Right from the Left Coast

Star Wars: A Tale of Media in the 21st Century

2008-12-31T16:45:00.000-08:00

Introduction:

Is it possible to understand American Politics without understanding the media?

Democracy is predicated on the assumption that the public can govern itself. If the public is out of touch with events, self-governance is impossible. Fishken- with his study of “deliberative polling”- proves that the public can make competent decisions if the proper information is presented. At the other extreme, Lau, Andersen, and Redlawsk demonstrate the disturbing level of correct voting in the United States- where the media suffers from numerous maladies- proof that a disengaged or uninformed public can be led astray. Reliable and accurate public access to information emerges as the key factor between the divergent results. No less important, Della Caprini demonstrates that an informed public is motivated to engage in the auxiliary activities needed for an effective democratic process- like political activism and informed discussion. Linkage institutions, or the avenues that information reaches the public, are therefore absolutely critical toward the health of any democracy, both in enabling and abating their function. Political figures, parties, interest groups, and the media all are linkage institutions. If media emerges as the dominant linkage institution of contemporary times, then yes, it is impossible to understand American politics without understanding the media.

And media is the dominant linkage institution in America today. As Leighley notes, the incredible accessibility and availability of the media to the public has broken any stranglehold other linkage institutions may have historically had. Perhaps the biggest proof of this development is the behavior of political figures and parties; today, instead of delivering the news directly to the public, these groups have to be content with “spinning” the message media outlets deliver- a phenomenon that will be discussed at length later. Having elevated media above other linkage institutions, and established that a democracy is built on the back of these institutions, the study of the state of the media becomes a necessity. Toward that goal, this paper is organized into three parts:

A New Hope: An Introduction to the Leighley “models of media” with an analysis of each models function as a linkage institution, as well as the crucial assumptions each model makes about the media.

The Empire Strikes Back: A study of how these models fair in reality, excluding the Internet.

Return of the Jedi: The new “forces” of the Internet and Soft News and what they mean for the models.

Along the way, examples of the 2008 election campaign will illustrate the various points made about the media at large. Together, these three segments will demonstrate how effectively the media is pursing its charter as a linkage institution.

Part 1: A NEW HOPE: Jefferson, Tocqueville, and the Dream of Democracy

Leighley proposes 5 theoretical media operating models. This section will analyze which of these models is equipped to be an effective linkage institution, and name the assumptions that need to be validated for each model to function.

The Reporter of Objective Fact:

The most basic function of the news media is to communicate raw facts and data from their source to the public. Media is viewed purely as a linkage institution, with no role other then the unbiased presentation of information. The responsibility for discussion and analysis is left to the public.

Support for leaving this task up to the public comes from the famous Beirut Study; researchers demonstrated the same news report was interpreted differently by viewers with different political standpoints, meaning effective democratic discussion can still be achieved without the engagement of the media. This model assumes (1) media presentation can be unbiased, (2) accurate facts are relatively easy to come by, and (3) the media has credibility in the eyes of the public.

The Neutral Adversary:

According to this model, media must act as a balance checking government power. In a 1787 letter to Edward Carrington, Thomas Jefferson ascribed this function to the media:

The people are the only censors of their governors: and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution. To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty. The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs thro' the channel of the public papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people. The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter”.

Like the model of objective reporting, this model requires the media to be unbiased (hence, the “neutral” in neutral adversary) and possess credibility among the citizenry. However, the additional responsibility of “muckraking” makes several other crucial assumptions: (1) that the media has the freedom to act as an adversary and (2) that the media has the will to act as an adversary.

The Public Advocate:

This model co-opts the publics’ obligation for public discussion and places it on the shoulders of the media. In addition to the presentation of information, the media is now expected to stimulate discussion of the topics at hand. This model was advocated by Alexis de Tocqueville:

Newspapers therefore become more necessary in proportion as men become more equal and individualism more to be feared. To suppose that they only serve to protect freedom would be to diminish their importance: they maintain civilization. I shall not deny that in democratic countries newspapers frequently lead the citizens to launch together into very ill-digested schemes; but if there were no newspapers there would be no common activity. The evil which they produce is therefore much less than that which they cure.

The effect of a newspaper is not only to suggest the same purpose to a great number of persons, but to furnish means for executing in common the designs which they may have singly conceived. The principal citizens who inhabit an aristocratic country discern each other from afar; and if they wish to unite their forces, they move towards each other, drawing a multitude of men after them. In democratic countries, on the contrary, it frequently happens that a great number of men who wish or who want to combine cannot accomplish it because as they are very insignificant and lost amid the crowd, they cannot see and do not know where to find one another. A newspaper then takes up the notion or the feeling that had occurred simultaneously, but singly, to each of them. All are then immediately guided towards this beacon; and these wandering minds, which had long sought each other in darkness, at length meet and unite. The newspaper brought them together, and the newspaper is still necessary to keep them united.
In order that an association among a democratic people should have any power, it must be a numerous body. The persons of whom it is composed are therefore scattered over a wide extent, and each of them is detained in the place of his domicile by the narrowness of his income or by the small unremitting exertions by which he earns it. Means must then be found to converse every day without seeing one another, and to take steps in common without having met. Thus hardly any democratic association can do without newspapers.”

Tocqueville proposes the most complex function of the media so far. Instead of simply reporting on political discussions, Tocqueville insists the media must allow the political discussion to occur within its pages. The grandeur of Tocqueville plan for a “national conversation” via media makes it vulnerable to the most assumptions: like the previous models, Tocqueville needs a basic unbiased and credible news source to allow conversation to begin. In addition, a national conversation demands 5 other factors: (1) that people want to participate in this conversation (2) that politicians care about what they say (3) that people can make their voices heard via the ballot box, making the conversation matter (4) that there is equal access with regards to politicians, so all voices can be heard equally and (5) the content and message of media cannot be manipulated by outside sources. In other words, the media sets the pace of the national discussion. If any these 5 principles are violated, the magnificent conversation envisioned by Tocqueville is in danger of collapse.

There is no question that media has the potential to start a national conversation. The power of the media to shape public discussion is documented in Behr’s study “Television News, Real-World Cues, and Changes in the Public Agenda”, which reveals that stories given priority by the media are prioritized by the public as well. Hardy and Jamison demonstrate the ability of the media to influence the national consensus on certain issues, simply by reporting that something is the national consensus. Put together, these studies indicate the media can both shape the agenda and influence opinion, both prerequisites for the Public Advocacy model.

Profit Seeking model:

The media is a business with no particular moral objective. This model aims to deliver the news the public wants, often at the expense of what the public needs. Such a pattern- ostensibly- compromises the news media as an effective linkage institution. An example of this phenomenon is ably captured by Mutz in her study “Effects of ‘In Your Face’ Television Discourse on Perceptions of a Legitimate Opposition”. Mutz found that the increased level of hostility on television (good for ratings; i.e what the public wants) is inversely correlated with greater tolerance for different opinions (what the public needs). Mutz’s finding is echoed by David Frum in his criticism (right or wrong) of Maddow:

For this reason, the “profit-seeking model” is frowned upon by many commentators with a sense of moral responsibility, like Fallows. Foser cites an example of misplaced media priorities in the 2008 election. So to, that profit driven media focuses on “theater” at the expense of serious discussion is the criticism that drives John Stewart’s ambush of the hapless Tucker Carlson:

Jon Stewart on Crossfire Viral SPIKE.com

Nor does profit-driven media feel an obligation to inspire the public to political action. In fact, a separate Mutz study discovered that the incivility craved by for-profit programs actually decreased public trust in political figures, which in turn threatens public alienation from the political process. A third potential pitfall of the profit-seeking model is that profits bring with them corporations. In turn, corporations bring with them the potential for control of the news media by a handful of ideologues. However, this nightmare scenario is the subject of much contention, and will be discussed in Part Two. This model assumes the content of the media is determined by profitability. However, profit seeking does not kill all hope of the media serving as a competent linkage institution. The phenomenon of soft news is a silver lining, and will be discussed in Part Three.

Propagandist Model:

The media is dedicated to the interests of the people in power. This model is unequivocally at odds with the idea of the media serving as a linkage institution, as its does not attempt to present the public with a comprehensive picture of the world. In theory, it should not exist in a Democracy. The model assumes that (1) the media is slanted towards those in power.

CONCLUSION:

In order to execute its responsibility as the linkage institution of record, media needs to adapt one of the first three models and stay away from the fifth; the first three models are positive in a Democracy, the fourth controversial and unpredictable, and the fifth deadly. Indeed, one needs to look no further then circumstances’ surrounding the Iraq War to observe what happens when media abandons the first three models and shifts to the fourth and the fifth. The facts are clear: the media failed to discredit the George W. Bush’s claim that Iraq had WMD, a claim later proven false. Massing and Boehling detail how this occurred: the press allowed itself to report falsehoods (therefore failing to uphold being reporters of objective fact) by refusing to investigate the administrations shakier claims (casting aside its duty as a neutral advocate) and stymied dissenting voices (transgressing the commandment to encourage public discussion). It is less clear how the fourth and fifth interacted in 2003, but the presence of both is a certainty. Regardless, the failure of America’s linkage institution resulted in the subservience of democracy; the country embarked on a war informed citizenry would not have fought.

The question now becomes: are the patterns observed in 2003 evidence of the demise of the first three models? Was the media failure of 2003 an exception in an otherwise healthy media climate? Or is it a symptom of an environment that is toxic towards the first three models and friendlier to the last two? Is the optimism of Jefferson and Tocqueville a false new hope?

Part 2: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK: Darth Murdoch and Friends Join the Party

Determining if the failure of 2003 is the most obvious case of a less dramatic, wider ranging epidemic entails evaluating the assumptions on which each media model is based. Should they prove viable, it can be concluded that 2003 was a one-time failure. Should they not…

Reporter of Objective Fact:

(1) This model assumes that reporters can be transmitters of objectivity. Several sources call this into question. Most notably, Rhetorica describes 5 types of bias that work against a Journalist even before they begin to speak, including word choice and structure. Further, Rhetorica lists 9 types of bias that plague ideologically neutral journalists, such as narration bias and temporal Bias. Rosensteil notes another bias: fairness bias. Often, Journalists become overcautious presenting both sides of the story and up creating two sides to a story when there is only one. The dangerous things about these biases are that since they are not the product of a consciousness choice, but rather can affect the most well-intentioned reporter. The Daily Show highlights the absurdity of fairness bias in this clip:

And then there is deliberate bias. The 2008 campaign produced a great example of how different news institutions can portray the same event in radically different terms:

For the record, these figures from the 2008 campaign indicate that overall media bias is more of a function of events and not consistently directed at one party.

(2) A second complication in reporting objective facts is the lack of objective sources. Political campaigns and figures employ a number of tricks- known collectively as “Spin”- in an effort to cast themselves in a favorable light. Spin will be discussed at length later, but suffice to say objective reporting is difficult when many millions are being spent in the hope reporters fail to actually report objective fact. Gershkoff’s study on the Bush Administration’s construction of a link between Iraq and Terrorism provides a valuable example of objective reporting’s susceptibility to manipulation. In that case, had the media taken the word of the president as objective fact, they would have been objectively wrong. James and Jamieson provide additional examples of the thin line between fact and fiction, ranging from the non-scientific studies cited by Cold-Eze to the difficulty of pinning down a single statistic like the number of homeless in the U.S. In today world of spin, reporters need to question everything. The 2008 campaign produced a wonderful example: try figuring out if Senator Obama was the most liberal U.S Senator. Go ahead. Try it. Even a fact as "objective" as this is diffcult to pin down. Descartes is having a field day. Reporters of the Objective Fact are not.

Polls are a special category of “subjective fact” in and of themselves. Woodly notes that the mainstream media often polls as true measures of public opinion. However, Public Agenda lists over 20 ways these “facts” can be manipulated. Page echoes many of these criticisms, demonstrating how misleading questions can skew poll results. In the 2008 campaign, there was a particular concern that silent rascism was skewing the polls. Making matters worse, Schwartz notes how polls are often treated as fact by the media, leading to erroneous conclusions:

This leads us to the second huge problem with polls: Different polls taken at the same time often produce remarkably different results. Fifteen percent discrepancies between polls are not all that rare. If a group of polls use just slightly different samples (all of them reasonably accurate), slightly different questions (all reasonable in themselves), and slightly different analytic procedures (all also reasonable), the range of results can be substantial indeed. If, in addition, they call at different times of the day or on different days of the week, the differences can grow even larger. And if they use different definitions of "likely voters," as they almost surely will, the discrepancies can be enormous.
To see how such a cascade of decisions really screws up our ability to rely on polls, consider the now famous "bounce" that Bush got from the Republican Convention. The media, using selected opinion polls, conveyed the impression that Bush surged from a "statistical tie" to a double-digit lead. Many of my friends -- Kerry supporters all -- felt the election was lost. (Some of them would certainly have fallen from the ranks of Gallup's "likely voters"). Things got so bad that Michael Moore sent a letter to all the Kerry supporters he could reach, telling them to stop being crybabies and get back to work.

In the end, at least for the 2008 campaign, polls did prove reliably accurate.

(3) Objective reporting assumes the public trusts the media. If there is no credibility, what is the use of being objective? Why be objective if the public perception of the product is subjective anyway? The 2008 campaign found that a staggering 51% saw the media biased against the Republican Ticket. The media’s objective credibility with the public is no longer a given.

The forecast for objective reporting is bleak. Even if it is assumed reporters are free of intentional bias, bias is impossible for them to avoid. So to, this model makes sense if the “facts” are unbiased themselves. In today’s world of spin, that is a leap of faith no longer possible without being a neutral adversary. Finally, the public faith in the media is on even shakier footing. Objective reporting may well be an anachronism.

The Neutral Adversary:

(1) This model assumes the media has the capability to engage in investigative reporting. The truth of this proposition is the most controversial issue dealt with in this paper. McChesney (115) argues that corporate control of the media has lent to right wing bias. McChesney implies this accounts for the disparities in reporting on issues like the draft deferment between President Bush and President Clinton. However, McChesney argument lacks the overall cohesive numbers to make this case. Conservative’s would shoot right back with such examples as the U.S weekly covers of Obama and Palin. And they are equally wrong in citing one example as proof of an overarching trend. Without numbers that span the scope of all reporting done by all journalists, and a mechanism to estimate what a neutral media would have reported, singular examples will not cut it to prove media bias. The same criticism is leveled at Outfoxed in this blog post; no matter how many clips are shown of Fox News endorsing conservatives, nothing is proven until it is demonstrated they do not do the same for liberals.

In a far more balanced piece, Page leaves this question open, citing the lack of studies that address the question of corporate influence on the media:

To my great surprise, I have found few systematic efforts to investigate possible mechanisms of owner or manager control of media's political stands. (A striking recent exception is D. Chomsky (1996), who has uncovered remarkable evidence of how the owners of the New York Times have influenced the content of news stories.) This topic seems to deserve high priority for future research. To be sure, it would be difficult or impossible to gather a random sample of influence attempts and observe their results. The subtle nature of processes like selective recruitment and internalized expectations, together with the highly confidential nature of overt interventions, affects what research designs are feasible. The use of memoirs, participant-observation, and interviews can be helpful, but most promising is archival research into the confidential memos or diaries of media owners and managers (e.g., Chomsky 1996). A complementary, outside strategy is to analyze patterns in which news and editorial stands may vary according to ownership characteristics, e.g., industrial sectors (Devereux 1993).

Page also refuses to decide if the “liberal” reporter corps (this was the subject of another dubious McChesney argument- that there is no “liberal bias” among reporters because Journalism school is expensive and therefore only the wealthy can afford to be reporters… try saying that at 5:05 on Monday in Furst 317 and see what happens… probably the same thing that happened to this Blog Post) offsets the “conservative” nature of corporate owners. This topic, and thus the health of the neutral adversary model, remains a question.

(2) Assuming reporters are allowed to investigate free of corporate interference, do they have the will to carry out the neutral adversary mandate? The evidence on this is mixed. On the one hand, as documented in the film All the Presidents Men, the U.S has a long history of investigate reporting. On the other, several pieces of evidence indicate investigative reporting faces numerous challenges. Most important, as noted by Page, reporters rely on sources in government for the bulk of their political news. This creates an obvious conflict of interest when it comes to investigating those same sources. Woodly calls this “elite bias”. There is also the fear of retaliation. Bennet claims that the Bush Administration took this idea to a new level, actively punishing dissenting voices like Richard Clarke. Both of these factors make investigative reporting difficult. Mussing and Boehling illustrate how the convergence of these factors contributed to the media failure to be an effective watchdog in the days preceding the Iraq War.

A second, less explored function of the neutral adversary involves the questioning at formal events. Clayman concludes that reporters take a middle-of-the-road approach at these conferences:

As for broader circumstantial factors that bear on aggressive questioning, it is useful to consider these results against the backdrop of the watchdog model of journalism and its alternatives. White House reporters are plainly discriminating in their conduct toward presidents, avoiding the extremes of both total passivity and relentless aggression. Moreover, at least some of the ways in which they discriminate are not inconsistent with an elaborated version of the watchdog model. This is perhaps most clear with respect to the relative impact of opinion polls versus economic factors.

Stephan Colbert begs to differ:

Nor does the Press Corps covering the new administration offer much hope.

The health of the neutral adversary model is a matter of much debate. Elements like the Bush administration’s treatment of the media indicate one way, while observations like those of Clayman lead to far less absolute conclusions. There are no clear indications that this is a dead model, although the Iraq War fiasco shows it is far from healthy.

The Public Advocate

(1) In order for the public advocate model to work, the public must be ready and willing to engage in a discussion about politics. Unfortunately, there exist several lines of evidence that indicate this is not the case. Louis Menand’s quotes research indicates that the U.S voting public pays little attention too and cares little about whom they are voting for:

Findings about the influence of the weather on voter behavior are among the many surveys and studies that confirm Converse’s sense of the inattention of the American electorate. In election years from 1952 to 2000, when people were asked whether they cared who won the Presidential election, between twenty-two and forty-four per cent answered “don’t care” or “don’t know.” In 2000, eighteen per cent said that they decided which Presidential candidate to vote for only in the last two weeks of the campaign; five per cent, enough to swing most elections, decided the day they voted.
Seventy per cent of Americans cannot name their senators or their congressman. Forty-nine per cent believe that the President has the power to suspend the Constitution. Only about thirty per cent name an issue when they explain why they voted the way they did, and only a fifth hold consistent opinions on issues over time. Rephrasing poll questions reveals that many people don’t understand the issues that they have just offered an opinion on. According to polls conducted in 1987 and 1989, for example, between twenty and twenty-five per cent of the public thinks that too little is being spent on welfare, and between sixty-three and sixty-five per cent feels that too little is being spent on assistance to the poor. And voters apparently do punish politicians for acts of God. In a paper written in 2004, the Princeton political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels estimate that “2.8 million people voted against Al Gore in 2000 because their states were too dry or too wet” as a consequence of that year’s weather patterns. Achen and Bartels think that these voters cost Gore seven states, any one of which would have given him the election.
All political systems make their claim to legitimacy by some theory, whether it’s the divine right of kings or the iron law of history. Divine rights and iron laws are not subject to empirical confirmation, which is one reason that democracy’s claims have always seemed superior. What polls and surveys suggest, though, is that the belief that elections express the true preferences of the people may be nearly as imaginary. When you move downward through what Converse called the public’s “belief strata,” candidates are quickly separated from ideology and issues, and they become attached, in voters’ minds, to idiosyncratic clusters of ideas and attitudes. The most widely known fact about George H. W. Bush in the 1992 election was that he hated broccoli. Eighty-six per cent of likely voters in that election knew that the Bushes’ dog’s name was Millie; only fifteen per cent knew that Bush and Clinton both favored the death penalty. It’s not that people know nothing. It’s just that politics is not what they know.

