Media Consumption, Media Bias, and You

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

I wasn't really going to post about this until I read this piece, which essentially tells us that watching dumb television shows actively makes us dumber. It kind of brought this back in the forefront, and so I'm diving in.

I just finished reading Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind by Tim Groseclose, a professor (with a PhD!) of American politics over at UCLA. The book, which is an expansion and mainstreaming of a couple peer-reviewed journal articles he co-authored, not only attempts to quantify the bias of the mainstream media, but also quantifies the "political quotient" of many politicians, personalities, and news organizations to try and get a baseline of sort as to where the true political center is and where the slant resides. (As an aside, you can find your own political quotient here - I was, unsurprisingly, a 5.4).

What I found most interesting, however, was not the idea that the media is biased, and largely in a leftward direction. The interesting point to me was the why that Groseclose was able to quantify. It is not so much that a certain media outlet is dishonest as much as a media outlet may be more or less likely to report the facts that bolster a certain argument. One issue he spends significant time with was the Bush tax cuts - quoting from his website, I'll note that one of the methods he used to help get his numbers was this issue:

A third method notes two equally-true sets of facts about the Bush tax cuts: (i) that in dollar terms, the rich received a disproportionate share of the cuts, and (ii) that the cuts made the tax system more progressive—that is, after the cuts took place, the share of the total taxes that the rich would pay actually increased. Liberal politicians and media outlets tended to report fact (i) relatively more, while conservative politicians and media outlets tended to report (ii) relatively more. The third method notes the relative frequencies that an outlet reported fact (i) or (ii).

When the media is slanted so far to the left, you're more likely to hear point one more than point two, which means that, as Groseclose was able to quantify, point one gains more traction, as does the liberal point of view on the issue. Any number of topics (he deals with five or six in the book) follow this trend, and add to the problem, especially since we tend to reflexively view the media as objective or, worse for many, conservative.

This is why Journolist was truly such an issue last year, and why the overwhelming ideological similarity in newsrooms and in the mainstream media overall is an issue for our ability to remain fully informed. It's not that the media is generally out to mislead, but rather that the media isn't even aware it's doing it. Without dissenting voices in the newsroom, the media misses stories (such as the "Flying Imams") or misses key components to stories that people should hear in order to get a truly balanced view, never mind receive a viewpoint that is truly closer to where the political center sits.

Comments

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

All I knows is what others say about what's in the papers. And if I listen to Right-Wingers the media's a left-over relic of Soviet agitprop destroying the inherent goodness of democracy to replace it with Soviet-style Gulag and central planning. If I listen to Left-Wing friends the media's a corporate oligarchy which has no concern whatsoever for any democracy save that of dollar diplomacy. It cannot be both at once, therefore I give credence to the notion that the media is in fact rather less biased than people think it is.

As to the view of things that's more realistic, most media organizations are run by corporations, for profit. This to me hardly inclines them to be a stronghold of leftism of any sort, and any claim that they are relies on a lot more evidence than is usually stated, and what's stated in this guy's case is not evidence that any of them advocate actual Leftist policies.

The Wikipedia article you list there also notes no less than 37 articles about the supposedly unmentioned incident, and in general this reflects a paradox that stabs directly into the heart of conservative ideology: that present-day US Right-Wing views represent the view of the majority of the American people, representing the richest, most affluent, most privileged section of the population and yet this group is repressed by a conspiracy and cabal of people who have no such power to repress them.

Don't get me wrong, present-day progressivism has its own deep, inherent flaws (the greatest of which is the simple inability and unwillingness to do the hard political work that would make their ideas viable politically, and if only one side does that, well.....and then attributing that to some corporate conspiracy that ignores the dysfunctional political organization of progressivism and refusing to change any of it), but this reflects that US Right-Wing politics these days is one giant-ass conspiracy theory that comes in a secular and in a religious variant.

TL;DR: Cry moar.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

In fact, I'm going to go so far as to state where I think actual media bias is: what keeps the corporate leadership that owns the media in the black. Sensationalism and the kind of stories that get cheap, easy, high-quantity viewership is what matters. I think another factor contributing to this "bias" is the fragmentation of overall media. None of the 24 hour news channels would have lasted in an era before the present with the number of viewers they have, nowadays the potential for a fragmented set of media creates a number of separate, parallel, and sometimes overlapping echo chambers that ensure that one group of people reads the Drudge Report and Little Green Footballs, watches FOX News, and listens to Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage, another checks Daily KOS, watches MSNBC, and listens to Air America, both of them alike assume that their own tightly-contained blocs represent more than they actually do, neither bothers to actually see if this is what really is.

