaos in China and the need to sell treasury bonds, it is now known that it was China who bought the U.S. Bonds through Belgium, as it sold lots of bonds to protect its currency, the yuan. Roberts was wrong, in fact he was stupidly wrong. Anyone who paid attention to him was dumpster diving for truth.

One should only read traditional news outlets. Well, er ... not so much either. They are better, but the way traditional news is manipulated is that the "gates" of the nightly news casts are controlled by people who think the same way, and the result is that unless a story fits the meme that is being advanced it does not get broadcast.

In the case of Roberts, the issue involved is called confirmation bias. Since a large number of readers of Roberts, maybe most of them, despise the Federal Reserve, anything said against it will tend to be believed. Since I am suspicious of the Fed, I need to be more careful than usual when I read about it. Roberts' error in the article on the bond purchases was an example of confirmation bias on Roberts' part.

So the only solution is to understand that we have confirmations bias tendencies. The only solution is to read different viewpoints on any subject one is interested in. While our individual biases will still exist, if we read widely, we might better recognize them and not deceive ourselves.