Lau’s study on the rate of correct voting supports Menand’s figures. Instead of researching candidates, the public uses shortcuts called “heuristics”- such as a candidate’s party affiliation- to make decisions. Equally troublesome, Spencer records the public’s indifference to the actual winner of the 2000 election. Once the election was over, the public moved on. Hardly the hallmark of a country engaged in an intense national conversation.

Even when the public is willing to engage in a conversation, chances for a national conversation are minimal. Partisans stick to like-minded new-sources, as demonstrated by Journalism.org:

Who Is Watching
Survey data have shown that there are some clear partisan differences among those tuning into the three cable news channels. According to data from the Pew Research Center for the People and Press, CNN and MSNBC had more Democrats tuning in, while Fox News’ audience leaned Republican. Looking at party affiliation, CNN and MSNBC had nearly identical viewer demographics. Almost half of both of their audience members were Democrats – 48% for MSNBC and 45% for CNN. Independents made up about a quarter (26%) of viewers, while Republicans took up the smallest share – 22% for CNN, and only 19% for MSNBC.On Fox News, the trend was somewhat reversed. The largest share of its audience – 38% -- were Republicans, followed by Democrats (31%) and independents (22%).9

Fox News is generally perceived as conservative, and MSNBC liberal, a fact John Stewart makes clear:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c
MSNBC Replaces Fox News
Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview
Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

These figures are in line with the idea that partisans flock to ideologically friendly media. Prior’s study confirms these results. Trends like these do not bode well for the public advocate model; the prospect of a national conversation is difficult when media is speaking to a fractured public.

(2) The public advocate model runs into more trouble at the other end of the conversation. Aside from a public not interested in talking, the political leaders at the other end of the dialogue are often not interested in listening. Instead of shaping policies out of public input, Jacobs and Shapiro (critiqued by Hochschild) claim that politicians craft their messages to convince the public “that their own policy proposal is what citizens really want.” Joshua Green observes this pattern in President George W. Bush:

This is typical of how the Bush administration uses polls: Policies are chosen beforehand, polls used to spin them. Because many of Bush's policies aren't necessarily popular with a majority of voters, Steeper and van Lohuizen's job essentially consists of finding words to sell them to the public. Take, for instance, the Bush energy plan. When administration officials unveiled it last May, they repeatedly described it as "balanced" and "comprehensive," and stressed Bush's "leadership" and use of "modern" methods to prevent environmental damage. As Time magazine's Jay Carney and John Dickerson revealed, van Lohuizen had poll-tested pitch phrases for weeks before arriving at these as the most likely to conciliate a skeptical public. (Again, independent polls showed weak voter support for the Bush plan.) And the "education recession" Bush trumpeted throughout the campaign? Another triumph of opinion research. Same with "school choice," the "death tax," and the "wealth-generating private accounts" you'll soon hear more about when the Social Security debate heats up. Even the much-lauded national service initiative Bush proposed in his State of the Union address was the product of focus grouping. Though publicly Bush prides himself on never looking in the mirror (that's "leadership"), privately, he's not quite so secure. His pollsters have even conducted favorability ratings on Ari Fleischer and Karen Hughes.

A final example is supplied by Gershkoff and Kushner; they demonstrate how the Iraq War was packaged with the War in Terror, allowing it to be sold to the American public. This is a classic example of policy being taken to the public, instead of taken from the public, as Tocqueville’s grand conversation requires.

(3) A third assumption made by the Public advocate model is that a national conversation is worth having, because the public can have an impact. Recent electoral debacles put a damper on this proposition as well. Neimi records the extraordinary amount of variety and complexity in the methods U.S election are conducted. Neimi concludes that even the most competent of voters can lose themselves in the jungle of the U.S electoral system. The most infamous example of a mangled election occurred in Florida in 2000, and is ably dramatized in HBO’s Recount. Further inconsistencies have been reported in the Minnesota Senate Recount of 2008, which also highlights the absurd turns the U.S election system takes. No matter how loud and intense the national conversation gets, it is useless if it get drowned out by an incompetent election process.

(4) In order for the national conversation to take place, citizens need to have equal access to their elected representatives. La Raja points out that despite the best efforts of McCain-Feingold, the campaign finance system is still broken. Money buys access, meaning that some Americans have their voices heard louder then others. The idea of the media inspiring a national conversation on policy seems futile if the voices of the public do not carry equal weight.

(5) The final criteria necessary for an informed national conversation is a responsible media that can stimulate discussion. If the media’s dialogue can be manipulated by political figures, then idea of media being a forum for national discussion does not get off the ground. Unfortunately for the public advocate model, media has proven porous to the torrent of manipulation unleashed by the modern political campaign.

Media manipulation begins with political ads. Political ads are by definition partisan and as a rule deceptive. James and Jamison highlight several less the kosher (come on, that word is so part of the modern lexicon) methods utilized in political ads, ranging from “the glittering generality” to the “dangling comparative. This blog post has an excellent selection of examples.

Effective political ads are not created simply for their immediate message, but in a hope their message is adopted by the larger media. Framing, priming and the creation of a narrative are three examples of ad’s influencing the media’s coverage of political campaigns. It should be noted that political ads are not the only way candidates achieve these objectives, (a press release also works), only the most common.

Modern political campaign create themes favorable to their candidate, and then attempt to cast subsequent events in light of that narrative. The goal of political campaigns is to tap into the media’s penchant for the “Narrative Bias” described in Rhetororica. Cook details how the Bush 2004 campaign achieved victory by creating and pursuing a devastatingly effective narrative about John Kerry.

Adherence to a narrative was arguably the difference between the 2008 campaigns of Senators McCain and Obama. A senior aid to Barack Obama credited the power of the narrative with that campaign success in 2008. The adherence to narrative is apparent in these two speeches delivered by Obama; although one is delivered early in the primary campaign. and one is his victory speech, the similarities are striking. The Obama campaign decided early on what images of the candidates it wanted to create, and pursued them with relish; in other words, they decided on a narrative about the candidates and stuck with it.

Meanwhile, there are many examples of the McCain team not applying this tactic. Cranky Doc cites this ad as an example, Palin's speech as another, and faults this ad for not differentiating between McCain and Obama (and therefore not contributing to McCain's narrative).

Spin does not stop with the creation of narratives. Candidates also attempt to control the national discussion with “framing” and “priming”. Kinder defines framing as the ability to place current events in a chosen context. Priming is explained by Kinder to consist of elevating a particular issue to central importance by devoting it disproportionate attention. West cites President Bush’s emphasizing trust in the 2004 election as an example of priming. Bush chose to raise the profile of that issue, perceived as a strength for his candidacy and a weakness of Kerry’s. In the 2008 campaign, the Obama team primed the age issue with ads like this one:

Making matter worse, the media devotes a disproportionate amount of time analyzing the ads. Negative ads, who had a significant and sometimes total share of the 2008 ad buys, also poisons the well from which national conversation needs to be drawn.

Spin creates a tremendous background noise that makes an educated conversation about candidates difficult if not impossible. Combined with a hesitant public, deaf politicians, an unpredictable election system, and broken campaign finance system, the idea of media generating a national conversation seems more distant now then ever.

The Profit-Seeking model

(1) The general consensus of media observers today is that the media operates according to this model. Most of the debate among scholars is if this prevents the media from adapting other roles (for example, the debate between Page and McChesney about corporate influence in the media).

The evidence of the existence of a profit driven media is abundant: McChesney writes of the corporate takeover of news media that has landed the vast majority of media outlets into the hands of 5 media corporations. The goal of these corporations is to make money. McChesney and Popkin cite various events as being responsible for the unprecedented rule of the profit seeking media: including the 1996 Telecommunications Act (“The Magna Carta of Media CEO’s”), the introduction of a 24/7 news cycle, and the demise of the FCC content regulatory function:

Before 1984, there were government constraints on just how low or cheap network news could go. This was largely because the FCC required networks to demonstrate public service programming in order to get their licenses lavishly on overseas bureaus, reporters, and Washington coverage in order to justify their licenses. They also went out of their way not to proﬁt from the news shows. After 1984, Mark Fowler, President Reagan’s FCC chief, dropped the public service requirement for license renewal, leaving the networks free to concentrate on news that sold instead of news that pleased the FCC—and freer to compete with the growing number of cable networks… (From Popkin)

Of course such a change had to happen in 1984...

The Propaganda Model

Unlike the other media models, there is some debate about what constitutes this model. Leighley has a very narrow definition, that the media exists to “support and advance the interests of those in power,” and a wider one, that the media caters to the dominant classes. Anup Shaw does not attempt to create a media model, but offers a different take on propaganda that further expands the breadth of this category.

Is there any evidence the media favors incumbents? La Raja presents evidence that incumbents are heavily favored in congressional elections. But is the media responsible? Indirectly. The immense gap in fundraising ability discovered by La Raja is only an issue because the staples of modern political advertising like ads come at tremendous cost. However, this is more of an offshoot of the profit-seeking mode of media then of the propaganda mode. Leighley takes note of this overlap.

The notion that the media caters to the dominant classes is energetically put forth by McChensey, Edelman, and Chomsky. Much of the debate on this particular proposition hinges on how much corporate control of media effects content, as well the ideological makeup of the Journalist corps. These subjects were addressed earlier, in the section dealing with the Neutral Adversary model.

Finally, Shah discusses propaganda of an entirely different nature; the use of media to promote a particular image or policy. This propaganda does not necessarily have to promote the interests of those in power; as this Blog post records, both the conduct of the American Media before and Al Jazaree during the Iraq War can be labeled propaganda. The first case was indeed a case of supporting those in power, but the second was not.

CONCLUSION:

Nearly 6000 words in, it is time to take stock. How is the media faring as a linkage institution? At this point, the data is alarming. All three of the models identified as contributing to this goal are in dire straits. Objective reporting appears impossible; the Neutral Adversary in danger, and the mechanisms needed for the Public Advocate model are broken. Meanwhile, commentators agree the profit-seeking model has moved in to stay. Evidence of propaganda has also been uncovered. As propaganda is clearly at odds with the idea of a responsible media, all eyes turn to the profit-seeking model. Is there a redeeming social value to profitable media? Or is the media system beyond repair? And what about a force left untouched until now, the Internet? Does that offer hope for any of the positive media models? Or has the Empire made a irreconcilable strike back?

Part Three: RETURN OF THE JEDI: Can the Forces of the Internet and Soft News Save the Media?

SOFT NEWS

The negatives of for profit media are well known: the media negates content valued by the three socially responsible media models, in favor of content viewers will watch. Hamilton chronicles the aftermath:

Both the regulatory environment and cable competition affected the mix of stories on the nightly news. When the Reagan FCC dropped the public service requirement for license renewal, there were indeed changes in coverage, but cable competition led to bigger changes.

In the 1990s, network news covered less legislation than in the 1970s. Whereas two-thirds of the critical Congressional Quarterly votes were covered in the seventies, only about half were covered in the nineties. Whereas the nightly news once covered half of the votes on interest-group scorecards, in the nineties they covered only one-third. Coverage of the Supreme Court, however, held steady, at about 40 percent of the important cases.

Celebrity coverage has also increased. Network news has doubled the time devoted to People's most intriguing people of the year. This is not entirely a move away from politics, though. People's list includes political personalities, and political celebrities like John McCain or Colin Powell get some of the attention no longer given to legislative insiders.

The big shifts in coverage, however, have been away from legislation and foreign reporting and into what is derisively known as “soft news.” While there has been some increase in the coverage of celebrities, both political and non-political, most of the shift has been to the “soft” categories of “news you can use”—consumer-oriented information on health, business, and technology.

Is there any social redeeming factor in this shift in coverage? Baum argues that there is, that so called “soft news”, or news that is reported with profitability,- and not necessary social responsibility- in mind has the potential to engage otherwise uninterested viewers:

Through cheap framing, the soft news media have successfully piggybacked information about foreign crises (and other highly accessible issues, such as the Lewinsky scandal) to entertainment-oriented information. Soft news consumers thereby gain information about such issues as an incidental by-product of seeking entertainment. My statistical investigations demonstrated that individuals do learn about these types of issues-but not other, less accessible or dramatic issues-from the soft news media, without necessarily tuning in with the intention of doing so.

The phenomenon of soft news is the lesser of two evils. What it lacks in responsible programming, it makes up by increasing viewer interest in the topics covered. Unfortunately, the benefits of soft news have a clear limit: Hart’s study (conducted in 1996, well within the era of soft news) shows that viewing political television decreases actual political activism, implying that even if soft news increases interest, it does not increase activism.

There is a second vehicle created by profit-seeking media where the same phenomenon has been reported: the emergence of “fake news” shows, like the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. These are commercial productions that parody newscasts. Since they are designed as "for profit" enterprises, they have the same advantage that soft news; they are created so people will want to watch them. And as the National Annenberg Election Survey reports shows, they also do not ignore media’s social responsibility to educate; “Daily Show” Viewers are in fact more knowledgeable then the average American viewers. Further, the “Daily Show” has as much news content as a normal broadcast.

It is important to note that Annenberg finding is limited to Satire. Peterson divides political comedy into two groups: Satire and Pseudo-Satire, and claims the difference between them is that “while the genuine satire and pseudo-satirist are both joking, only one of them is kidding.” Apparently, this difference translates to a difference in content; while the Annenberg finding found “Daily Show” viewers to be more knowledgeable, it did not find a substantial difference viewers of Letterman and Leno, both pseudo-satire outfits.

A second important development associated with platforms like the “Daily Show” is they manage to correct one of the main casualties of contemporary media, trust. As reported in the section on the Objective Reporting model, media credibility is low. This is why the findings of the Project for Excellence in Journalism are especially relevant:

When Americans last year were asked to name the journalist they most admired, a comedian showed up at No. 4 on the list. Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central and former master of ceremonies at Academy Award shows, tied in the rankings with anchormen Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather and cable host Anderson Cooper. [1] [1]

The implication seems to be that the comedic nature of his program engenders viewers to Stewart, giving him the credibility people associate with Journalists. Considering that John Stewart- at least- does not consider himself a Journalist, this is quite an accomplishment, and raises interesting possibilities for the future of Journalism.

The 2008 campaign was a major success for soft news. Because of her uncanny resemblance to Sarah Palin, Tina Fey's SNL skits became national news stories. Soft News was valued by the McCain campaign to the point where his last national appearance occurred on SNL.

Much is made of profit-seeking media delinquencies. However, the detractors of for profit news fail to take account of where for-profit media succeeds. The phenomenon of soft news has the potential to interest otherwise ignorant Americans in politics. This is no small development. An involved public is the first step in solving the problems keeping the media from performing its role as a public advocate. A knowledgeable public knows when its leaders are not listening, knows when it is being lied too, ect. Soft news is a step in the right direction.

THE INTERNET

In the parlance of the 2008 campaign, the Internet has the status of game changer. There is no question the 2008 campaign saw the importance of the Internet taken to new heights. The hope of the internet comes in many forms: blogging allows the average American an unprecedented bully pulpit. Campaign fundraising has been revolutionized. What do these developments mean for the media models?

Blogging has so far shied away from being a “for profit” venture, although there have been some notable exceptions, like the Huffington Post. Blogging is also a grassroots phenomenon and highly decentralized, and therefore unlikely to be used for propaganda. This leaves the other three media models suited for Bloggers. Combining the studies of Zimmerman, Samson, Sunstein and Woodly this post concludes that Bloggers are best suited to the role of public advocacy. However, this post only addressed one area where the public advocate model ran into trouble, the actual content of media. Blogging is an antidote to media manipulation. What about the other 4 areas- can the solution be found on the Internet as well?

Bloggers have the ability to solve another problem; the much maligned voting system in this country. Despite Blogger’s infancy in breaking news, they have proven adept in agenda setting, by shouting and screaming until their desired issue is brought to the fore, as was the case with Brennan. It is hard to imagine the results of the 2000 election being released in the age of Blogs and going unnoticed (see Spencer above).

However, it is another area of the Internet that threatens to knock off the issues of disproportionate access and deaf politicians: Internet fundraising. Internet fundraising has proven to be a tremendous vehicle of political upset. McKibben provides one example:

In its account of the political possibilities of the Internet, Crashing the Gate seems to me the most ambitious, interesting, and hopeful venture in progressive politics in decades. It's not a model that will win overnight. Kos picked a dozen Democratic challengers, most in quixotic races against heavy favorites like Tom DeLay, to raise money for in 2004, and all of them lost. But as he points out, it took patient work for the Republican right to build up its strength after the Goldwater debacle of 1964. And indeed, in the eighteen months since Kerry's defeat, Web activists have tested the new approaches in special elections with some successes. One example came during last August's election for a seat in Ohio's 2nd District, a Republican stronghold since 1974, which Bush carried in 2004 with 64 percent of the vote. Normally the Democrats would barely have bothered contesting the seat, but Paul Hackett, a political novice recently returned from a tour as a Marine Corps major in Iraq, launched just the kind of antiwar campaign the on-line activists had been urging: he was, the authors write, "boldly outspoken, unafraid of taking the battle to Republicans." Asked about gay marriage, he said: "Gay marriage—who the hell cares? If you're gay, you're gay—more power to you. What you want is to be treated fairly by the law and any American who doesn't think that should be the case is, frankly, un-American." The Internet activists raised $500,000 of the campaign's total $850,000 budget—nine thousand people giving an average of a little more than $50 apiece. On election day, the word went out at 10:30 in the morning that Hackett needed $60,000 for get-out-the-vote expenses, and six hours later $60,000 had poured in. The on-line activists had to tell people to stop giving.

The financial power of the Internet is not something politicians can ignore. In one fell swoop, politicians are now that much more vulnerable. They can no longer afford to be deaf.

Hindman draws the most prominent example of the Internet aiding politicians from the Howard Dean campaign. Dean is the perfect example of a politician who let the policy of his constituents come to him, in contrast to the mold described by Jacobs and Shapiro. Dean rode a groundswell of popular sentiment by opposing the Iraq War, and was handsomely rewarded on the Internet:

I have so far offered a causal explanation for Howard Dean's initial rise as the Democratic party front-runner. In social science, causal questions are ultimately about counterfactuals. Thus, it is worth putting these observations together to ask: but for the Internet, how should we have expected Dean's campaign to unfold? While such analysis is never an exact science, the strong body of established research on political participation, fund-raising, and primary politics makes Dean's counterfactual case study easier than most.
In the 2004 primary field, Dean had several potential advantages over his competitors that would have been important with or without the Internet. Many Dean supporters opposed the war in Iraq, and there was no other staunch antiwar candidate. As both governor and medical doctor, Dean presented a compelling personal narrative. His energetic presence on the stump (and the fervor of his attacks against the president) made him stand out. For the dark horse candidate, being ignored is the biggest danger; Dean was consistently quotable.
A completely offline Dean campaign, then, would still have had important strengths. But one thing it would not have done is raise more than a fraction of the $52 million that Dean ultimately received. Dean's campaign defied the example of every previous primary candidate, the Republicans' longstanding advantage in small donations, and every political science model of how much candidates raise and from whom. It is not just the grand sums of money raised that point to the influence of the Internet—though that was important enough—but also the balance between large and small donations. The only other recent primary campaigns to raise a substantial percentage of their funding from small donors—specifically Clark and Dennis Kucinich—were themselves heavily invested in the Web. Not only that, once Senator John Kerry had the nomination, his sudden success in online fund-raising dramatically increased the proportion of funding he received from smaller donors: whereas at the end of January, 58 percent of his giving had come from those giving $2,000 each, by the end of June those who gave the maximum accounted for only 34 percent of Kerry's total war chest. 18
To get a sense of Dean's expected fund-raising without the Internet, let us make two assumptions for the sake of argument: first, that Dean's online success did not scare off more large donors than it attracted; second, that without the Internet, large donors would have provided roughly the same proportion of Dean's funding that they did for previous primary candidates, or for those of Dean's competitors who failed to run strong Web campaigns. Dean attracted 2,851 donors who gave the $2,000 maximum. Let us conjecture that these donors would otherwise have accounted for 50 percent of Dean's funds—still less than the percentage that they accounted for in the early fund-raising for George W. Bush, John Kerry, John Edwards, Dick Gephardt, and Joe Lieberman. In that case, Dean would have raised no more than $11 million in campaign funds, 21 percent of his actual total—placing him behind all of the above candidates in the fund-raising race.