If we want the answer to the problem, it's a combination of media focus on sensationalism, as that sells better than common sense or positive news, and a combination of ever-fragmenting and balkanizing media that create a great variety of echo chambers in all media, not just in newspapers, radio, television, the Internet, and so on, but instead an all-encompassing potential to be absorbed in an endless strand of ideological feedback that produces a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism that creates an East is East and West is West pattern.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

As to the view of things that's more realistic, most media organizations are run by corporations, for profit. This to me hardly inclines them to be a stronghold of leftism of any sort, and any claim that they are relies on a lot more evidence than is usually stated, and what's stated in this guy's case is not evidence that any of them advocate actual Leftist policies.

Groseclose actually addresses that a few times. His argument about it, outside of the fact that the statistics simply don't support such a claim, is how it would work in the opposite direction - a liberal owner trying to skew the conservative reporters more liberal. It's not as easy to do as one would think, and it is severely cramped by the available pool of reporters who openly admit they're left wing.

The Wikipedia article you list there also notes no less than 37 articles about the supposedly unmentioned incident, and in general this reflects a paradox that stabs directly into the heart of conservative ideology: that present-day US Right-Wing views represent the view of the majority of the American people, representing the richest, most affluent, most privileged section of the population and yet this group is repressed by a conspiracy and cabal of people who have no such power to repress them.

The Flying Imams story was only picked up much later, often citing the original Star-Tribune story broken by the paper's conservative reporter "experiment." Many of the citations you're speaking of are about the aftermath, all of which was caused by a story the rest of the media largely missed.

[soliloquy76.livejournal.com]

Do you think the bias is deliberate? Or just the result of seeing the world through a particular lens? Not that this is a justification for bias, since any journalist worth his salt should be trained how to avoid this.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

The book has largely convinced me that it's a latter issue, and one that you would think could be trained. For the most part, I don't think it's deliberate - it's just that many reporters wouldn't even think to, to go back to the tax cut example, highlight the progressivity of the bill because the story, to them, is the disproportionate impact.

And vice-versa, for that matter.

[politikitty.livejournal.com]

I've been curious about the book. I read a few of his papers on legislative theory, and walked away with a high opinion of him. A political screed seemed out of place.

That said, studies on the political defenses people put in place make me less concerned about bias in the media than I once was. People read the news with their own biases, not the biases of the writers or editors.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

I've been curious about the book. I read a few of his papers on legislative theory, and walked away with a high opinion of him. A political screed seemed out of place.

The book is very well done. He dots his is and crosses his ts almost to a fault sometimes because of the inevitable backlash. But even he noted - the work has been peer reviewed, accepted into important journals, and no academic (or anyone, for that matter) is stepping forward to dispute his findings.

I don't know if the way he did it is perfect, mind you, but it's a surprisingly solid way to do things, and he even runs different numbers along the way to show how the differentials largely wouldn't matter.

That said, studies on the political defenses people put in place make me less concerned about bias in the media than I once was. People read the news with their own biases, not the biases of the writers or editors.

A very fair point. The problem, however, is when those biases cross with other biases - that's when you get the "reality has a liberal bias"/"the media is nothing more than a house organ for the left" craziness. A more balanced media would dampen the extremes.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

You're so post-modern :P

[onefatmusicnerd.livejournal.com]

Groseclose has been working on this for about a decade. I know I cited a Groseclose and Milyo (2004?) presentation in my dissertation. I was not impressed at the time, his measurements seemed a little simplistic. But, that often happens in the house of rational choice.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

Media advocates for whatever issue it depicts, yes.

Television will warp your mind. Reading will warp your mind. Experience will warp your mind. We're caught in a mind warp!

You certainly hear us lefties making similar arguments. (The "worse" population!)

From the prospective of antiwar, the American media was certainly pro-war in the run up to Iraq. FAIR did a study of news reports on major outlets PBS, CBS, NBC, and they showed that over 90% of the coverage was pro war, pentagon, mic folks. Only a few antiwar voices run at 2am...

Then you had stuff like this (http://www.democracynow.org/2004/8/13/washington_post_admits_it_buried_anti):

The Washington Post yesterday published a major 3,000 word front-page story examining how the paper downplayed critics of the Iraq war before the U.S. attacked lat year.

Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks revealed how in October 2002 editors killed a piece of his titled "Doubts" that outlined how many senior Pentagon officials were reluctant about plans to attack Iraq. Ricks also added "The paper was not front-paging stuff. Administration assertions were on the front page. Things that challenged the administration were on A18 on Sunday or A24 on Monday. There was an attitude among editors: Look, we’re going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?"

I'm failing to see the liberal influence.

The SF Chronicle, on the first day of the Iraq war, showed a picture of an American Iraqi man kissing a picture of President Bush. They didn't show the 14 year old girl who was wounded nor her aunt who was killed in that very first missile attack nope.

Guess I'm not seeing the liberal influence much, not when Jesus, Patriotism, or the American military are concerned. What I do see is the money influence.

Its rare for anyone to bite the hand that feeds them.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

From the prospective of antiwar, the American media was certainly pro-war in the run up to Iraq.

I'm not sure we can say that, and the FAIR study gives me significant pause in adopting such a point of view that they share. I hesitate to go much further, as I haven't done much in the way of study on this myself, but, anecdotally, I would have appreciated the media not being so skeptical of it for the entire runup.

The piece Democracy Now (speaking of biased media) is here (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A58127-2004Aug11?language=printer), and is actually a great example of what Groseclose is talking about - the liberals at the Post, especially Woodward and Kurtz, saw the media not as someone who needs to be offering straight information, but the information that they deem important. The complaint is not so much that the pieces weren't balanced - in fact, they were probably more balanced without this piece - but that they didn't reflect enough of the liberal viewpoint, even when said viewpoint is the dominant one.

The SF Chronicle, on the first day of the Iraq war, showed a picture of an American Iraqi man kissing a picture of President Bush. They didn't show the 14 year old girl who was wounded nor her aunt who was killed in that very first missile attack nope.

In this case, you're also echoing Groseclose's sentiments, but with the media expressing a more conservative point of view. That the media may not always be 100% liberal in their stories does not change their overall slant or bias, especially in areas such as Iraq where support was broad.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

Perhaps it's silly to be looking for left/right biases anyway; and look to the bias in particular issues. The US political left was certainly not anti-war in the early 2000s (nor the 1990s). Anti-war is a fringe issue, possibly because of the media (but I suspect more so because the US is a militaristic nation). There is probably an argument to be made that a) most readers don't want to be hearing about how the USA is not the most asskicking nation on Earth who can take down anyone with three soldiers and a donkey as well as b) the military is a big industry and most media outlets are part of conglomerates that also have their fingers in military pies. Maybe, as Jeff suggests, orders don't come down from on high as to what to report (although the evidence seems to me that that's precisely what Murdoch did, and he has 75% of the print media in my country, so that's a lot of pull), but pressures can certainly be put on in terms of advertising and hiring decisions.

[ytterbius.livejournal.com]

"(i) that in dollar terms, the rich received a disproportionate share of the cuts, and (ii) that the cuts made the tax system more progressive—that is, after the cuts took place, the share of the total taxes that the rich would pay actually increased."

This would have to be explained in more detail.

It can't just be simplified to such an extent.

For one thing, the tax cuts were on a deficit, so the total bill wasn't actually being paid. So those costs were shifted down the road (and were greater with interest).

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

This would have to be explained in more detail.

It can't just be simplified to such an extent.

The point of using that was more based on media discussions than anything else. The ideas are fairly simple, but they are two very simple facts about the tax cuts.

[devil-ad-vocate.livejournal.com]

"It's not that the media is generally out to mislead, but rather that the media isn't even aware it's doing it."

My experience in a Journalism school graduate program - and thirty-five years working with media people - leads me to believe that your statement is ridiculous.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

IAWTC

[eracerhead.livejournal.com]

IF the PQ test questions are any indication of the scientific quality of the book, then I'll pass, thank you.

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

Creating a scale of measure like this is almost always going to be subject to substantial criticism...unsurprisingly it is not hard to find credentialed critique of this methodology. (http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2005/12/the_problems_wi.html)

I think the actual test of this will be to tweak certain assumptions of how to compile this scale and then see how much, if any, that changes the final results. You would want a scale like this to survive minor challenges to how it gets to the end results.

[onefatmusicnerd.livejournal.com]

I am not comfortable with this, and most discussions of bias, largely because they tend to miss some major issues.

Response, most news outlets, in the name of objectivity get the "newsmaker's" opinion and a response, which disagrees with the newsmaker's opinion. This causes two problems, first, maybe the newsmaker has a pretty common opinion, most journalists will go pretty far out into the fringes to get a response. Second, complicated issues are complicated, and a multiplicity of responses are both confusing and require additional resources (time on TV).

Authority, reporters are trained to use authority, so they seek out certain people, this combined with the use of a "response" mean that many issues become formulaic.

A couple of years ago, a judge in Louisiana refused to issue a marriage permit to a interracial couple (and I mean this century, not the twentieth). Most articles used a response from the local NAACP official, an "authority" on civil rights. Do you think that the tone of the article would be different if they had used a member of the Chamber of Commerce?

Or say the ACLU, often the ACLU gets in local fights, the local official may not be affiliated with a national conservative group. So, you get two views and only one is associated with a national organization.

(In fairness, I am going off early versions of this work, and Groseclose may have cleaned this up in the past few years).

But what does it mean?