This is not to say that the Internet promises complete freedom from the traditional methods of fundraising. As The Center For Public Integrity reports, even the 2008 campaign, with Barack Obama's record Internet fundraising machine, relied on Bundlers.

The 2008 victory of Barack Obama has also aided the access issue. Although in a country of 300 million people and 536 elected Federal officials, access will always be a problem, Change.Gov offers an interesting take to the access question.

The Internet has been shown to solve four of the issues raised about the Public advocate model: deaf politicians, voting irregularities, access, and media manipulation. One obstacle to a full second coming of the Public Advocate model on the Internet are the findings of Reeher, whose study shows that internet use actually decreases political activism. If so, the first problem with the public advocacy model still remains an issue. The good news is that Cranky Doc has found research indicating the opposite. A second, debatable issue, is if the Internet makes the public more partisan or less. Prior’s study- conducted within the Internet era- is not an encouraging sign, considering the more information on the Internet is no guarantee for decreased partisanship. This blog discusses the issue further.

One major assumption made by those who expect the Internet to revolutionize politics is the immunity of the Internet to government manipulation. This proposition turns out to be controversial. Glen Reynolds takes in Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu in this correspondence. Gillmor also begins addressing these questions. If governments do indeed have control over the Internet, the rebirth of the public advocacy model is dead on arrival. Meanwhile, corporate control is only slightly less threatening.

CONCLUSION: What does the Future Hold (Hopefully no more Prequels)?

There is little debate that the non-internet media is primarily profit driven. There is also no question the environment is tough to toxic for the three “responsible” models. And profit driven economics are- likely- not going anywhere any time soon. However, there is hope that media in the 21st Century still fulfill its obligation as a responsible linkage institution. Soft News shows promise in at least involving otherwise distant individuals in the political process. The Internet has nearly solved the many issues with the public advocacy model, arguably the most noble of all media models. My suspicion is that these trends have a healthy future in front of them, and with them the media.

The Prep Rally Version 2.0

2008-12-21T14:14:00.000-08:00

What do the "comments" sections of popular blogs reveal about the the nature of the forum?

Disclaimer: As no studies have been presented about the nature of blog comments, the conclusions in this blog are absolutely non-scientific. They are based on the comments from two blogs, one conservative and one liberal. So it with much trepidation that I make the following statement...

Blog "comments" are absolutely partisan. There is little evidence of discussion. Instead, a Blog and its comments function as an online pep rally; the blogger riles up the masses, and the crowd responds emotionally. This accounts for the extreme, emotional comments that tend to crowd comment sections. Here are a few examples of such comments:

First from Michelle Malkin, a conservative blogger, who in this post discusses the legality (or lack thereof) of change.gov:

On December 20th, 2008 at 10:07 am, DesertLover said:
Thanks to Lance and to you Michelle for not letting this go away unchallenged … those of us in the computer and internet fields chimed in on the illegality of this website’s domain name just as you did because we also knew the site did not meet the qualifications for a .gov classification …
Just more proof of the number of liberal kool-aid drinkers that infest the governmental bureaucracy at virtually every level imaginable …
Keep up the good work … and thanks again …

On December 20th, 2008 at 11:00 am, ajmontana said:
Odopey is the 2nd biggest scam the United States has ever seen, number one going to Al Gore.

On December 20th, 2008 at 11:13 am, alamb said:
that’s exactly right WaterBoyz. Obama is going to campaign, as President, and use all tools available to galvanize, organize his troops to push his agenda. IS THIS LEGAL? For sure we need to counter this infamy big time!

On December 20th, 2008 at 11:35 am, TXGator said:
It will be easier to deal with things if we just accept the fact that the rules only apply to the responsible. Most conservatives value responsibility. Most liberals think the rules apply on a case-by-case basis.

Here are a few emotion soaked comments from a liberal blog- that of Jed L from DailyKos, on the subject of Dick Cheney saying 9/11 was the most compelling moment of the Bush Presidency:

I can't discuss. (20+ / 0-)
Too busy vomiting with rage.

Hard core Christian and hard core liberal...not an illogical combination at all.

by penny8611 on Sun Dec 21, 2008 at 01:01:26 PM PST

This does so much to quell any hint (4+ / 0-)
of conspiracy.....not.

"the most compelling, was 9/11 itself"

What it was all done for a TV special that he could watch from the WH basement?

He makes me puke as well.

"Flying is simple. You just throw yourself at the ground and miss." ~Douglas Adams

by LaFeminista on Sun Dec 21, 2008 at 01:38:29 PM PST
[ Parent ]

Probably say the Scooter Libby tragedy... (3+ / 0-)
To Cheney, I'm sure this episode was about as scary as it gets... I mean, imagine, having your own underling convicted of committing crimes...because you ordered him to...

by Nimbus on Sun Dec 21, 2008 at 01:25:43 PM PST
[ Parent ]

The question was high point (1+ / 0-)
you buffoon, Cheney. NOT important or compelling. I guess since there was NO high point in your administration you have to alter the question to suit your reality.

by eXtina on Sun Dec 21, 2008 at 02:30:35 PM PST
[ Parent ]

Why is is that Blog comments tend to be, errr, less politically tolerant?

The Dell Karpini study reveals political knowledge is directly correlated with tolerance.

According to the Pew Study, respondents who indicate blogs are their main news source are among the least informed members of the citizenry.

Well, there you have it.

A second line of evidence that confirms that bloggers are among the least informed of voters is that bloggers are predominantly young. The Pew Center establishes this as fact:

The following demographic data comes from two surveys of internet users conducted in
November-December 2005 and February-April 2006 (n=7,012).
The most distinguishing characteristic of bloggers is their youth. More than half
(54%) of bloggers are under the age of 30. Like the Internet population in general,
however, bloggers are evenly divided between men and women, and more than half
live in the suburbs. Another third live in urban areas and a scant 13% live in rural
regions.

A second Pew survey records that these same young voters are among least informed:

Casting doubt on this line of evidence is the fact that- by nature- any would be commentator on a blog needs to be politically informed. How can young people be the least informed segment of the populace and at the same time be the most active in the blogosphere?

The answer confirms one of the themes that has been developed in class, the readings, and this blog: the blogosphere is far more partisan then any conventional news source. Thus, those who get their information from the Blogosphere are more partisan. Indeed, Pew also found that- circa 2004- the younger demographic led all others in news intake from the Internet:

This finding has important ramifications for understanding the use of blogs in the future. They cannot exist alone, as they do not encourage cross talk between different political segments.

At this point, I am going to begin my Blessay, so good luck and thanks for reading. It has been a pleasure.

Darth Murdoch has Feelings Too

2008-12-19T11:11:00.000-08:00

Is the country threatened by media consolidation? Will the advent of media consolidation mean content is controlled by fewer and fewer people? Is that a bad thing?

Here is an excellent summary of the criticisms:

The consensus seems to be that there is a monopoly of the media in place, that media consolidation means less local representation, congressmen are arrogant prima-donna's, and the FCC has to assume that the 500 people that were energetic enough to pack public hearings on the issue represent an "overwhelming majority of 300 million citizens."

In contrast, Ben Compaine argues against the idea of media consolidation meaning a "media monoploy" in the first place. And he has the numbers to back it up (yay!):

In 1986, I employed a widely-used measure of economic concentration called the Herfindahl-Hirschmann Index (HHI), to assess the 50 largest American media industry players. In the HHI a score of 10,000 means a total monopoly. Anything above 1,800 indicates a highly concentrated market; 1,000 represents the bottom range of oligopolistic tendencies (meaning the major companies have some capability to limit price competition and perhaps indirectly constrain the range of content diversity), while any score under 1,000 reveals a competitive market. In 1997, the index for media companies stood at 268. This was up some from 206 in 1986, but hardly what you'd expect given fears of concentration. Skeptics would point out that 1997 was before AOL and Time Warner or CBS and Viacom merged, but it was also before magazine publisher Ziff-Davis broke itself up or Thomson, once the owner of more newspapers than any other company in North America, sold off most of its holdings to several established as well as newer players. Competitiveness in media compares favorably to other industries: The 1997 HHI for American motor vehicles was 2,506; for semiconductors, 1,080; and for pharmaceuticals, 446.

Much of the best-known merger activity has been more like rearranging the industry furniture: In the last 15 years, the American owners of MCA and its Universal Pictures subsidiary sold out to the Japanese firm Matsushita, who then sold Universal to Seagram's (Canada), who sold it to Vivendi (France), which is selling parts of it to General Electric's NBC. But at the same time Vivendi sold textbook publisher Houghton-Mifflin to a private investment group, and it did not include its Universal Music Group in the NBC sale. There is an ebb as well as flow, even among the largest media companies.

With all this fluidity, it is strange to read in the 1992 edition of Ben Bagdikian's influential book The Media Monopoly that our primary concern should be about "concentrated control" by "fifty corporations." Monopoly means exclusive control by one company. An oligopoly could involve two or three or four. In a 2001 online debate with me, academic critic and anti-consolidation activist Robert McChesney wrote that a top tier of seven "transnational giants -- AOL Time Warner, Disney, Bertelsmann, Vivendi Universal, Sony, Viacom and News Corporation -- ...together own all the major film studios and music companies, most of the cable and satellite TV systems and stations, the U.S. television networks, much of global book publishing and much, much, more." Of course, he wrote this in 2001, before Comcast became the largest cable company. So now it's the top eight? McChesney continues that the media cabal "is rounded out by a second tier of 60-80 firms," including many based in Asia and Latin America.

It is hard to contend that such a large and diverse group of companies has anything like "monopoly power," certainly in the economic sense. Indeed, any industry with 60 or more major players (who frequently change positions, appear out of nowhere, and disappear altogether) seems the very definition of a strong, competitive market.

Assuming that Compaine is wrong, and there is a monopoly that controls the media, does that mean that the media has replaced that media's quality and local representation has become worse?

First watch this...

...then read this, also from Compaine...

� Nor should anyone assume that smaller media entities are somehow "better" in the quality or quantity of news and public affairs programming. Or even that a commonly owned newspaper and television station in the same market create a single "voice." Studies by the FCC's Media Ownership Policy Working Group found that the local television stations owned by the large broadcast networks receive awards for news excellence at three times the rate of stations owned by smaller groups, and produce nearly 25 percent more news and public affairs programming than non-network-owned affiliates. Television stations owned by enterprises that also own newspapers have higher news ratings, win more news awards, and offer more news shows than non-newspaper affiliates. And in 10 cities where the newspaper and a TV station had common ownership, half of the combinations had a similar editorial slant in the 2000 presidential election, while the other half had divergent slants.

Hmm...

But perhaps, even though the content may be better and more expansive (not to mention diverse), putting the media in the hands of a selected group of people runs the risk of content being controlled by ideologies. To that, Compaine responds:

A.J. Liebling, the outspoken press critic of half a century ago, had a pragmatic insight into why the ownership structure of the media -- primarily newspapers then -- was a positive influence on content. In his 1947 book The Wayward Pressman he wrote, "The profit system, while it insures the predominant conservative coloration of our press, also guarantees that there will always be a certain amount of dissidence. The American press has never been monolithic, like that of an authoritarian state. One reason is that there is always money to be made in journalism by standing up for the underdog....[The underdog's] wife buys girdles and baking powder and Literary Guild selections, and the advertiser has to reach her."

At the time Liebling wrote this, the Hearst newspaper chain controlled more local circulation than any newspaper company does today. But his insights are actually more relevant today than in 1947. Profit, not ideology, means that whether one wants to focus on the 10 largest conglomerates or the 50 largest players or whatever other number, the content of the media is determined not by what the chief executive officer wants, but by what thousands of editors, producers, publishers, and local operating managers determine is right for the audience they are trying to reach.

This is one reason why big business and business executives are regularly made the villains (see The China Syndrome, Broadcast News, and Erin Brockovich, among many) in film and television features produced by major media companies. In many instances, the profit motive means localism prevails over centralization. It is not likely to matter much (and indeed experience shows it does not) whether a local TV station is owned by a company headquartered in another city. The decisions for much news and information need to be made locally if the owner wants to attract its share of the audience. In short, both locally and nationally owned media outlets are driven by the profit motive.

In fact, the notion that local owners of newspapers or TV and radio stations are inherently "better" -- usually taken to mean more "objective" -- than a large corporation has no standing in the real world. Some of the most biased newspapers in 20th-century history -- McCormick's Chicago Tribune, Annenberg's Philadelphia Inquirer, Loeb's Manchester Union-Leader -- were the creations of local ownership. Local owners are more likely than remote corporate owners to have ties to the local political and business establishment. Local owners may not have the economic resources to withstand a boycott by real estate or banking or similar interests should they risk some criticism of the local industry. Large chains, on the other hand, are far less affected economically by a short-term downturn in any one community. And it is less likely that the publisher is a prep school buddy of the mayor.

There is one more important point. Diversifying ownership by no means equals greater diversity in product. These smaller institutions need to make a profit as well. This means two things:

(1) As Compaine points out, they may simply purchase their programming from a larger production company, thus landing media control right back in the hands of the few regulation was supposed to remove from power:

� There is nothing inherently better or more "diverse" about a media company buying its content from outside sources rather than from its vertically integrated production operation. The trend in recent mergers has been for distributors, i.e., broadcast networks, to align with production companies, i.e., film studios. Their decision to do so is a classic "make vs. buy" case. No one has criticized newspapers for running their own content-creation businesses, even though they could rely on freelancers and independent contractors. Some do more than others. Magazines do some of both. TV networks and local stations have long had their own in-house news operations. But a combination of business model and (for two decades) regulation kept most entertainment production out-of-house at the three older networks. Over time the combined studios/TV networks are likely to find that they were better off being able to pick and choose programming from what outsiders offered them rather than being stuck with whatever their limited in-house operations offer. The economics offer powerful incentives: To cite one of many examples, Warner Brothers Television, part of AOL Time Warner, owner of the WB and HBO television networks, produces the top-rated television show, ER. It could run that show on either of those in-house networks, but instead sells it to NBC, based on a cold calculation that this is the better financial decision.

(2) This argument does not affect local television broadcasts, which are cheaper and more manageable then national or international operations. However, the dynamics of profit still call the shots no matter how many independent stations exist. This means that stations will gravitate towards the same programing (read: the pack mentality) no matter how trivial it is (read: soft news).

Compaine brings an interesting proof that when profit (i.e what the public does not want to see) it not responsible for programming, nobody watches. In three letters: P, B, and S:

Animus against the profit motive runs deep among FCC critics and activist groups. Consider this complaint in the mission statement of the Free Press, a lobbying group founded by McChesney: "The main problem is that the structure of the media system makes socially dubious behavior...the rational outcome." One proposed scenario? "If the government gave all the publicly owned radio and TV frequencies to nonprofit groups, rather than a relative handful of huge corporations, the content of our broadcasting system would probably be radically different from what exists today."

They are almost certainly half-right. Content might well be different. But it wouldn't necessarily be better. Would nonprofits be able to pay their employees well? Would they have the capital to reinvest in equipment and technologies? Who would determine the content of their programming, and on what basis? This might work only in a Harrison Bergeron world of enforced equality, where no democracy of content was allowed, where the voice of the audience was not heard. The experience with the Public Broadcasting Service is instructive in this regard. At its best, PBS could rarely get the attention of more than 2 percent of the total TV audience. And that was when it had only three rivals. Who exactly would benefit from a model of only PBS-like programming?

There are definite merits to both sides of the deregulation debate. As Compaine himself points out, there are serious negatives to media consolidation. However, he argues the risk is tremendously exaggerated. Compared to other industries, media is competitive. Corporate control does not mean less local coverage. Consolidation is also not correlated with uniform content. And Deregulation may not be that much better anyway. Time will tell who is correct.

I Blog, Therefore I Am

2008-12-14T11:54:00.000-08:00

Are bloggers reporters?

There is no easy answer, largely because the definition of reporter is fluid. Leighly suggests that reporters may be "neutral adversaries" of the public, meaning that in order to be reporters, bloggers must deliver new information to their audience. Zimmerman observes that Bloggers follow the pattern of news covered by the MSM, casting doubt on the functionality of Bloggers in this particular role. Shifting gears, if reporters are made in the mold of what Leighly terms "reporters of the objective fact", then blogs need credibility (as well as an ability to access new information in the first place, a claim already weakened by Zimmerman). Sunstein casts doubt on this claim. The outlook for Bloggers for these models of Journalism appears bleak.

The fortunes of Bloggers take a turn for the better if we change the definition of Journalism to "public advocate". In this case, Woodly provides excellent theories (although not the numbers to back up her claims) as to why Bloggers fill the void created by the (alleged) failure of the MSM in this particular role.

Blogs as Neutral adversaries: Do Blogs uncover new information?

Zimmerman points out that Bloggers march in lockstep with the MSM in regards to the stories they cover.

Bloggers, as a whole, appear worse at covering developing nations than mainstream news, suggesting that bloggers in developing nations may ﬁnd it hard to win recognition from their fellows in the North. It’s hard to pin this down statistically as a comparison between Blogpulse blogs and Google News data is not entirely fair: many of the blogs tracked by Blogpulse are diaries, which we would not expect to regularly reﬂect on interna- tional news. Comparisons of top blogs on Technorati or Blogpulse, rather than the whole setof blogs, might reveal different results. Early research on Daypop, a now-defunct catalog of 40,000 top blogs, suggested more focus on developing nations in top blogs than in the larger blogset tracked by Blogpulse and Technorati.

There is also evidence that bloggers will cover stories pertinent to the developing world if they are adequately primed by mainstream media coverage of the event. Research commis- sioned by AlertNet, a nonproﬁt arm of Reuters, indicated that coverage of the Indian Ocean Tsunami dwarfed coverage of ten other pressing humanitarian stories (Jones 2005)—the ten “forgotten” stories put together received only 78% of the coverage the tsunami received. A rough parallel study, using data from Blogpulse and keywords designed to approximate the AlertNet searches,20 revealed that coverage of the tsunami in the blogosphere dwarfed coverage of the ten “forgotten” stories to an even greater degree than in mainstream media— bloggers wrote 39% as many stories about the forgotten stories as about the tsunami.

Their sensitivity to priming suggests that Bloggers currently exist as a reaction to the the MSM, and not as a replacement. As with most of the material in the special edition of Public Opinion, there is little in the way of numbers to challenge this theory or substantiate it. Its should be noted that examples of Blogs breaking stories do exist, such as that of CBSgate. However, even this example of Bloggers influncing the news cycle was a reaction to a story brought by the MSM.

The Reporter of Objective Fact: Are Blogs credible?

Sunstein suggests that Blogs may have credibilty because of their sheer mass:

Hayek’s central point is that the best solution comes from the price system. His claim is that in a system in which knowledge of relevant facts is dispersed among many people, prices act as an astonishingly concise and accurate coordinating and signaling device. They incorporate that dispersed knowledge and in a sense also publicize it, because the price itself operates as a signal to all. At the same time, the price system has a wonderfully automatic quality, particularly in its capacity to respond to change. If fresh information shows that a product—a television, a car, a watch—doesn’t always work, people’s demand for it will rapidly fall, and so too the price. And when a commodity suddenly becomes more scarce, its users must respond to that fact. The market works remarkably well as a whole, not because any participant can see all its features, but because the relevant information is communicated to everyone through prices.

However, Samson notes that a prequisite to this phenomenon is that all of the individual components share information. This is not the case in the Blogosphere. In fact, Samson notes the credibility problem grows worse as political activists stay within Blogs that agree to their particular political beliefs.

In light of this evidence, it should be clear that the Habermasian view of the blogosphere faces a particular problem if people are reading blogs that conform to their own preexisting beliefs. If this is so, the truth is not likely to emerge, and polarization is nearly inevitable. Liberals, reading liberal blogs, will end up more liberal; conservatives will become more conservative if they restrict themselves to conservative blogs. It is reasonable to speculate that the Colorado experiment ﬁnds itself replicated in the blogosphere every day, with poten- tially harmful results. People sometimes go to extremes simply because they are consulting others who think as they do. The rise of blogs makes it all the easier for people to live in echo chambers of their own design. Indeed some bloggers, and many readers of blogs, live in information cocoons. Shared identities are often salient on the blogosphere, in a way that makes polarization both more likely and more likely to be large.

Without the needed cross-exchange, bloggers lose their credibility and with it their ability to be reporter of objective fact.

The Public Advocate: Can Bloggers inspire public discussion as advocates of the public?

In the public advocate model, the media is part of a larger discussion between the public and government. A symptom of a healthy public advocacy media system is the the level of voter participation it inspires. Woodly notes that 4 criteria prevent the MSM from motivating increased voter participation:

The increasingly anemic interest of most Americans in politics is certainly not all the fault of news media, but communications scholars have long noted that the news itself is ailing, not only by the standards of the democratic hope for the free press, but also by the professional expectations which developed at the turn of the last century. The roots and characteristics of the news media’s condition are attributed to different causes depend- ing on the focus of the study, but there seem to be four major areas that are consistently noted as problematic. First, the news is biased toward elite opinion, especially White House opinion. This bias is not necessarily the result of a normative preference for the opinions of ofﬁcials, but instead the consequence of a number of constraints and standard operating procedures that are characteristic of the modern press (Tuchman 1978; Gans 1979; Bennett 1983; Entman 2004, 1989). Second, the presentation of the news is increasingly episodic and sensational. Michael Delli Carpini and Bruce Williams have referred to thisphenomenon as the rise of “infotainment”: the increased centralization, nationalization, economic motivation and entertainment orientation of public affairs media (Carpini and Williams 2001). Third, the professional ideology of American journalists, which holds sacred the idea that “objectivity” is the chief guiding principle of news reporting, may para- doxically prevent journalists from adequately reﬂecting reality. Fourth and ﬁnally, the mass reach of news is complicated by the consolidated ownership of media outlets, which dimin- ishes the diversity of news content that is produced (McChesney 1997; 2004).

Woodsly demonstrates that Blogging avoids these four pitfalls. Blogs avoid "elite bias"....

Not only is the form of the information that blogs make available distinct from that of
traditional news media but so is the substance. Remember, the content of traditional media is limited by elite bias, the necessity of attention-grabbing presentation, the professional ethic of objectivity and the conglomeration of corporate ownership. Blogs do not share traditional media’s elite bias. While it cannot be said that bloggers avoid focusing on the pronouncements of ofﬁcials in their content, it is the case that bloggers lack the objectivity-based credibility structure and ﬁnancial constraints that often limit the depth and scope of news in traditional media. While ofﬁcial statements might inspire attention to a particular subject, the content of those statements does not act as a boundary on inquiry or commentary. One of the reasons for the development of this norm might be a question of access. Unlike top mainstream journalists, most bloggers do not have, or are only just acquiring the insider status required to talk to high ranking ofﬁcials. Most blog posts simply could not be made up of original quotes from “both” ofﬁcial sides. For this reason, bloggers tend to ask questions and make arguments by examining public facts or engaging with non-elite viewpoints that have been left out of traditional coverage in favor of elite he-said-she said.

..., the quicksand of soft news,...

Blogs can also avoid the “infotainment” trap. While it cannot be said that blogs are in- vulnerable to gossip and fads, it is the case that political blog posts do not face the same pressures that lead traditional media into the infotainment trap. Even if the blogger posts only a few lines to highlight an aspect of a political phenomenon, those short posts can and often do engender extended discussion, either through the enabled comments section or through additional posts where the author responds to and incorporates emailed information s/he has received. The assertion that blogs are more likely than traditional media to present information thematically (or, in context) might seem counter-intuitive, however, one of the advantages of blogs as a form is that bloggers can update frequently without sacriﬁcing depth of discussion. Since blogs are only partly constituted by the thoughts of the author, blog readers are free to continue to carry on discussion and make inquiries about any recent post that suits their interest or speaks to their expertise. In this way, the speed or brevity with which subjects are presented for discussion does not fundamentally compromise the thoroughness with which the topic can be discussed.

..., can be as biased as they want to be,...

Since the construction of credibility in the blogosphere is not based on access to or validation from ofﬁcials, there is also little need to avoid charges of bias. While one of the major tenets of professional journalism is neutral objectivity, bloggers often frankly disclose their political leanings and affections, eschewing the dictate that equates analytical balance with ideological innocence. Since there is no prohibition against making political allegiances and positions known, the substance of blog posts, unlike the content of articles or broadcast news stories, can and often does take the form of critical appraisal instead of objective reportage.

... and don't have to make money:

The ﬁnal and most obvious difference between blogs and traditional news media is that blogs are so inexpensive to produce that they need not depend on patrons, corporations or ad revenue to enable and insure their existence. While it is becoming more common for bloggers that sustain high trafﬁc to sell ad space, the vast majority of political bloggers derive little or no income from what is necessarily a part-time endeavor. Bloggers do not solicit for advertisers out of necessity so when they do sell ad space they may pick and chose advertising content. This means that ad content on blogs often conforms to their reader’s sympathy and interest. In traditional media this relationship is reversed.

Blogs are free from the restrictions of the MSM. The inevitable result is that people say what they want to say and hear what they want to hear. They can feel powerful and/or feel satisfied in the discovery a fellow ideological community. Both of these emotions lead to greater political participation. [Hopefully, later in the week part 2 of this post, The Blog For America will be used as a case study that illustrates these phenomena].

It emerges that the MSM and the blogosphere complement each other. Where blogs lack the ability to be neutral adveseraies and reporters of objective fact, the MSM (in theory) has the resources to ensure these media models are fulfilled. And where the MSM is boxed in by factors that limit the range of its content and analysis, blogs pick up the slack.

Chicken Soup

2008-12-10T16:16:00.000-08:00

Here are several notes on topics we have discussed both in class and on this blog.

(1) Can we expect blogs to supplant traditional news sources?

I would construct this argument on my own, but newspaperdeathwatch leaves me no room for original thought.

My main argument against Blogs supplanting newspapers assumed that Blogs did not have the resources or motivation to challenge traditional news outlets. These articles, from newspaperdeathwatch, may show evidence of a different trend.

In this piece, Daniel Kimerling examines how newspapers were absolutely replaced by amateurs reporting in the recent Mumbai attacks.

Yet, for all the doom and gloom which one cannot help but feeling when looking at the current state of the newspaper business in the United States, I may have seen the future of News. Not surprisingly that future intersects with that of the Internet in many significant ways. And surprisingly, I saw it for the first time during the horrific events of last week’s terrorist attacks in Mumbai. For those of us who need up to date information on global events, normal sources for such news are CNN, the BBC, or other similar organizations. However, these traditional media organizations were terribly slow in providing news coverage of the tragedy. How was information spread? Surprisingly it was through Twitter, the oft-mentioned microblogging platform. Because Twitter offers short, near real time communications, it allowed people under attack to transmit information, allowed media events to aggregate information, and allowed consumers to receive information. It has turned into what one might call, for lack of a better term, a crowd-sourced information dissemination system. The power of distributed nodes, a hall mark of the Twitter model, is especially powerful in this and other emergent situations as it offers speed and agility, in stark contrast to the adjectives associated with a television journalist’s satellite truck or a print journalist’s laptop. A second exciting technology that demonstrated its value during the Mumbai attacks was that of people powered search, most commonly associated with the search start-up Mahalo. Mahalo works by having writers curate search pages, combining aspects of Wikipedia, About.com, and Google. In the case of breaking news they have a team that can build pages dynamically, and aggregate content from across the web, whether social media or standard content. In doing so, they can adapt nearly as quickly as real world events can occur. Breaking news might have actually proven to be the best use case for people-powered search.

Mumbai is a direct affront to my argument.

A second relevant article discussed the expansion of the Huffington Post. With more money at its disposal, the HP will at least have the opportunity to expand into traditional news collection. This is not a direct affront to my claim, for two reasons: (a) the Article states that HP intends to use the money to hire more business and editorial talent, not reporters, and (b) can HP move into objective news collection even with its clearly liberal slant. And if it does, does that mean that blog dominated news means a reversion to the era of partisan papers?

Finally, newspaperdeathwatch provides an excellent example of a blog actually morphing into a news service:

Politico Reports Strong Response to New Wire Service

Attempting to exploit newspapers’ frustration with the Associated Press, CNN has stepped into the breach with its own international news network. But the cable company may face some unexpected competition: The Politico. The Washington-based boutique news service, which specializes in Capitol Hill coverage, has signed up 67 newspapers for its news service over the last three months. They include the Arizona Republic, Des Moines Register, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as all 27 dailies owned by Advance Publications. Several of its new clients are in dire financial circumstances and have cut back upon or eliminated their Washington bureaus. That makes Politico’s value proposition compelling. As we’re written before, The Politico continues to be an example of how specialized journalism can fill the gap left by broad-based media titans in an era of micro markets.

I guess this is a pretty strong argument that Blogs can indeed function as new services. Now the question becomes, will they be able to maintain their identity?

(2) The Pew Center provides further evidence of the Democratic domination of the Internet. What is important is that these numbers are for the 2008 cycle, and they show evidence that the younger (democratic) demographic continues to dominate the Internet...

...however, Republicans are not so far behind...

(3) Finally, here is an interesting study that indicates Stewart may just be newsworthy after all. Here is an abstract:

The Daily Show is much funnier than traditional newscasts, but a new study from Indiana University says it has the same amount of meat on its bones when it comes to coverage of the news. The brand of news coverage Jon Stewart and the rest of The Daily Show's staff brings to the airwaves is just as substantive as traditional news programs like World News Tonight and the CBS Evening News, according to the study conducted by IU assistant professor of telecommunications Julia R. Fox and a couple of graduate students.

The researchers looked at coverage of the 2004 Democratic and Republican national conventions and the first presidential debate of the fall campaign, all of which were covered by the mainstream broadcast news outlets and The Daily Show. Individual broadcasts of the nightly news and corresponding episodes of The Daily Show were analyzed by the researchers, who found that the "average amounts of video and audio substance in the broadcast network news stories" were no different from The Daily Show. Perhaps more telling, The Daily Show delivered longer stories on the topic.

Grand Old Party

2008-12-07T18:30:00.000-08:00

The entrance of the Internet into the political lexicon raises a host of issues. Among the most pressing is the the dominance of this new medium by Democrats. Why is is that Democrats appear to have successfully employed the Internet for their parties advancement, while Republicans seem to be in a distant second?

The batch of readings dealing with the Internet makes it clear that Democrats dominated across two of the most relevant political functions of the Internet- fundraising, organization, and blogging.

(1) Blogging: McKibben makes it clear that Blogging is a Democratic pastime:

Reporters long cowed by conservative charges of bias (as Michael Massing demonstrated in his recent essays on press coverage of Iraq[2] ) now find that they are getting closer scrutiny on the Internet. Since the liberals of the blogosphere are better organized, this is starting to have a balancing effect. Kos says he gets fifty times the number of visits received by the entire right-wing "blogosphere," where his biggest competitor is probably a site called Instapundit.com

.

(2) Fundraising: The Washington Post reports that Obama raised over half a billion dollars online:

In an exclusive interview with The Post, members of the vaunted Triple O, Obama's online operation, broke down the numbers: 3 million donors made a total of 6.5 million donations online adding up to more than $500 million. Of those 6.5 million donations, 6 million were in increments of $100 or less. The average online donation was $80, and the average Obama donor gave more than once.

(3) Organization: The Washington Post also notes the size Obama's extensive Internet volunteer network:

Obama's e-mail list contains upwards of 13 million addresses. Over the course of the campaign, aides sent more than 7,000 different messages, many of them targeted to specific donation levels (people who gave less than $200, for example, or those who gave more than $1,000). In total, more than 1 billion e-mails landed in inboxes. (Four years ago, Sen. John F. Kerry had 3 million e-addresses on his list; former Vermont governor Howard Dean had 600,000.)
A million people signed up for Obama's text-messaging program. On the night Obama accepted the Democratic nomination at Invesco Field in Denver, more than 30,000 phones among the crowd of 75,000 were used to text in to join the program. On Election Day, every voter who'd signed up for alerts in battleground states got at least three text messages. Supporters on average received five to 20 text messages per month, depending on where they lived -- the program was divided by states, regions, zip codes and colleges -- and what kind of messages they had opted to receive.
On MyBarackObama.com, or MyBO, Obama's own socnet, 2 million profiles were created. In addition, 200,000 offline events were planned, about 400,000 blog posts were written and more than 35,000 volunteer groups were created -- at least 1,000 of them on Feb. 10, 2007, the day Obama announced his candidacy. Some 3 million calls were made in the final four days of the campaign using MyBO's virtual phone-banking platform. On their own MyBO fundraising pages, 70,000 people raised $30 million. The campaign even set up a grassroots finance committee that was inspired by the national finance committee's high-dollar bundlers. In the grassroots committee, though, supporters were trained to collect small-dollar donations from their friends, relatives and co-workers.
Obama has 5 million supporters in other socnets. He maintained a profile in more than 15 online communities, including BlackPlanet, a MySpace for African Americans, and Eons, a Facebook for baby boomers. On Facebook, where about 3.2 million signed up as his supporters, a group called Students for Barack Obama was created in July 2007. It was so effective at energizing college-age voters that senior aides made it an official part of the campaign the following spring. And Facebook users did vote: On Facebook's Election 2008 page, which listed an 800 number to call for voting problems, more than 5.4 million users clicked on an "I Voted" button to let their Facebook friends know that they made it to the polls. (Talk about online peer pressure.)

[If anyone can find McCain's numbers, please post them in comments. I could not.]

The diffrence between Republicans and Democrats dates back to the 2004 campaign of Howard Dean. Hindman notes this and attributes it to Liberals greater usage of the internet:

There is much that we still do not know about political Web use, and many important details remain to be filled in. In the Dean case, though, the importance of these skewed political demographics is clear. In the early campaign, Dean positioned himself to the left of most competitors, declaring that he represented “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” and offering forceful opposition to the Iraq war while other competitors adopted more nuanced positions. 2 If the patterns of political Web usage were reversed—if conservatives visited political sites far more than liberals—the Internet would not have been such an asset for Dean. He would have raised much less money, recruited fewer volunteers, and attracted less positive press coverage.

These findings force us to consider whether Dean's experience might be part of a larger trend in online activism that benefits liberal views. Should we expect this liberal-conservative gap to be temporary or an enduring feature of the online political landscape? At this point, we do not know. There is some reason to expect that conservatives will catch up. The Internet is a young medium, and effective methods of online organizing are still largely experimental. As user sophistication continues to improve, as conservative candidates invest resources in exploiting the Web, and as conservative partisans themselves see online participation as a key part of political activism, online politics may have less of a liberal cast.

Ideological differentials in usage may not fade quickly, though. 2004 is not 1994; the majority of the American public is online and has been for several years. There is no liberal-conservative gap in access more generally, or in time spent online. Moreover, many other mediums of political outreach have had a persistent partisan character. For example, direct mail solicitation has long been a more effective tool for Republicans than Democrats.

The Dean campaign highlights the importance of the liberal-conservative gap in political Web usage, but it does little to show us how this disparity will evolve as online politics matures. Measuring and understanding the ideological divide in political Web usage will be critical to nearly every aspect of online politics.

Why do they use the Internet more? I have two theories: the first being that (a) Democrats tend to be younger and (b) Younger people are more comfortable using the Internet, meaning they can use it for political activities with ease. The Pew Research Center makes this clear about at least one of the three categories- blogging- analyzed:

More than half (54%) of bloggers are under the age of 30, and about another third (30%) are between 30 and 50. Just 14% of bloggers fall in the 50 to 64 age group and a tiny 2% are 65 or older. In comparison, only 24% of Internet users are age 18-29. Nearly half of Internet users (45%) are age 30 to 49 and another quarter (24%) are age 50 to 64. About 7% of Internet users are 65 or older.

There are important ramifications for the dominance of younger voters of the Internet. First, it raises doubt if the Democratic party will be able to hold a lock on the Internet over the long term. Those older members of the Grand Old Party- they where young once too. What happens when the Internet generation turns to the dark side? Second, these same voters are, well, young, and notorious for non-participation in elections. Perhaps this explains the findings of one of earlier readings...

There is a second theory, although I type it with caution. Is it so crazy to suggest the Democratic party is by nature more anti-establishment then the Republican party? If this was a truth, it would account for the natural flow of Democrats to the grassroots medium of the Internet. McKibben seems to hint at this a couple times, first with this...

The incumbent, Terry McAuliffe, retired after his failure in the 2004 elections, and the general consensus was that the 447 voting members of the relevant party committees would turn to yet another veteran of the inbred and centrist world of Democratic Party technicians, bland pols, and full-time fund-raisers. Jerome, on his widely followed MyDD blog (where Kos had begun his blogging career by posting comments), started handicapping the race; other bloggers began to study the records of Dean's rivals. One of them, Leo Hindery, for instance, was a prototypical fat cat. According to Crashing the Gate, he turned his Gulfstream around in midair while en route to a Democratic caucus when he learned that the blogs had revealed he was a chief backer of the ad linking Dean and Osama. When Dean eventually won, he said, "This party's strength does not come from consultants down. It comes from the grassroots up." In essence, this new force had lost the primary, but made it clear that it could continue to fight. "Dean was the first to break through and get inside the heretofore closed world of the party," Kos and Jerome write. "He won't be the last.

"

...and then with this interesting contrast between DailyKos (of the grassroots Internet) and The New Republic (of that old stuffy medium)...

At the center of this world, however, is Daily Kos, which because of its particular architecture, and the open spirit of its founder, has become an experiment in Web-style democracy. Kos himself posts a few blog entries every day. But each year he appoints five assistants who can post comments of their own on his front page. Many of these have become household names (albeit pseudonymous ones) in the blogging world—Meteor Blades or Armando are far more widely read than, say, The New Republic's TRB, despite the magazine's hundred-year head start. (As a measure of comparative fortunes, The New Republic announced last month that its circulation had fallen by 40 percent in the last few years.) But anyone who joins Daily Kos—a free and painless process—is allowed to post "diaries"—really mini-essays—about particular topics at any time

If my theory is true, it would also account for why the conservative FOX news is more popular then the liberal MSNBC. Conservatives are more inclined to be satisfied with the tried and true establishment of television. According to this theory, the stage is set for the trend of Democratic domination of the internet to continue.

Very Funny

2008-12-04T00:01:00.000-08:00

Peterson divided political comedy into two distinct groups: Satire, and Pseudo-Satire.

Jay Leno exhibits his pseudo-satire credentials in this joke about Barack Obama. It is at the :45 second mark:

Leno's joke about Biden illustrate the traits that separate him as a pseudo-satirist. Leno's comedy has distinct limitations: If a joke is not commercially viable, Leno does not pursue it. Pseudo-satire is a for-profit affair; the jokes flow to those topics that are easy to follow and short to the punchline. Obama lacks the instant humor of a Bush, Biden, or Clinton, and is therefore not good fodder for late night comedy. Second, Leno is not in a position to create jokes. Pseudo-satire does not bend over backwards to highlight the humor in serious situations. It is a response to events, recycling proven humorous themes in new situations. In contrast, satire looks to create humor in non-humorous situations.

John Stewert provides an excellent contrast to Leno. In this piece about the tragedy in Mumbai, Stewert does both tasks Leno was unwilling to do: he mines non-commercially viable materiel (because massacres of innocent civilians are both easy to produce and present evident punch-lines...) and creates comedy out of an otherwise bleak situation.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c
Mumbai Tragedy
Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview
Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Very Funny.

Not all Polls are created equal

2008-12-02T20:22:00.000-08:00

On Thanksgiving, a cousin of mine emailed me this Zogby Poll. As I researched it myself, I discovered that the controversy surrounding this poll provides an immediate case study of many of the topics we have covered in class.