[rick-day.livejournal.com]

Here’s your PQ: 61.9

Politicians with similar PQs are:

Ben Nelson (D-Neb., 2001-09) PQ=55.6
Christopher Shays (R-Ct., 1987-2008) PQ=61.0
John F. Kennedy (D-Mass., 1947-60) PQ=63.7
Arlen Specter (D-Penn., 2009) PQ=67.4

Re: But what does it mean?

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Mine was not much different: 56.6.

This

[dwer.livejournal.com]

I was going too say. The media bias is towards profit.

[musicpsych.livejournal.com]

What an unfortunate book title. It makes the author seem so biased, like it was written precisely to capitalize on the "echo chamber"/confirmation bias angle (and appeal to a right-wing target audience). I don't know why, but to me, the title alone seems to put the author in the same league as O'Reilly and Limbaugh. (They're the ones I most closely associate with the "liberal media" argument, for some reason. Plus, the "Distorts the American Mind" scare attempt seems like something they would say.)

Talk about bias before I even pick up the book.

I don't want to judge his arguments having not read the book. In the example you gave, though, this may be my own liberal bias, but to me, fact (i) and fact (ii) don't seem equivalent in terms of weight/importance. Fact (i) stands on its own; the rich did receive a disproportionate share of the cuts. Full stop. With fact (ii), while "the share of the total taxes that the rich would pay actually increased," in dollar terms, the amount of money they actually paid went down. On a personal finance level, you are going to notice your own tax bill falling, not what percentage your tax bracket is contributing as a whole. Talking in dollar terms is more tangible.

In my opinion, fact (ii) seems like an attempt to spin fact (i). What if fact (i) was the story, and fact (ii) was the Fox News spin, which was then repeated in conservative media? These stats seem to imply that all of these articles were written and published at exactly the same time, with the facts included based solely on the individual author's bias. They don't recognize that some could have been reactive or repeated, which is a reality of our Internet news and 24-hour news age. The data could be a product of that cycle and echo chamber effect, and not a reflection of media bias. I don't know the author's method, but I hope he accounted for that.

With this example, I almost wonder if it's not a left-bias or a right-bias that we approach it with, but more of a rich-bias/not-rich bias. When I read it, I think about whether I'm rich or not rich, not whether I'm a Democrat or a Republican.

[musicpsych.livejournal.com]

The other thing that was bothering me was that your post talks about how "the media is biased, and largely in a leftward direction," and even that "the media is slanted so far to the left," but that the book author is able to break down the media into liberal and conservative groups, and that there are enough in the conservative group for it to be statistically significant. Are you saying that the media is biased, or unbalanced?

My problem with the "liberal media" charge is that the person saying it is often:

- trying to discredit most major mainstream media,
- implying that you can trust him/her to tell the truth, and
- not admitting to his/her own biases.

[http://users.livejournal.com/-wanderer-/]

I really have a hard time swallowing that study in the first place. Maybe one version of the story was simply more interesting, and therefore more distracting, than the other? And it doesn't address how long this supposed effect lasts. If it wears off in 15 minutes, I don't think we can draw too many larger conclusions from it....

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

As an aside, you can find your own political quotient here - I was, unsurprisingly, a 5.4

That actually seems very surprising to me. That's almost liberal. I got a 23.1 (compared to Ron Paul's 31.8).

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

Ok, after looking at what some other people got, I guess it means you're super-right rather than super-left? Still surprising though. And not really understandable as to what it's measuring.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Without having read the book you mention, I would say I'm dubious of his claims. underlankers hit on a more cromulent cause with the for-profit nature of the media, rather than unconscious bias.

There's another element that also needs to be discussed, however, and it's the cuts media providers have suffered over the decades. As news has become more and more a profit center, the bottom line has dictated the resources put to actual reporting. As a result, we have sloppy reporting in general and an inability for reporters to dedicate the time necessary to investigate a story, leading to shortcuts that further and further distort the facts.

Throw in the echo chamber effect and facts can be twisted completely out of proportion. I heard an interview with Dave Cullen about his book Columbine (http://www.davecullen.com/columbine.htm), where he notes the complete inability of the media to report what actually happened due to a lack of information coming from the sheriff. The media turned into a perfect echo chamber, amplifying any signal they could get and discounting signal that contradicted with the amplified. As a result, we are left with several elements of the story in the culture that are, well, lies fully embraced.

Given the complexity of tax law in general, it may simply be the reporters' ignorance of nuance that amplifies what the author noted. Combined that with a leaning toward the sensational (that sells!), the media echo chamber (why investigate what he or she already checked?) and a purging of detail in the final product ('cause they need the time to run the ads, dontchaknow), and one might very well reach the same product.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

I just tried taking the PQ test. Couldn't finish. The irritating need to share what the Dems and GOP voted biased the results. I also found many elements of some of the legislation described left out amazingly important details that initially formed my opinion.

A failed questionaire. Weird for the intertubes, ain't it?