The poll itself is a series of 8 questions addressed to Obama voters. The results demonstrated that Obama voters knew significantly less negatives about Obama then they did about McCain. John Zegiler, the Polls commissioner, claims on his website HowObamaGotElected that these results prove media bias...

"On Election day twelve Obama voters were interviewed extensively right after they voted to learn how the news media impacted their knowledge of what occurred during the campaign. These voters were chosen for their apparent intelligence/verbal abilities and willingness to express their opinions to a large audience. The rather shocking video below seeks to provide some insight into which information broke through the news media clutter and which did not....Because obviously interviewing a relative handful of Obama voters, while interesting, is hardly scientific proof of anything, we also commissioned a Zogby telephone poll which asked the very same questions (as well as a few others) with similarly amazing results..."

...and proudly displays the results in the following fashion:

512 Obama Voters 11/13/08-11/15/08 MOE +/- 4.4 points

97.1% High School Graduate or higher, 55% College Graduates

Results to 12 simple Multiple Choice Questions

57.4% could NOT correctly say which party controls congress (50/50 shot just by guessing)

71.8% could NOT correctly say Joe Biden quit a previous campaign because of plagiarism (25% chance by guessing)

82.6% could NOT correctly say that Barack Obama won his first election by getting opponents kicked off the ballot (25% chance by guessing)

88.4% could NOT correctly say that Obama said his policies would likely bankrupt the coal industry and make energy rates skyrocket (25% chance by guessing)

56.1% could NOT correctly say Obama started his political career at the home of two former members of the Weather Underground (25% chance by guessing).

And yet.....

Only 13.7% failed to identify Sarah Palin as the person on which their party spent $150,000 in clothes

Only 6.2% failed to identify Palin as the one with a pregnant teenage daughter

And 86.9 % thought that Palin said that she could see Russia from her "house," even though that was Tina Fey who said that!!

Only 2.4% got at least 11 correct.

Only .5% got all of them correct. (And we "gave" one answer that was technically not Palin, but actually Tina Fey)

However, as other media sources were quick to point out, the methodology of this poll is deeply flawed. The relatively non-partisan WSJ noted that the presentation of the results was misleading:

Here’s an alternative way of presenting the findings that’s at least as valid. There were 10 questions that were meant to be answered with the name of one of the candidates. Five of them covered events that had surfaced in the three months before the election: McCain’s inability to say how many homes he owned; Palin’s pregnant teenage daughter; Palin’s wardrobe budget; Obama’s intent to redistribute wealth; and Biden’s comment that Obama would be tested by an international crisis. On those questions, more than half of Obama voters correctly identified the involved candidate (the percentage for the last question was lowest, at 53.3%; on the others, it was in the 80s).

...

...and cast in doubt the selection of the questions in proving that Obama voters did not know much about the man they where voting for:

Apart from the exclusion of McCain supporters and whether the poll’s questions were representative of overall campaign knowledge, the poll didn’t demonstrate that the news media favored Obama, or that any media distortions “got Obama elected.” No questions addressed how voters got their information or how the answers to the questions influenced their vote. It may well be that supporters of each candidate gravitate toward media that downplay the shortcomings of their own candidates and highlight those of opponents — or simply that they retain knowledge that conforms with their world view.

The significantly more partisan blogosphere was considerably more harsh, and accused the questions themselves of being misleading.

The wisdom of "The 20 Questions about Polls" advice to look at the sponsor of the poll never rang truer.

Further, even if we assume that there are no methodological issues with this poll, there is the simple causation/correlation issue. As we discussed extensively in the beginning of the semester, people flock to "like media." Conservatives tend to watch Fox News and liberals MSNBC. So to, cognitive psychology has documented the existence of confirmation bias, or the phenomenon where individuals pay more attention to examples that confirm their preexisting beliefs and assume these examples are more common. This is a misuse of a heuristic called the "representative heuristic", where individuals assume that single example represents the character of a larger group. Thus, two people can watch the exact same coverage and come away with different memories. The poll does not prove that media coverage was biased, rather that Obama supporters were biased in favor of Obama.

In an attempt to correct this last issue, Ziegler commissioned a poll asking both McCain and Obama voters the same questions about the negatives of both candidates. In this case, we can assume the effect of "like media" is negated. The results:

Here are the highlights:

35 % of McCain voters got 10 or more of 13 questions correct.

18% of Obama voters got 10 or more of 13 questions correct.

McCain voters knew which party controls congress by a 63-27 margin.

Obama voters got the “congressional control” question wrong by 43-41.

Those that got "congressional control" correct voted 56-43 for McCain.

Those that got "congressional control" wrong voted 65-35 for Obama.

The 35% number is very important. It shows, assuming there are no methodological problems with the poll, a big IF, that even McCain supporters did not know that much negative about Obama. If the phenomenon of "like media" is to be blamed for the Obama-supporter's answers, then we should expect the McCain people to do much better on Obama Negatives. The problem is that Zeigler has not released the exact details of the last poll, question by question. But this new, companion poll does at least begin to remove the "like-media" issue, and perhaps (if we assume the poll to be fair) demonstrates that the media was not vocal enough about the issues expressed in the poll's questions.

I can't help but post this

2008-12-02T20:17:00.000-08:00

The video illustrates many of the points about soft news we have made in class. But it is a whole a lot funnier.

What We Call the News | Funny Jokes at JibJab

The Few, The Proud, and the Broken

2008-11-26T19:47:00.000-08:00

Control Room and the massive breakdown in media diligence preceding the Iraq war highlight the pitfalls that lie at both extremes of media self-censorship. On the one hand, as the media failure to give credibility to both sides of the WMD story in 2002-3, the consequences of neglecting both sides of a story can be deadly. On the other hand, as demonstrated by Al Jazera's mission to act as a counter to the Western media, emphasising one side of a story because you are the sole defender of that perspective can lead to propaganda.

I leave that beginning as a lead to the post I was going to write. I wanted to illustrate how much I wanted to believe that only Al Jazere was guilty of disseminating propaganda during the Iraq War. However, I had an epiphany at the end of that paragraph, and I think it is the point the Doc was trying to emphasize by selecting these readings: if we find Al Jazeree guilty of spreading propaganda, we must do the same for our own media in the period leading up to the Iraq War. For me, this is such an unbelievable thought; Propaganda is a dirty word I normally associate with the Third Reich, Al Jazeree, and Howard Dean. To add NBC, FOX, and the New York Times is anathema to any red and blue blooded American. But we must, at least for the period preceding the Iraq War.

As we discussed in class Propaganda does not have to mean you are being lied to. Bending the truth also qualifies. Shah lists the following means of Propaganda, none of which involve outright lying:

Elements Of Propaganda
Propaganda can serve to rally people behind a cause, but often at the cost of exaggerating, misrepresenting, or even lying about the issues in order to gain that support.

While the issue of propaganda often is discussed in the context of militarism, war and war-mongering, it is around us in all aspects of life.

As the various examples below will show, common tactics in propaganda often used by either side include:

Using selective stories that come over as wide-covering and objective.

Partial facts, or historical context

Reinforcing reasons and motivations to act due to threats on the security of the individual.

Narrow sources of “experts” to provide insights in to the situation. (For example, the mainstream media typically interview retired military personnel for many conflict-related issues, or treat official government sources as fact, rather than just one perspective that needs to be verified and researched).

Demonizing the “enemy” who does not fit the picture of what is “right”.

Using a narrow range of discourse, whereby judgments are often made while the boundary of discourse itself, or the framework within which the opinions are formed, are often not discussed. The narrow focus then helps to serve the interests of the propagandists.

Control Room documents how Al Jazera was guilty of all these activities during the Iraq War. Here are some examples: (1) As the military information officer observes, Al Jazera choose to emphasize stories that served their purposes. (2) The Officer also mentions the 30-90 second graphic clips that Al Jazera played before every commercial during the war. These fall into the category of "reinforcing reasons and motivations to act due to threats on the security of the individual," as they bring the War home to every Arab. They also are an example of "demonizing the “enemy” who does not fit the picture of what is “right"." By showing emotionally charged pictures, Al Jazera speaks to the Arab heart and not the Arab mind. This is classic propaganda; not a lie, but rather an emphasis on the emotional, "leading to a narrow range of discourse, whereby judgments are often made while the boundary of discourse itself."

But are we any better?

No. That is the conclusion one has to come to when they read the accounts of the skewed reporting that occurred before the Iraq War. We may not be as crude as Al Jazera; we don't show dying American soldiers and massive carnage. Rather, our propaganda was more subtle.

In "Now they Tell Us" Messing illustrates how the U.S Media also selectively choose it stories in the run up to the Iraq War. For example, Colin Powell's detailing allegation that there where WMD in Iraq received 3 front page articles in the NYT the next day. On the other hand, this only made A10:

In short, the IAEA, after weeks of intensive inspections, had found no sign whatever of any effort by Iraq to resume its nuclear program. Given the importance the administration had attached to this matter, this would have seemed news of the utmost significance. Yet it was largely ignored. The Times, which had so prominently displayed its initial story about the aluminum tubes, buried its main article about ElBaradei's statement on page A10. (The paper did briefly mention ElBaradei's conclusion about the tubes in a front-page story that focused mainly on Iraq's lack of cooperation with the inspectors.) One of the few papers to give his statement significant treatment was The Washington Post. Following up on his earlier article on the tubes, Joby Warrick incorporated the IAEA findings into a detailed analysis of the claims and counterclaims surrounding the tubes. The article cited weapons inspectors, scientists, and other experts, all of whom cast strong doubt on the administration's arguments.[3]

Like Al Jazera's violent pre-commercial special, the suppression of doubt about the WMD served as "Reinforcing reasons and motivations to act due to threats" in the eyes of the American public. This is only one example of the many Messing supplies in an article that leaves little room to deny that the American media was as intent in constructing a certain narrative. No other word suits this behavior besides propaganda.

It is alright to label Al Jazera Propaganda. With its story selection and emotional arguments, it may very well may fit the definition. It is not ok to pretend we were not, as least partially, guilty of the same offense in the run up to the Iraq War.

Mr. Popularity

2008-11-24T20:18:00.000-08:00

In their article "Can a Poll Affect the Public's Perception of a Candidates Traits", Hardy and Jamison argue that polls are self serving, in that their conclusions are often parroted by the consuming public. In other words, the conclusions reached by the polls cause a shift towards that polls conclusions. Is the same thing true when the media begins associating phrases like "unpopular" with "War" and Iraq". Does the perception that a majority feels a certain way reenforce the actual numbers of that perceived majority? That is the question with which this post will deal.

Hardy the Los Angeles Times June 2004 poll as a case study. The poll showed that 58% of respondents viewed President Bush as stubborn. Subsequently, there was a spike in the long term ANES poll on the question of Bush's stubbornness. The authors argued that this spike was caused by the realease of the Los Angeles Time Poll. They characterized the general trend as follows:

The integration of priming and classical agenda-setting has led researchers
to develop a two-level theory of agenda-setting. The first, the attention level,
deals exclusively with objects sucb as a public figure, a public issue, an insti-
tution, or "anything else that is the focus of attention" (McCombs 2005.
p. 160). The second, the attribute level, deals with that object's characteristics
and traits. For example, in the 2004 campaign. President Bush was a first-
level agenda object, while his image and character traits made up the attribute
agenda. As McCombs explains, "Attribute agenda-setting is the influence
of the descriptions in the press on the public's image of the candidate"
(McCombs 2005, p. 161). In sum, the media both set the agenda by increasing
the salience of certain issues and political actors and provide the hasis for the
assessment of them (Jacobs and Shapiro 1994; Pan and Kosicki 1997; Weaver
etal. 1981).

Can we trace this phenomenon in the Iraq War? Did the media reenforce a perception that the war in Iraq was an unpopular venture, much like the Los Angeles Times Poll reenforced the idea that President Bush is stubborn? This question requires much research, but here is some data that can at least put us in the ballpark. First is the Gallup Poll that tracked answers to the question: "Was the War in Iraq a Mistake". Second is a Nexis search for the period when the majority of Americans in the poll siding one way or the other fluctuated, the year before, and the year immediately after. If the media was not responsible for reenforcing the perception that the Iraq war was unpopular, we should expect to see a steady increase in the number of results over three years, in line with public opinion. In other words, the media should not report the war in Iraq as unpopular before it really was. Any other pattern demands further analysis.

What does the data tell us?

The year 2005 is crucial. According to Gallup, January 9th 2005 was the first time a majority of the public thought the Iraq War was a mistake. December 11th 2005 was the last time a majority thought it was not.

A Nexis search of major U.S Newspapers and wire services reveals 1917 references to "unpopular" "Iraq" and "War" between those two dates. Between January 7, 2005 and January 7th 2004- a period when the Iraq War was never viewed as a mistake by the a majority of the public- there where 2250 hits for the three phrases. Between December 11th 2005 and December 11th 2006- a period where the Iraq war was never viewed favorably by the public- there where over 3000 results.

The data is inconclusive, but is defiantly grounds for further analysis. Most important, the year preceding the actual unpopularity of the Iraq War had over 2250 hits for the choice words. This is amazing for a war that had yet to become numerically unpopular! This figure seems to indicate that the media preempted the unpopularity of the war. There are however, significant reasons not to use this data to jump to conclusions. First and foremost, although proof that media primed the public that the war in Iraq is unpopular is a prerequisite towards claiming the media where somewhat responsible for the increase in negative public perception of the war, it is not proof. Second, their are numerous contexts these words can appear and not give the connotation that the War was actually unpopular in the U.S. Examples include: "The War is unpopular in the Ukraine," and "The increasingly unpopular war." Third, there is a dip during the period surveyed in 2005 when the war was fluctuating in popularity. If the media was responsible for priming the public, the amount of references should have increased or at least held steady (although that period is shorter then a year, it still is slightly off proportionality). However, the figure for 2004 demands that this topic be re-visited.

The Wholesome Picture

2008-11-20T20:30:00.000-08:00

The Roper Center lists 4 polls conducted by different news organizations over 3 years on the topic of single party rule. The results illustrate the striking differences that subtly altered poll questions create.

The first poll was conducted on Sept 9th 2005 by CBS News/NY Times:

The Question: Do you think it is better for the country to have a President who comes from the same political party that controls Congress or do you think it is better to have a President from one political party and the Congress controlled by another?

Better when same party 32
Better when different party 41
Don't know/No answer 27

Topics: Presidency Congress Parties

The second poll was conducted in June 2006 by USA Today/Gallup:

Do you think it is better for the country--to have a President who comes from the same political party that controls Congress, does it make no difference either way, or do you think it is better to have a President from one political party and Congress controlled by another?

%
Same party 26
No difference 38
Different parties 31
No opinion 5

Topics: Presidency Congress Parties

The fourth poll (I will mention the third later) was conducted on Nov 6th 2008 by Quinippac University:

Do you think the government will work better now that the President and the majority of Congress both belong to the same political party, or don't you think it will work better?

%
Will work better 60
Will not 32
Don't know/No answer 7

Topics: Presidency Congress Parties

The first two polls indicate a general pattern. When asked in 2005 and 2006 if single party rule was preferable, the result was near enough to be explained rather plainly. In both cases, the most popular choice for respondents was "Different Parties" or "Better when Different party." In the former case, the margin was narrower. This is understood to be a result of a third, acceptable choice: "No difference", which took roughly 10 points off "Better when different parties." The narrowing gap demonstrates that respondents were less convinced that different parties where better, flocking to "don't know" when possible. This shift highlights one of the dangers of polls we mentioned in class: the options often do not reflect the best possible answers. It is also worth noting the first Poll was adjusted for a larger Black population. I do not think that accounts for the skew. This is not a hot-button racial issue.

The last, poll however, is striking. No more then 32% of people in 2006 thought highly of single party rule. How did that double in 2008? The explanation is Question #13 from 20 Questions about Polls.

13. What questions were asked?
You must find out the exact wording of the poll questions. Why? Because the very wording of questions can make major differences in the results.
Perhaps the best test of any poll question is your reaction to it. On the face of it, does the question seem fair and unbiased? Does it present a balanced set of choices? Would people you know be able to answer the question?
On sensitive questions--such as abortion--the complete wording of the question should probably be included in your story. But at the very least, you must have the exact wording as you are preparing the story.
It may well be worthwhile to compare the results of several different polls from different organizations on these sensitive questions. In that case, you should be careful to compare both the results and the exact wording of the questions.

In the case of the last poll, there was an important linguistic shift. Instead of asking "do you think it is better for the country..." to have single party rule, respondents where asked "Do you think the Government will work better." This question is weighted towards a "yes" response. "Will work better" is essentially asking the respondent: do you think the government will get along better now that everyone is ideologically similar. Hmmm..... Meanwhile, the first two polls asked respondents to weigh the merits of a divided government against a single party in charge: do you choose checks and balances(divided government) or efficiency (single party rule). This question is dependent on which value the individual thinks is more important, leading to the near even divide. Thus, the results from all three of these polls make perfect sense: the polls both asked about divided government, but the similarities in the questions ended there.

A second factor in the shift is illuminated in the third poll, conducted on October 13 2006 by the WSJ/ and NBC news:

I'm going to read you a statement. Please tell me how much you agree or disagree with this statement using a five-point scale. On this scale a five means you totally agree with this statement and a one means you totally disagree. You may use any number from one to five depending on how much you agree or disagree with the statement. In a time of economic uncertainty and potential terrorism, it makes sense to have unity and cooperation in the government with a majority in Congress and a president who are of the same party.

%
5-Totally agree 33
4 17
3 21
2 10
1-Totally disagree 18
Cannot rate 1

Topics: Congress Presidency Parties

Considering that we are now (2008, when this poll was conducted) in a situation that very much matches the description in the question, the results of the fourth poll are sensible. In turn, this change illuminates Question #8 from "20":

8. When was the poll done?
Events have a dramatic impact on poll results. Your interpretation of a poll should depend on when it was conducted relative to key events. Even the freshest poll results can be overtaken by subsequent events. The President may have given a stirring speech to the nation, the stock market may have crashed or an oil tanker may have sunk, spilling millions of gallons of crude on beautiful beaches.
Poll results that are several weeks or months old may be perfectly valid as history, but are not always newsworthy.

This series of polls highlight the fact that all polls need to be taken with a grain of salt (and these 20 questions.) Looking at the first two polls alone leads to one conclusion, that the American people favor split-party rule, that is not entirely true. In turn, focusing only on either 3 or 4 would mask America's preference in a theoretical government, for split party rule. Together, and with the variances in their questions noted, these polls paint one pollsome picture.

Thank you CNN

2008-11-18T16:07:00.000-08:00

The story of Drew Peterson is a classic example of the clutter that dominates our newswaves but is not, well, news. It also serves as an excellent example of an unquestionably "soft" news story dominating the newshole.

The case of Peterson lacks any inherent public-service value. Whether or not Mr. Peterson murdered his wives does not effect your life, mine, or any of CNN's audience outside of the small Illinois town he inhabits. Claiming the media will solve the case ignores the negative effects of media coverage, such as bias intenional or otherwise. If the media was devoted to the mission of informing the public, this story has no place in the newshole. Adding insult to injury are the stories that where pushed aside by the Peterson's story prominent place as the banner on CNN's main web page. Lesser stories like:

CNNMoney: Auto execs face sharp scrutiny
U.S. families struggle to feed kids, report says
"Borger: Obama dealing from strength" 40 min
"McCain may face bumpy adjustment"
Pirates grab more ships off Somalia
Who is the CNN Hero of the Year? Vote now
CNN Wire: House Dems mull end to ‘Don’t...

Apparently, Peterson beats hungry children. (pun intended)

Public fasination with the Peterson case is easly understood: the Peterson story provides an engaging narritive that plays out like any television show. It is not by accident the Leighly reports that crime is the single biggest reason viewers watch the news at 23%. Excaberating the damage is the follow-up news stories that steal yet more time from those stories the public needs to know, such as todays headline:

Peterson claims desertion, meets with divorce lawyer

Further, cases like that of Peterson serve to erode Baum's argument that soft news is valuable. The public may relate to soft news, but an aroused public is useless if their attention has been captured by shtos (unimportant things in English) like the Peterson case. It is indeed "Crisis Popcorn," news covered for entertainment value only.

Crisis Popcorn

2008-11-15T20:31:00.000-08:00

Two questions are prominent in the latest batch of readings. Has a desire for profitability taken hostage the content of the news media? If so, is this a negative development?

Hamilton says yes, and proceeds to chart the historical developments that have indebted the news media to profit, including: the corporate buyout of the networks in the 1980, the demise of the FCC communal responsibility mission, and the introduction of 24/7 news cycles. Proof of the increased emphasis on money making news comes in the form of a comparison of soft (big money, little value) as opposed to hard (little money, big value) news before and after the historical events that led to the content shift:

Both the regulatory environment and cable competition affected the mix of stories on the nightly news. When the Reagan FCC dropped the public service requirement for license renewal, there were indeed changes in coverage, but cable competition led to bigger changes.

In the 1990s, network news covered less legislation than in the 1970s. Whereas two-thirds of the critical Congressional Quarterly votes were covered in the seventies, only about half were covered in the nineties. Whereas the nightly news once covered half of the votes on interest-group scorecards, in the nineties they covered only one-third. Coverage of the Supreme Court, however, held steady, at about 40 percent of the important cases.

Celebrity coverage has also increased. Network news has doubled the time devoted to People's most intriguing people of the year. This is not entirely a move away from politics, though. People's list includes political personalities, and political celebrities like John McCain or Colin Powell get some of the attention no longer given to legislative insiders.

The big shifts in coverage, however, have been away from legislation and foreign reporting and into what is derisively known as “soft news.” While there has been some increase in the coverage of celebrities, both political and non-political, most of the shift has been to the “soft” categories of “news you can use”—consumer-oriented information on health, business, and technology. 8

Leighly argues that the professionalism [69% of Reporters list getting information to the public as extremely important and 67% claim investigating governments claim is also extremely important] and liberalism [44.1% are Democrats and 16.4 are Republicans] check the profit drives of news organizations, meaning that even though profit has been introduce to the equation there is negligible effect. However this argument is severely flawed, as only 14% of Reporters characterized their reporting as entertainment. This is a ridiculously tiny and wishful number. Indeed, the fact the number is low is evidence that Reporters are in denial about the current state of their industry. Leighly provides no further proof to her claim, leading to its defeat on the basis of insufficient evidence.

Kaplan, working on anecdotal evidence alone, agrees with the conclusions reached by Hamilton. In turn, Kaplan addresses the second question, arguing that this devomplent is negative. Kaplan complains that the sensationalism prevalent in the news media makes it impossible to support the "Democray of educated citizenry" dreamed of by Jefferson.

Network brings to film many of the arguments found in Kaplan. In Diane and Frank, the audience is presented with the embodiment of the profit dynamic. They are set up against Max Shaumacher, cast as the protector of classic, factually driven news. The battle emerges on two fronts, the storyline involving Howard Biel, and that of Diane and Max’s imbroglio. Biel represents the transition of news from informative to provocative, and is summarily pushed by Diane and Frank. The film leaves no doubt that their actions are negative, portraying the pair as cold and greedy with no concern for truth or sense of purpose. The audience is left with a distrust of media driven by monetary concerns. On a more subtle level, a similar message is conveyed in the episode of Diane and Max. Max’s last speech to Diane- that she and the tube she programs suck the life out of living- is not simply a condemnation of her, but of everything she represents. Max's message is clear: monetary motives pervert reality from being about human emotions and common decency, transforming it into a coldly efficient calculated experience. In the case of the news media, money strips the communal responsibly of informing the public and replaces it with news designed exactly to titillate.

With such a virulent arraignment, is it possible that profit driven news can be acquitted?

Baum makes a convincing argument that there is a positive aspect to this new type of media. Baum does not attempt to deny that news content is no longer “hard,” in that it no longer is driven by the need to inform. Instead, Baum argues that profit-driven medias content has a beneficial side effect. The news may be less informative and driven by shock-value, but now is designed to exactly engage the public interest. Although this is for the sake of advertising, the effect means that people now care more about the news they watch:

Soft news emphasizes human impact and moral values, so the new audience for foreign affairs is an audience with different concerns and different ways of thinking about foreign affairs. When soft news covers a war, it focuses more on the human drama than on the geopolitical stakes, foreign relations, and diplomacy. A rescued hostage, a downed pilot, bereaved families, or a national guardsman resentful of the better-armed regular forces will get extensive coverage; congressional hearings, budget fights, and meetings with allies may go unmentioned. Baum argues that the focus on the personal over the geopolitical, in turn, feeds isolationist sentiments. 13 I suspect that this is a premature inference; it seems just as plausible that these media could feed interventionist sentiments in future situations like the Iran hostage crisis of 1979, when American hostages were shown being humiliated by their captors.

As an aside, Popkin makes the following statement that runs contrary to Kaplans claim f Jefferson:
The Founding Fathers believed that it was their prerogative to decide

what and when to report to the citizenry. James Madison believed that an uninformed public was a key to the survival of democracy: without ongoing access to information about government, there could be no factional alliances to contravene the common good. 31 Madison did not believe there should be a congressional record; better that legislators should tell the public what they needed to know when they returned home from Congress. He also assumed that there would be only face-to-face accountability between representatives and voters in America. That is, when a representative returned home from the distant capital, he would give an account of his actions to the voters and this would be their basis for judging him. He did not expect that before long the postal system and newspapers would make it possible for citizens to monitor his activities while Congress was meeting. After his travels through America in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that he had expected small town and rural Americans to be as politically ignorant as French peasants. Instead, he found that the postal system was a “great link between minds,” penetrating into the wilderness and “bringing enlightenment to palace and hovel alike.” 32]

As roundly a condemnation of the profit-driven model Network is, the film cannot help but stumble onto Baum’s point. Howard Beil’s ability to not simply speak to the masses, but to control their actions is a function of the power of Soft News. In this case, Biel provides shock value as the “Angry prophet of the people.” Having opened this form of intimate communication, Biel is able to involve his audience on numerous occasions in political actions, ranging from mass displays of anger to a telegraph campaign on the White House. Although the film casts this power in a negative sense, with Biel himself condemning its ability to be abused, its positive potential is exactly the point Baum is driving at. Witness the power of "soft media":

Imagine if Biel had told them to help an old lady cross the street. The point is the power of engaging television- good or bad- is a force that has to be dealt with.

The batch of readings provides consensus on one issue and controversy on the other. On the one hand, the historical changes noted by Hamilton have led to a media where profit-seeking is an undeniable undercurrent in the world of reporting. On the other, the effect of this phenomenon depends on the lesser of two evils: an uncaring, informed public, or an involved, ignorant one.

All the little thing that eventually add up.. to a Blog

2008-11-12T20:46:00.000-08:00

Here is my little things that add up to a blog blog. This one is consists of further bits of evidence that the Public is not sure who it elected President.

Here is an interesting article about the treatment of the Obama Press Corp. As an aside, I found especially fascinating the part where Dean Reynolds provides this analytical gem:

The national headquarters in Chicago airily dismisses complaints from journalists wondering why a schedule cannot be printed up or at least e-mailed in time to make coverage plans. Nor is there much sympathy for those of us who report for a newscast that airs in the early evening hours. Our shows place a premium on live reporting from the scene of campaign events. But this campaign can often be found in the air and flying around at the time the "CBS Evening News with Katie Couric" is broadcast. I suspect there is a feeling within the Obama campaign that the broadcast networks are less influential in the age of the internet and thus needn't be accomodated as in the days of yore. Even if it's true, they are only hurting themselves by dissing audiences that run in the tens of millions every night.

The main reason I bring this article is for its description of Obama's much vaunted campaign. Considering Obama's answer to his lack of executive experience is that he ran a massive (and successful) campaign, the contents are, well, scary. Here is an example:

Obama's campaign schedule is fuller, more hectic and seemingly improvisational. The Obama aides who deal with the national reporters on the campaign plane are often overwhelmed, overworked and un-informed about where, when, why or how the candidate is moving about. Baggage calls are preposterously early with the explanation that it's all for security reasons.

If so, I would love to have someone from Obama's campaign explain why the entire press corps, the Secret Service, and the local police idled for two hours in a Miami hotel parking lot recently because there was nothing to do and nowhere to go. It was not an isolated case.

The fact that the first time I had ever heard of the lack of organization and hubris (well, maybe not the hubris part) surrounding his campaign was after the election, and that I had to read a right-wing mag like The Weekly Standard to hear about it, is also, well, scary. Yet more proof of the massive media failure to discover the real Obama, even when the story was literally the media themselves

On that note, here is another example that we do not really know who we just elected. Here is the reaction ofMohhamed Ahamdinejad on the Thursday after Election Day:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad congratulated U.S. President-elect Barack Obama -- the first time an Iranian leader has offered such wishes to a U.S. president-elect since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Ahmadinejad on Thursday outlined where he thinks U.S. policy needs to change.

One analyst said the welcome was a gesture from the hard-line president that he is open to a more conciliatory relationship with the U.S.

Ahmadinejad said Tehran "welcomes basic and fair changes in U.S. policies and conducts," according to the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency on Thursday.

Then Obama said this:

In his first post-election news conference Friday afternoon, Obama reiterated that he believes a nuclear-armed Iran would be "unacceptable." He also said he would help mount an international effort to prevent it from happening.

Leading to the following Iranian reaction:

"Obama must know that the change that he talks about is not simply a superficial changing of colors or tactics," Larijani said in comments carried by the semi-official Mehr News Agency.

"What is expected is a change in strategy, not the repetition of objections to Iran's nuclear program, which will be taking a step in the wrong direction."

The entire article is available on CNN. I don't know if I can blame the U.S media for their confusion, but there is a definite pattern emerging.

Further evidence that the U.S public does not have a realistic view of Obama is found in this new poll released by CNN:

"The bar is being set awfully high for an Obama presidency," said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.

According to the poll, most people think it's likely that Obama will improve race relations, improve economic conditions, bring stability to the financial markets, make the United States safer from terrorism, reduce the country's dependence on foreign oil, reduce global warming, win the war in Afghanistan, and remove U.S. troops from Iraq without causing a major upheaval in that country.

"That's a pretty big to-do list," said Holland.

I'm surprised the public is not expecting Obama to cure cancer. These- clearly unrealistic- numbers are clear evidence that Obama did not win the Presidency by laying out clear concepts that people related to. Rather, he made an emotional connection to voters everywhere, and they projected their wishes on him. If my wish was to keep the U.S safe from Terrorism, then Obama became the person who was going to accomplish this, ect. Hence, "that's a pretty big to-do list."

The CNN poll also provides valuable evidence that allows us to view Obamamainia in context. In my last post, I acknowledged that there is certain amount of uncertainty that surrounds every new president. How much of this is responsible to the ambiguity surrounding Obama? Well, if we assume that the public's unrealistic expectations for Obama are a product of his campaign style- and the failure of the media as an advocate for the public- then we can expect Obama has a much higher positive rating then the normal first term president elect. A normal freshly minted President would also have the benefit of a clean slate to boast his popularity. Thus, these numbers from CNN are extremely important:

Three-quarters of those polled also have a favorable view of Obama, up 12 points since the election. Among black Americans the number was 99 percent, while among Republicans it was 41 percent.

The overall 75 percent favorable rating "makes Obama the most popular president-elect in at least a quarter of a century," Holland said.

In November of 1980, after his landslide victory over incumbent President Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan's favorable rating was 67 percent. Eight years later, the elder George Bush had a favorable rating of only 50 percent immediately after his win in the 1988 election. When Bill Clinton beat Bush
four years later, his favorable rating was 60 percent just after the election.

And after the Florida recount ended in December of 2000, George W. Bush had a 59 percent favorable rating.

Although, the poll registers a 12 point bump in popularity since the election, I don't think it skews the point because the other President-elects could also count on this effect. Could I be wrong? Could Obama really be all that the public expects him to be? Maybe. But not likely.

Don't blame BCRA

2008-11-09T19:48:00.000-08:00

Central to La Raja's grievances against the campaign finance reform of BCRA is that money was redirected from the known and monitored quantities of Political parties and into new, murky organizations called 527's:

In much the same way, BCRA spurs the institutionalization of electioneering
groups called 527 and 501(c) organizations, groups that will apparently remain a
permanent fixture on the campaign landscape. These groups have the advantage
of spending soft money in elections. Some 501(c) groups do not even have to
report donors. Since BCRA, outside election spending has increased as groups
gain experience. Politico quotes one Democratic operative saying, "Four years
ago and eight years ago, people were just dipping their toes in, because it was all
relatively new then. Now people understand the process, and it's much more
mainstream" (Vogel 2008).

The underlying assumption is that this is a "big deal" because these groups can tilt elections one way or the other. The most prominent example is the mother of all 527's, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The fact, however, tell a different story. Opensecrets reports that in 9 out of 10 congressional races, as well as the presidency, the richer candidate won. This data does not include 527's, which are, of course, independent of the candidates own personal war chests:

In 93 percent of House of Representatives races and 94 percent of Senate races that had been decided by mid-day Nov. 5, the candidate who spent the most money ended up winning, according to a post-election analysis by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. The findings are based on candidates' spending through Oct. 15, as reported to the Federal Election Commission.

Continuing a trend seen election cycle after election cycle, the biggest spender was victorious in 397 of 426 decided House races and 30 of 32 settled Senate races. On Election Day 2006, top spenders won 94 percent of House races and 73 percent of Senate races. In 2004, 98 percent of House seats went to the biggest spender, as did 88 percent of Senate seats.

"The 2008 election will go down in U.S. history as an election of firsts, but this was far from the first time that money was overwhelmingly victorious on Election Day," Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, said. "The best-funded candidates won nine out of 10 contests, and all but a few members of Congress will be returning to Washington."

It seems from this data that 527's are inconsequential to the outcome of elections. Otherwise, the independent 527's should negate individual candidates war chests.

However, BCRA is not off the hook. The fact that incumbents have more money is a function of a second phenomenon that La Raja claims that BCRA has caused:

Congressional challengers are falling behind. Financial imbalances
within this presidential story do not appear to be party-based, favoring one party
consistently rather than the other. Nor do they appear to differentiate among
serious candidates in a regular way, year in and year out. The congressional story,
on the other hand, looks very different. While incumbents reliably raise more
money, challengers appear to fare additionally worse under BCRA.
Figure 1 shows that the financial gap has widened between officeholders and
challengers. Incumbent fundraising increased 20% between 2002 and 2006, while
challenger fundraising stayed flat during this same period. Incumbents simply
exploit their powerful positions to raise additional money from PACs and their
established networks of donors. Challengers, especially those in the 2nd tier of
competitive races, the ones that are typically ignored by their national parties, just cannot keep pace with incumbents.

The vast majority of congressional races where won by incumbents, perhaps accounting for the high figure of victory for those with more money (presumably the incumbents).

However, the evidence indicates that with or without BCRA, US congressional elections historically go to the incumbents.

It is also worth noting that name recognition is a natural reason that incumbents are favored, giving them an added advantage even if all else is equal.

Returning to the topic of 527's, perhaps La Raja is referring to the dangers of 527's in Presidential politics, ala the swifties. Here to, however, the evidence is clear. The man who raised more money is the President elect. And his personal campaign war chest can take much credit (see: Commercial, nationally televised).

America the Infatuated

2008-11-05T16:08:00.000-08:00

Did the media fail the public in the 2008 campaign? The question is complex, and depends how you define the role of the media. If we view the role of the media as Sarah Palin said it was after her defeat, as a check on government (I think the classical term is the fourth estate??), then the media is a complete failure. The role of the media is to do what the public on its own lacks the resources to accomplish, to vett the policies and personalities of candidates. The media utterly failed at this what it comes to Barack Obama.

Claiming that the media failed the public by not producing sufficient information about his life and background is a difficult claim to make. How is that America elected a man who they know nothing about? This, however, is exactly the case. As we discussed in class, the extraordinary process that led to President Obama was an emotional one, as opposed to an intellectual one. We know this from the tremendous boost Obama received from African Americans in Indiana, North Carolina, and Virgina. We know this from the ambiguity that has been a centerpiece of his campaign, from "Hope" and "Change" to "Yes we can." We know this from the carnival like reaction to his victory. We do not know how long Obama will survive on emotion alone.
Obama himself has admitted- and Hillary desperately tried to remind voters during the primaries- that Barack Obama is a blank slate on which people can write their own dreams. These two ideas therefore go hand in hand; the media failed the public by neglecting to screen a presidential candidate, and the public didn't mind because they allowed themselves to fall in love with Obama.

Proving that the election of Barack Obama was an emotional choice on a national level, and providing numbers that prove the media gave Obama a free ride is impossible. What we can do is notice a phenomenon that lends validity to this theory: nobody, nobody, seems to have an impression about how President Obama will govern. On the contrary, groups at both end of political issues both seem to believe that Obama is on their side of their particular issue. If this is indeed the case, and I will be posting examples as I see them, we can assume the news media failed to inform the public about the policies endorsed by Obama, as well as not providing enough of a background about Obama for the public to have a reasonable expectation of his governing style. Although every new president presents a certain element of uncertainty, the case of Obama is different. The sheer breadth of these occurrences speaks to how little we really know about the 44th President of the United States.

Here is one example of groups from both ends of the political spectrum finding hope for their causes in Obama. The AP reports that the "Arab world sees hope in Obama":

Still, to many Obama seems to spell something different — whether because of the color of his skin, his Muslim family ties — his Kenyan father was a Muslim — or simply his charisma.

Many believe he's more sympathetic to the Palestinians, or that he'll emphasize dialogue over what was seen as Bush's more bellicose tone. Some watched the dramatic vote and wished they could see similar democratic change in Arab countries, ruled by authoritarian leaders who stay in power through rigged elections.

"When Obama won, I felt it was the return of the American dream," Iman Bibars, an Egyptian women's activist and writer who is often sharply critical of the United States, told The Associated Press. "I just cried through the whole thing, because it gave me hope that the good guy will win, in a world where good people don't normally win."

Even before his victory, the LA Times reported that "Allies of Palestinans see a friend in Barack Obama".

Contrast that with Obama's speech at AIPAC:

“Our alliance is based on shared interests and shared values. Those who threaten Israel threaten us. Israel has always faced these threats on the front lines. And I will bring to the White House an unshakable commitment to Israel’s security…I will ensure that Israel can defend itself from any threat - from Gaza to Tehran.… Across the political spectrum, Israelis understand that real security can only come through lasting peace. And that is why we - as friends of Israel - must resolve to do all we can to help Israel and its neighbors to achieve it.”

If I am an Arab, this speech sounds like more of the same.

This video from CNN provides more anecdotal evidence that people have no idea why the voted Obama: not one interviewee says taxes, Iraq, or health care (and the one guy who says fix the world economy does not exactly explain how). And pay attention to the last woman's kind words:

Shifting back to the topic of the media, Leighly would argue that the media did not fail at all. Leighly claims that the media is not suited for the rule of public advocate. Even if we assume like Page that the likelihood of the media engaging in deliberate support of one candidate is difficult at best, reporters are still prone to the natural biases described in Rhetorica. In the case of Obama, the media was infected with a nasty case of narrative bias:

Narrative bias: The news media cover the news in terms of "stories" that must have a beginning, middle, and end--in other words, a plot with antagonists and protagonists. Much of what happens in our world, however, is ambiguous. The news media apply a narrative structure to ambiguous events suggesting that these events are easily understood and have clear cause-and-effect relationships. Good storytelling requires drama, and so this bias often leads journalists to add, or seek out, drama for the sake of drama. Controversy creates drama. Journalists often seek out the opinions of competing experts or officials in order to present conflict between two sides of an issue (sometimes referred to as the authority-disorder bias). Lastly, narrative bias leads many journalists to create, and then hang on to, master narratives--set story lines with set characters who act in set ways. Once a master narrative has been set, it is very difficult to get journalists to see that their narrative is simply one way, and not necessarily the correct or best way, of viewing people and events.

What story is more inspiring then that of Barack Obama? We can only hope he is as an effective leader as he is speaker, or else America may find itself stuck in a Vegas marriage after the one-night stand to end all one night stands. But don't worry, we can get divorced in 4 years.

Right about being right?

2008-11-03T16:50:00.000-08:00

Is Barack Obama adequately serviced by using the phrase "Bush-McCain" over "Republican" policies as a catchphrase? The answer to this question depends on another question: Is America a "centre-right nation." If it is, then as Karl Rove notes, the last thing Obama wants to do is remind voters that he is not center right:

Because Obama recognises that America is a centre-right nation, he balances calls for withdrawal from Iraq with tough talk about stepping up US military efforts in Afghanistan, even threatening to invade Pakistan if that country fails to do enough to hunt down Al-Qaeda. He doesn’t emphasise his call for tax increases or income redistribution, but masks his policy as “a tax cut for 95% of Americans”. His adverts savage McCain’s health-care proposals as a tax increase and attack “government-run healthcare” as “extreme”. Obama has wisely used his financial advantage to press these points in “red states” to try to diminish the traditional Republican edge among evangelicals, military families, gun owners and small business owners.

Rove last assertion is observed by the Democratic Pollster Peter Hart to explain the results of a new WSJ poll on taxes:

Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster, said Sen. Obama is winning the debate because he is significantly outspending Sen. McCain on ads. "The only reason we're seeing a shift here is that's the difference money makes in a campaign," said Mr. Hart, who conducts the Wall Street Journal polls with Mr. Newhouse. "Democrats have gotten through tactically versus philosophically

If Rove is indeed correct, then the wisdom of avoiding besmirching the Republican label is obvious. It insults the "centre right nation" that Obama has succeeded in convincing is well-represented in his policies.

But are we a center right nation?

The Blog "RedBlueRichPoor" presents statistics that make it seem we are, well in the middle. The Pew Research Center substantiates these findings:

Americans cannot be easily characterized as conservative or liberal on today's most pressing social questions. The public's point of view varies from issue to issue. They are conservative in opposing gay marriage and gay adoption, liberal in favoring embryonic stem cell research and a little of both on abortion. Along with favoring no clear ideological approach to most social issues, the public expresses a desire for a middle ground on the most divisive social concern of the day: abortion.

So where does this idea that America is a center right nation come from? Newsweek offered the following tidbit:

are we a centrist country, or a right-of-center one? I think the latter, because the mean to which most Americans revert tends to be more conservative than liberal. According to the NEWSWEEK Poll, nearly twice as many people call themselves conservatives as liberals (40 percent to 20 percent), and Republicans have dominated presidential politics—in many ways the most personal, visceral vote we cast—for 40 years. Since 1968, Democrats have won only three of 10 general elections (1976, 1992 and 1996), and in those years they were led by Southern Baptist nominees who ran away from the liberal label. "Is this a center-right country? Yes, compared to Europe or Canada it's obviously much more conservative," says Adrian Wooldridge, coauthor of "The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America" and Washington bureau chief of the London-based Economist. "There's a much higher tolerance for inequality, much greater cultural conservatism, a higher incarceration rate, legalized handguns and greater distrust of the state."

The Poll provided Newsweek is not necessarily a contradiction to the findings of surveys like the Pew. Although American may call themselves Conservatives, in practice, a label like conservative or liberal is exactly the type of ambiguous smear that can obscure a much more complex true. In other words, people may think of themselves as actually Conservative, but not realize all that entails. They are Conservative in name only, an reality Obama has seized upon by blasting Conservatives (Bush McCain) without actually calling them by their "proper" names (Republican).

The mother medium

2008-11-02T14:09:00.000-08:00

Among the many observations discussed in our latest batch of readings is the idea of a medium effect. The argument was made by Leighly that different modes of media engender different reactions simply based on their modes of presentation. This claim is substantiated by Mutz's studies, which find that Television, with its in-your-face style and potential for heated debate, arouses interest in subject manner,but also exacerbates partisan differences:

But the problem inherent in this prescription becomes apparent when the analysis turns to effects on people's evaluations of those same candidates and their issue arguments. Incivility alone does not dampen enthusiasm for political advocates nor the arguments they make. However, when uncivil discourse and close-up camera perspectives combine to produce the unique "in-your-face" perspective, then the high levels of arousal and attention come at the cost of lowering regard for the other side. The "in-your-face" intimacy of uncivil political discourse on television discourages the kind of mutual respect that might sustain perceptions of a legitimate opposition. Here the pattern of findings is quite consistent; close-up perspectives on uncivil discourse routinely damage perceptions of the candidates and issue arguments that subjects are already prone to dislike; that is, attitudes toward the least-liked candidate, and the perceived legitimacy of rationales for opposing issue positions. The same pattern of effects did not occur for attitudes toward the preferred candidate, nor for perceptions of the legitimacy of arguments for the preferred issue position. In other words, by violating social norms, the political advocates increased the intensity of affect among the opposition, but remaining civil did not intensify the positive feelings viewers held toward their own side. Instead, on television as in everyday life, civility appears to be the default expectation, and it is arousing and influential only when people deviate from it. Nonetheless, the overall effect of these two patterns was to increase the magnitude of the difference that is perceived between one's own side and the opposition.

Newspapers, by their nature, do not have this effect. Having established that there is indeed a medium effect, the question becomes: how do we classify the Internet? The Internet seems to straddle both sides of the medium effect, with both newspapers and video readily available. (For this reason, I term the intenet the "mother medium".) Nor is this simply a theoretical question. There is an important(practical difference in how we are to judge the Internet. As Mutz observes:

Seeing politicians argue about their disagreeable policies up-close and personal rather than from a distance intensifies citizens' negativity toward those people and ideas that they dislike. In the days when such intimate perspectives were not technologically possible, as when exposure to politicians was limited to newspapers, or when extreme close-ups of candidates were technologically difficult, the intensity of disgust that people had for those of opposing views might have remained more muted. In the political realm, television may be a primary engine of what Sennett (1977) has termed "the fall of public man." When private relationships become indistinguishable from public ones, and public figures and politicians are routinely talking to people up-close and personal as they sit in their living rooms, then a boundary is crossed that makes our judgments of them far less impersonal. According to Sennett, the contemporary United States is overwhelmed by a "tyranny of intimacy," meaning that private individuals feel they know public figures in intimate terms. Although Sennett's argument is not about television per se, it seems likely that the way people "meet" and experience public figures today is very different from how they were learned about and encountered in a pre-television era

Can we say that the Internet contributes to the growing partisan atmosphere of American politics? Or is the effect offset by the availability of traditional news media sources? With this question in mind, the following study by the Pew Center takes on new importance:

The proportion of voters who have gone online to view videos about the campaign has increased substantially since the start of the election season. Overall, 39% of voters say they have watched some type of campaign-related video online. In December, 24% had done so. There has been an increase in viewing of all types of campaign videos, including candidate speeches (28% now, up from 14%), interviews (27%, up from 14%), campaign commercials (21%, up from 12%), and candidate debates (23% now, 12% in December).

The findings suggest that video is on the rise. It remains to be seen if the Internet will become a video dominated medium, or if the amount of traditional "paper" news on the Internet will maintain a steady share. The outcome of this question will determine if the birth of the Internet is viewed as a polarizing event in American politics, as was the introduction of television.

Slated for Obama

2008-10-28T21:29:00.000-07:00

Page claims in his “The Media as Mass Political Actors” that an obstacle to- and therefore a guarantee against- a concentrated effort towards the news organization running a concentrated political campaign is that they are made up of individuals. Attempting to corral individual reporters and direct them towards a larger goal is an unlikely occurrence.

Against this argument, I present the following article from Slate Magazine. Slate polled its reporters and staff and discovered that 55 of its 57 of it employees where voting for Barack Obama. Explaining this phenomenon, David Plotz, the editor of Slate, had this to say:

Why did Obama win the swing state of Slate? Like Mike and Jacob before me, I don't think a candidate's Slate victory reflects a bias that has corrupted the magazine during the campaign. There are obvious reasons why Slate would lean heavily toward Obama: Most of our staff and contributors live in extremely Democratic cities on the East and West Coast. (It's worth noting that our lone McCain voter, Deputy Managing Editor Rachael Larimore, lives in Ohio.) Slate's voters tend to skew young, and all polls show younger voters favoring the Democrat.

Tucked away in this explanation is a valuable nugget; the nature of a magazine like Slate is that similar people work for it, people who live in the same cities and are roughly the same age group. I think it is obvious that the situation at Slate is not unusual. As Page himself notes later in his essay, the owners and editors of a news institution are responsible the hiring and firing of their reporting core. Thus, even though Journalists have autonomy in their reporting, this autonomy does not guarantee there will be variety in the coverage. The opposite is also true; since the reporters of a particular organization are similar in nature, they most likely will take a similar attitude towards events, thus negating Page’s claim that the individual status of reporters acts as check on a concentrated bias by a News organization. In other words, Page only makes sense if these reporters are a pool from the general population, as opposed to be kindred souls, as is the case with Slate.

There is a problem with using Slate as an example for all news organizations. Slate is not meant to be a news magazine in the traditional sense, but rather acts as a glossy op-ed. It is not necessarily meant to be balanced, but rather caters to a segment of the public. Reporters are hired accordingly. This may not be true of traditional news organizations, like the New York Times or WSJ. I am still scouring the internet in an attempt to find satistics that back up or rebutt this claim.

Recount

2008-10-25T17:32:00.000-07:00

I cannot help but engage in my favorite hobby of "bias-watching". The initial word on this film is that it has a democratic slant. Here are some observations that validate this point:

(1)The beginning of the film does this impression no favors. The Republicans are portrayed as overtly religious (via the Ginsburg story) and clueless (contrast the way the same question "are we going to win" is posed by the different parties. The Democrats do it in "West Wing" fashion, with one analyst crisply asking another, while a blond (read, clueless) staffer innocently asks Ginsberg the same question...)antagonists (notice the sad music when the Gore campaign loses and the hopeful music when they win... this continues throughout the film. Also, the film's protoganist is a a Democrat).

REPUBLICANS ARE NOT THIS STUPID!!!:
(2) W says (with the authority of a pre-schooler) "My little brother has assured my I won Florida"...
(3) Harris asks "What's the difference, Clay?" [Harris is referring here to simple arithmetic.]

(4) The Republicans introduce the idea that the Recount is a "street fight for the presidency of the United States," while the Democrats are portrayed as the honorable side that wants to "treat this as a legal process." The sequence that follows only continues this contrast. Republicans are political prostitutes, willing to do anything to get elected, while the Democrats are the "nice guys who (will) finish last." Further, when the Democrats do start throwing punches, it is only because the "Bush brothers are not going to run a dignified process."

(5) Katherine Harris as the absolutely partisan, arrogant primadonaa.

(6) Contrast the barnyard atmosphere of the Republican protest with the respectable Democratic protest.

(7) The dastardly conduct of the Republican protesters and the subsequent cover-up of the riot.

(8) The entire premise of the movie; that the Democrats are the ones being cheated- is false, because only Democratic counties where being recounted.

(9) Gore emerges on the moral high ground, ending the Recount for the sake of the country.

In conclusion, Recount portrays the Democrats as the moral, wronged party, and the Republicans as the slimy political operatives determined to steal the election for Bush. Having said this, this may indeed have been the case, in which case HBO is vindicated in their portrayal of their events. Ironically, a recount conducted by news organizations found that Bush would have won if Gore’s recount had been allowed to proceed, meaning that the tone of the film- that Bush stole the election- is flawed.

Now to the assignment. What can be learned from “Recount” that is applicable to the 2008 election?

(1) Who is this years Florida (i.e the potentially explosive swing state)? There are many candidates: As of 10/26, Yahoo has only North Carolina, Indiana, and Missouri as battleground states. However, until two weeks ago, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, and Nevada were all considered to be battleground states.

(2) Who is this years Katherine Harris, i.e, a key figure in the state apparatus that can help his or her parties candidate? Here are the breakdown for the three current battleground states: Indiana: the current Governor is Republican, but the houses of the Assembly are split, one being Democratic and one being Republican. Missouri: Republican Governor, Republican house and senate. North Carolina: Democratic Governor with democratic legislature.

(3) Is their a Warren Christopher type figure, i.e, someone who will lack the will to conduct a prolonged legal battle if it comes to that?
The two parties have proven deft at slugging it out. There will be no Warren Christophers found in the David Axelords or Steve Schmidts in this campaign.

(4) Will anyone pull a Joe Lieberman, i.e, will a V.P be more concerned about their own interests (as the movie alleges) and go off message in an attempt to solidify their chances for 2012? This blog goes to press just as this story about Palin-McCain tension surfaces. So there is a chance Palin could pull a "Lieberman." Biden is older, and does not have any chance of running in 2012 (remember Hillary?), and so it would be safe to assume he would not do anything intentional to sabotage Obama. However, Biden is known for running the mouth...

(5) Will the media play the same role it did in 2000, when it called the State twice, both times prematurely?
No, after the 2000 election, the news media no longer broadcasts results from its exit polls until after all the polling booths have closed. This means Moveon.org will have to find a new villain if McCain wins (recall Outfoxed with it allegations about Fox News, an accusation repeated on DailyKos.)

The Morning After

2008-10-19T04:19:00.000-07:00

In our last class, I argued that no matter who wins the election, the next presidency will be dominated by the aftermath of the Bush presidency. The unresolved events begun by the Bush administration [Iraq, North Korea, Afghanistan, the trillion dollars in bailout money] are both time and money guzzlers. Where is a President Obama going to find the money for universal health care? Where is a President McCain going to find the room for tax cuts? I want to expand on this idea a bit.
To begin, the last couple of days- with Obama's credit crisis aided jump in the polls- have spawned what I call "The Right wing Armageddon Article." Basically, the article presumes that the Democrats will win a filibuster proof majority in the Senate as well as the presidency, and then goes on to list the damage they will do to this country. Here is one from Pat Buchanan (I wonder if he minds me reading his work) and another from the WSJ.
People. Chill! The next president will not have the wiggle room to institute the dramatic changes in policy that those on the right wing fear so much. Further, the Democrats are not winning based on a positive, logical argument, [The New America is about...] but rather on the negative, emotionally charged argument that W. is a disaster and we need to throw out the party he calls home. What is the difference between these two claims? Well, the latter argument weakens exponentially with the passage of time. In two years, if things still are going badly, will the Democrats really be able to claim "The time for change is now"? Throw in American's distaste for single party rule, and I predict a Democratic supermajority that does not last past the next elections, especially if the democrats try to institure an ideaologically charged agenda.

P.S. In a previous post I mentioned an inaccessible WSJ editoral that debunked deruglation as teh source for the current economic crisis. Here is a simalar article I can post.

Jew Wars!

2008-10-13T03:27:00.000-07:00

I would like to call attention to the air war currently being fought over you and me. Yes, thanks to the chosen people's choice of living in electorally significant areas like Flor-dah and Michigan, one can almost forget that the vast majority of Jews live in New York, California, and Israel, none of which are swing states. (There has been some trouble with people understanding my sarcasm- Israel is not a typo- only a joke.) The first salvo was fired by an organization called The Great Schlep, which aims to have "liberal" grandchildren of Florida voters convince their "confused" grandparents about voting Obama. The headliner is Sarah Silverman. She cannot accomplish this without referring to obscenities, so I will not publish the clip on my site. You can access it at here. In response, the Republican Jewish Committee enlisted Jackie Mason. This is what he had to say:

Meanwhile, back at YU, the Observer and Commentator both weighed in:

[Update: This post was delayed because of technical difficulties. In the interim, CNN came out with this story and this video: UGGGH I GIVE UP ON POSTING IT. You can see it there. For some reason, now word yet on Jackie Mason.]

Pre-Schoolers for President

2008-10-05T14:41:00.000-07:00

I am biting my tongue on this whole Ayers thing. I don't want to start another partisan war about media bias- particularly the tendency to highlight McCain attacks over Obama's- but you all should know there is what to say, especially about AP with its musing that the Ayers attack is racial in nature:

Palin's words avoid repulsing voters with overt racism. But is there another
subtext for creating the false image of a black presidential nominee "palling
around" with terrorists while assuring a predominantly white audience that he
doesn't see their America?
In a post-Sept. 11 America, terrorists are envisioned as dark-skinned radical Muslims, not the homegrown anarchists of Ayers' day 40 years ago. With Obama a relative unknown when he began his campaign, the Internet hummed with false e-mails about ties to radical Islam of a foreign-born candidate.
Whether intended or not by the McCain campaign, portraying Obama as "not like us" is another potential appeal to racism. It suggests that the Hawaiian-born Christian is, at heart, un-American. The fact is that when racism creeps into the discussion, it serves a purpose for McCain. As the fallout from Wright's sermons showed earlier this year, forcing Obama to abandon issues to talk about race leads to unresolved arguments about America's promise to treat all people equally.

Perhaps I am innocent, perhaps I am biased, or perhaps I am simply unaware of the subliminal working of my physce, but I never imagined such an association until reading this article. [Update: I am not crazy. The WSJ also picked up on this sketch association, and also provides other wonderful examples of bias against Palin.]

Here are two applications of Air Wars to the current cycle:
Agenda Setting is the reason for McCain current downturn in the polls. Let me explain. West sets forth two election extremes: that of 1992, where serious issues prevented Bush from setting his own agenda, and 1996, where a lack of serious agenda's gave both candidate the opportunity to set their own agenda. This year is a combination of both. On the one hand, we have serious issues, like 1992. On the other, we have a lot of serious issues, so much so that the candidates have had the opportunity, like in 1996, to emphasise what they wish. That all changed with the credit crisis. It elevated one issue over all the others, an issue that is to Obama's advantage.

The Blame Game is on in full force: Obama plans to launch an ad tomorrow condemning McCain for issuing negative ads, according to CNN. The article also provides a wonderful example of Obama mixing the positive with the negative, slamming McCain for launching negative ads and then embarking on a negative attack of his own.

"Sen. McCain and his operatives are gambling that they can distract you with
smears rather than talk to you about substance. They'd rather try to tear our
campaign down than lift this country up," Obama said at an event in Asheville,
North Carolina.
"That's what you do when you're out of touch, out of ideas,
and running out of time," he said

You gotta love that last line. On the McCain side, Palin is clearly being used as the attack dog, aka Dick Cheney in a dress, in an attempt to shift attention away from McCain. However, this tactic is not enough. Obama is winning the Blame Game, in the image of Bill Clinton in 1992. Two factors contributed to Clinton's victory: (a) successfully convincing the public of the existence of, as it is currently known, "the right wing dirt machine," and (b) as recorded by West, a media that was sympathetic to Clinton and jumped on Bush for making negative remarks. We saw this same phenomenon a month ago after the RNC convention. McCain has not- and may not- recover.

Issues? What issues?

2008-10-03T12:30:00.000-07:00

I have had the luxury of reading everyone's blogs before writing my own. There is a point I would like to make that I do not think has been stated enough. It does not matter that Biden won according to all traditional metrics. AP reports that the ratings for this debate where through the roof. Does anyone think that people were turning in to watch the issues. No! I sure didn't. The American people are suckers for a juicy narrative. Two examples? Barack Obama and Sarah Palin. Obama will be the first to tell you- as will McCain, but for very different reasons- that his "narrative" has fueled his candidacy. Palin's story had reached a low point: I mean, did you see that interview with Couric?!? Even the National Review was calling for her to step down, further enhancing its reputation as the voice of the angry left wing. BTW, I cannot believe nobody has posted SNL's take on the interview, so here it is:

Back to the point: Nobody, nobody expected anything from Palin. America watched not to see her express her opinions, but rather sat on the edge of its collective seat waiting to watch her make a fool of herself. It was to be the next chapter in the Palin story. Skits like the SNL one had lowered expectations to the point were the audience- and I include myself in this category- did not expect her to even be able to put together a sentence. I mean- she litterally could not in the Couric interview. Thus, even though it is clear Biden won in the traditional sense, all Palin had to do was anything but the Couric interview. (I'll be honest: If I didn't know better, if the Couric interview did not look so real, I would readily believe Palin messed it up deliberately create such low expectations. There is no doubt in my mind that part of the McCain campaign's desicion to have Palin maintain media silence was to foster such low expectation. In fact, it is being reported that she is to have a larger role now, after the debate.) This piece in the Washington Post does an excellent job of capturing the pre-debate mood about Palin. Obama and Biden knew this, which is why, they tried particularly hard to raise expectations for Palin before the debate.
Thus, the stage was set. Biden won the debate, of that there is no doubt. His attack went unanswered, his points were stated clearly. But in the larger scheme, McCain comes out ahead. Palin did not fall on her face, (this article from CNN backs up both of these points) and that was all she needed to do. There are many pundits saying this today: I'll give you one from the offical magazine of the DNC, or Newsweek as it is popularly known. I believe a large part of the recent shift towards Obama in the polls was the belief that McCain is to eccentric to be an effective president. Exhibit A was the SNL fodder that was his VP pick. No more. This election is going to be like a the baseball playoffs: just as the Dodgers beat the Cubs because they currently are blazing hot, so to the hottest candidate- the candidate who has the current upswing on Nov 1ST- will win the presidency on Nov 2nd. I think this will help shift a bit of momentum back to McCain, or at least stop the bleeding.

At Last! I figure out how to embed video!

2008-09-24T13:45:00.000-07:00

Here is an analysis of 4 recent campaign ads, one negative and one positive for each candidate.

The Obama ad on McCain health plan is a brilliant piece. It begins with the visual associations of Bush, McCain and the disgraced financial companies the caused the current economic mess. In a welcome change, Obama then offers a suggestion of what is was that Bush and McCain agreed on: the Deregulation of the Banking industry. This is substance, assuming it is true that the current crisis is the fault of deregulation. (For a reality check on that, see yesterdays WSJ editorial page- which unfortunately is not available for free online). What I particularly like about this ad is the creativity the Obama team displayed in connecting the current turmoil in the markets with McCain healthcare proposal. They did not simply blame McCain for the crisis, they used it to debunk his entire theory of government. Nice.

This ad is effective on several levels. Topically, it deals with the very specific policy flip-flop by the Obama Biden camp on coal plants. However, like Obama did with deregulation and health care, it threads this minor issue into the larger narrative the McCain campaign is trying to construct: that Obama is a politician of opportunity. This ad is an attempt to case Obama as a politician of opportunity whose policies are driven by polls and not principals. Central to this claim is that Obama will say different things to different people in order to please them. A second narrative the ad plays into is that Obama is not ready to lead. The fact Obama and his running mate are caught saying different things lends a sense of disorganization to the campaign. The music and visuals are particularly suited to this last end: the up-tempo music contributes a sense of hilarity to the entire enterprise, and Obama and Biden look... clueless. A nice touch: the grainy footage of Obama and Biden talking serves to portray them as amateurs.

This is fairly typical positive ad. First we have the problem- oil dependence- complete with the nervous images and threatening colors. Then we have the solution- John McCain- this time with happy music and bright colors. The cherry on top is the sun rising at the end.

Again, this ad has all the normal charachteristics of a positive campaign ad: The Disney music, the presidential looking images of the candidate. The one peculiarity is that Obama shades himself in black and white. Normally, this is a tactic used to convey a negative image. So what is Obama thinking? Most likely, that the black and white shading connotes a certain level of seriousness. This works to affront those who trivialize Obama's run for the presidency.

Lies, Lies, their all lies!!!!

2008-09-18T10:29:00.000-07:00

The Menad article raises serious questions about the wisdom of a democratic political system. Fortunately, Plato and Aristotle conducted this debate eons ago, so either way, we have a famous Greek philosopher supporting our choice. This article is particularly relevant in the case of Barack Obama: will his skin color do to him what the weather did to Al Gore? And if whites do not back him because of skin color, will that be canceled out by an enthused black voter turnout?And if he loses, how much credence can we give to those who claim it does? On that note, here is an article from AP that postulates Obama is down 6 points because of Racism.

In reference to the class on Wednesday, I want to move on from what is clearly a partisan debate. But first a few final notes (as you can see, I have begun the doublespeak of the politicians we study has had its effect.)

The Washington Post (which I assume everyone will agree is a reputable source) had this to say about the barrage of negative ads that preceded that took place two week ago: Obama had more the McCain. Further, we have seen numerous distortions from the Obama campaign in the past week, like this one about social security and the Rush Limbaugh ad... but I have yet to see any articles outraged at Obama's choice of the low road towards political victory.
No matter the case, I think that McCain strategists have definitely made a mistake by making these attacks. Commentary agrees with me, (as do the recent polls.)

Finally, here is a quote from Mark Penn, who was to Bill Clinton what Karl Rove was to W. If we are going to put weight in Rove's statement, we must do the same for Penn's comment:

CBSNews.com: Your former colleague Howard Wolfson argued that you all
unintentionally paved the way for Palin by exposing some of the unfair media
coverage that Hillary Clinton received. And, therefore, a lot of the media
may now be treating Sarah Palin with kid gloves. Do you agree with that?

Mark Penn:
Well, no, I think the people themselves saw unfair media coverage of Senator
Clinton. I think if you go back, the polls reflected very clearly what "Saturday
Night Live" crystallized in one of their mock debates about what was happening
with the press. I think here the media is on very dangerous ground. I think thatwhen you see them going through every single expense report that Governor Palin ever filed, if they don't do that for all four of the candidates, they're on very dangerous ground. I think the media so far has been the biggest loser in this race. And they continue to have growing credibility problems. And I think that that's a real problem growing out of this election. The media now, all of the media — not just Fox News, that was perceived as highly partisan — but all of the media is now being viewed as partisan in one way or another. And that is an unfortunate development.
CBSNews.com: So you think the media is being uniquely tough on Palin now?
Mark Penn: Well, I think that the media is doing
the kinds of stories on Palin that they're not doing on the other candidates. And that's going to subject them to people concluding that they're giving her a
tougher time. Now, the media defense would be, "Yeah, we looked at these other
candidates who have been in public life at an earlier time." What happened here
very clearly is that the controversy over Palin led to 37 million Americans
tuning into a vice-presidential speech, something that is unprecedented,
because they wanted to see for themselves. This is an election in which the
voters are going to decide for themselves. The media has lost credibility
with them.

Finally, I find astonished that I am being accused of being biased in my analysis of this situation. I don’t think my knee-jerk reaction towards defending McCain is any less biased then assuming everything in the National Review has the value of Lehman Brothers. To say otherwise is incredibly hypocritical. I give people the benefit of the doubt that they try to move away from their knee-jerk reactions and analyze both sides of an argument before coming to a conclusion. I expect others to extend me the same courtesy.

OMG! I thougt Politicos always told the truth!

2008-09-16T12:28:00.000-07:00

I would like to continue my insistence that their is media bias directed at John McCain. The reason is very simple. Over the past week, I have read numerous articles in such established publication as Newsweek and the New York Times expressing their shock and dismay over the McCain campaigns stretching of the truth. I have to agree. The McCain campaign has been guilty of stretching the truth. As has every politician in the modern era. Including Barack Obama. I have no problem with the McCain campaign being slammed for its Rovian (although I like to refer to them as Ploufian) tactics, however, if the media has decided to go on a moral crusade they attack Jerusalem as well as Tiberius. They have to go after Barack Obama as well.
Here are some interesting articles: The National Review says that McCain was not lying about the Sex-Ed ad, AP has finally noted that the McCain campaign is far from the "sleaziest" ever [almost 2 days after that inane comment was made]. The AP article is especially significant because it is the first time I have seen a major new organization mention that the type of adds McCain has aired are perfectly normal political fodder. [Update: I just viewed CNN's coerage of Obama's own attack adds. The verdict: Since Obama was attacked, he has every right to respond. How typical.]

OutFooled

2008-09-12T11:44:00.000-07:00

Like this film, I also have an agenda. As a conservative, I wish to
defend Fox News, and knew that this would be my reaction. However, I did
not think it would be this easy. I have paused it 10 minutes in, because I
don’t want to lose track of the plethora of inaccuracies and distortions in this
film.
(1) The film begins with the sinister proposition that Murdoch
is directly responsible for the news consumption of 4.3 billion people. Oh
really? As we discussed in class, with the growth in media options, people can
now avoid opinions and or subjects they do not like. No matter what
Murdoch’s actual reach, as long as he has healthy competition- which was
apparently not important enough to include in this film- people can and will
simply avoid his product. It is that simple. Even if Murdoch news
flow is biased, people who disagree simply will not watch. Here are the
actual figures from Journalism.Org:

Who Is Watching
Survey data have shown that there are some clear partisan
differences among those tuning into the three cable news channels.
According
to data from the Pew Research Center for the People and Press, CNN and MSNBC had
more Democrats tuning in, while Fox News’ audience leaned Republican.
Looking at party affiliation, CNN and MSNBC had nearly identical viewer
demographics. Almost half of both of their audience members were Democrats – 48%
for MSNBC and 45% for CNN. Independents made up about a quarter (26%) of
viewers, while Republicans took up the smallest share – 22% for CNN, and only
19% for MSNBC.
On Fox News, the trend was somewhat reversed. The largest
share of its audience – 38% -- were Republicans, followed by Democrats (31%) and
independents (22%).9

As you can see, it does not matter how many people you reach. People will watch what they want to watch. Further, the filmmakers are misleading in that the film is only about Fox News, which does not have an audience of 4.3 billion [Update: The segment about viewers knowing less is presented as evidence that the massive propaganda of Fox is succeeding when in fact it more likely a reflection of those who choose to watch Fox in the first place.]

(2)The sources presented in this film are atrocious. Cronkite is a big name, but he brings no proof to his statement that Fox News is biased. The filmmakers utilize the classic liberal source proof of conspiracy source [think of Loose Change...] the anonymous tipster. Very credible.
Further, because you find one local Fox channel that may have suffered several improper breaches of journalistic integrity is not proof that everything Fox does is poison... [Update from later on: It is very interesting that they cannot seem to find one conservitive that says Fox is biased... Only guys from Vanity Fair- because of course the left doesn't muddle stories- how vain.]

(3) Most disturbing is the Film's distortion of an everyday and necessary aspect of a news service into evidence of a propaganda machine in action; the editors prerogative to assign reporters to various stories. Is any news organization the prduct ofindependent reporters who cobble together random stories? NO! Outfoxed makes Fox's doing this into evidence of evil design... [Update: A hullablo is raised about covering Gay marriage because it is a cultural issue. Again, why can Fox not decide what it wants to cover. According to the thinking of this film, Fox News cannot win. If it does cover the story, it is right wing because it does not think that cultural issues are important. If it does not, it is left wing...

Here at minute 12:48:

(4) Distortion: Claim: Fox news has destroyed Journalism. Evidence is only presented from commentary like shows which never purported to be objective journalism.

() Another distortion: Bill O'Reilly says he has only told a guest to "shut-up" once, and the film then shows video of him saying shut-up in a variety of other context- trying to catch him lying, when in fact, he was referring to directing a shut-up at a guest. [Update: No matter what is or is not rue about O'Reilly, his status as a commenter means he is expected to say his opinion. Even if he is biased, or Hannity is biased, so is Keith Olberman.

(6) This is getting painful: I simply cannot believe that anyone can take this seriously. How can you claim that Fox is pro-Conservative by showing several positive clips of Fox coverage of Republicans; how is this evidence of a systematic pro-Conservative agenda? I need figures!!!! [Update: No evidence is presented in the film about the most serious and disturbing charge, that Fox takes orders from the RNC...]

(7) I don't buy that "some people say" is evidence of anything more then trying to introduce an opposite viewpoint

(8) HALLLULAKA! Finally, at 27:14, I see the first actual evidence that Fox may be biased, the ratio of guests on Hume's program. [Update: It was the first and only].

(9) The segment about Fear misses the point. Fox could be doing that to make money, so there is no proof it reflects on a political agenda.

(10) The segment about highlighting the positive in Iraq again misses the point. Fox was not making anything up- i.e propaganda- but rather highlighting things that were missing from the mainstream media. One can argue that Fox's coverage was a necessary reaction to everyone elses negative coverage of Iraq

(11) There comes a time in every left wing documentary that the Right wing becomes responsible for everything... today's candidate is the claim that Fox News's false prediction made Bush President.

(12) An outright lie in the film. MSNBC is trying to imitate Fox New's "conservitive" agenda. Apparenlty, nobody told Keith.

(13) Talk about hypocrisy: The film criticized Fox News for its edgy graphics. The implication was that Fox engaged in subliminal Conservative advertising. Yet what better example of subliminal advertising then then cheery music that accompanies the film's turn to "A Call to Action," after the doom-laden score for the rest of the film.

In conclusion, this film is wrong on many levels. First, the evidence presented is shoddy. I saw only one figure that proved Fox had any Agenda. I do no care how many pro-Bush clips you show me. How do I know that there are not as many pro-Kerry, democratic clips on Fox News? (I mean, there are not, but this is not how you prove it.) So to, no distinction is made between commentary shows and actual news coverage. Only in actual news coverage should bias be an issue. Otherwise, viewers are well aware they are getting a opinion
Second, the criticisms are hypocritical: All news organization choose which news they want to show. All news channels have shows that do not purport to offer news, like Bill O'Reilly and Hannity and Colmes. If Fox is wrong, so is CNN. If the film offered any evidence that Fox News was controlled or affilited with the RNC, now there is a juicy conspiracy. But until then, Outfoxed is in no way far or balanced.

We got to make this Shtim

2008-09-09T20:54:00.001-07:00

At first glance, Reeher's study on Internet use and political activism seems at odds with the conclusions found in Priors study on news and entertainment. Reehers found that increased consumption of Internet news was not correlated with political activism. Although "occasional" gathers of news on the Internet did engage in more political activism, "frequent" gathers did not. Prior, on the other hand, found that for those with an interest in news [the assumption being that these are the same people who are in the "frequent" category of Reehers study] did engage in political activities [in the form of voting] more often. According to Prior, it would seem that Reehers should find a steady pattern of correlation between the frequency of Internet usage and political activism. Fortunately, we can make these studies shtim by highlighting the difference in their aims: Reehers measured the effect of Internet usage on political activism, and Prior measured the effect mainly on political knowledge. Although polling is a political activity, we can assume that its importance removes it from the type of voluntary work Reehers measured. The message from the two surveys together is that increased Internet activity- for those with an interest in news- increases political knowledge, but does not necessarily increase political activity [with the exception of voting].

Palin Vol. 2

2008-09-08T12:21:00.000-07:00

My apologies for being slightly late with a response to my 1st post. I just now noticed that comments had been posted. To begin, I quote the survey not as proof, but rather as anecdotal evidence that in the minds of those who matter most- the public- the media is biased. I agree, the public may not be correct in their judgment. Second, my comparison of the four cases is not built on the fact the Palin case is the least consequential. Even if all the cases are of equal objective misdeed and import, I still believe the Palin case has been unfairly targeted in the amount of journalistic effort it has received. The Rezko, Ayers, and Palin cases are similar in that all are unresolved to some degree. We do not know if Palin is guilty, nor do we know the extent of Obama’s involvement with those two figures. The role of the press is to fill this void. The volume of the stories suggest more of a zeal to fill this void in the case of Palin in contrast to the cases of Obama. When is the last time an investigative reporter uncovered something new about Rezko? Is the story really that dead? This is also true with regards to Edwards: we know that he is guilty. Where was the speculation on the part of the press? Their efforts in investigating him appear to have been utterly lackadaisical. In short, even if all are of equal importance, why does the press seem to devoting more resources to the Palin case then it is/did in the other three?
Finally, the point about time-compression is a good one. My counter is that if it was the need for information alone that is motivating the feeding frenzy of the press, why has there not been an equal amount of positive coverage of Palin? She must have some good traits about her…

Clash of the Titans

2008-09-07T21:21:00.001-07:00

A prominent magazine recently ran a feature explaining the significance of Rupert Murdoch’s recent purchase of the Wall Street Journal. Journalism, said the article, is an endangered species. Across the country, newsrooms are downsizing, radio operations are consolidating, and editors are being turned over at a rapid pace in the hope that fresh leadership will bring with it marketing prowess. The cause is apparent to even the casual observer: the internet has ended the monopoly that radio, TV and paper have enjoyed on the publics access to information. Against this backdrop, Murdoch’s takeover of the WSJ represents a welcome infusion of capital, but at the same time means… Murdoch. Murdoch is notorious for intensely involved approach to his media properties. This link provides a bit of history:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/32512?tid=relatedcl. The cartoon provides a bit of laughter.

In a nutshell, the WSJ takeover can be portrayed as a title round bout between the two great gods of the media: credibility and economics. Journalism.org finds a direct link between the rise of one and the demise of the other:

That is related to one of the other major threads in the findings. Journalists in this survey are much less concerned than three years ago or eight years earlier about issues of quality and credibility. In earlier years the quality of the coverage was the chief concern among those surveyed. In 1999, 44% named issues of quality as the top problem facing journalism as did 41% in 2004. Now half as many, about two in ten, place these issues at the top. The same drop occurred among local journalists, falling from 33% in 2004 to 21% in 2007.
Concerns about the lack of credibility declined even more, falling from 28% of national journalists and 23% of locals naming it as the top problem in 2004 to just 9% for both groups this year.
Yet this does not mean that journalists are now satisfied. Less than 20% of journalists named the quality of coverage as something that journalism “is doing especially well these days.”
But these concerns over quality may now be more concerned with resources than with the attitudes or professionalism of the journalist. Indeed, this concern is overwhelmingly shared. More than eight in ten journalists surveyed, a greater percentage than in 2004, agree that news organizations have cut back too much on the scope of their reporting and that too little attention is paid to complex issues.
What seems to be happening instead is that other, more pressing issues have evolved — namely those of money and bottom-line pressures.

The study portrays the clash between economics and credibility on the supply side: as funds languish, the resources needed to thoroughly vet and cross-check stories disappear. The freedom of reporters to investigate complex issues, or pursue the leads that lead them to all important scoops, evaporates with the need for an immediate product. However, the issue is a demand side one as well: The economics of a media are simple: the larger the audience, the greater the potential for profit. This effect may be blunted by another effect: trust- which can only be established with the consistent accuracy of news- also sells. It remains to be seen if these forces cancel each other out, erasing the problem of credibility vs. economics at least from the demand side.
In this context, Murdoch and the WSJ are in fact just one case study within a larger phenomenon. It is not surprising the Journalism.com also found (un)healthy tension between media executives (who worship at the alter of economics) and their reporter underlings (who are- in theory- more inclined towards credibility):

This divide first can be seen in the questions about values. More than half (55%) of national executives felt their reporters substantially shared their values. Only 30% of reporters feel this way about their top owners and editors. And the gap is even greater between executives and newsroom staff. At the local level, only 23% reporters felt their bosses shared their values, versus 47% of executives and 31% of senior editors who felt this way about their reporters.
The divide can also be seen in how the line journalists rank their leaders. Just 12% of national reporters and 6% of local gave their leaders a rating of excellent (over half of executives offered this highest mark about themselves). And when asked specifically about the leadership’s transition to the Internet, executives again gave more positive assessments than did newsroom staff.
This concern over values also extends to how journalists see the influence of corporate ownership. Even greater divides exist over the influence of corporate owners in story selection. Reporters were five to six times as likely to say that corporate owners had a great deal of influence over coverage (11% of national and 13% of local journalists versus not a single national executive and 2% of local executives.) Very similar divides existed over the influence that advertising concerns have on content.

Let the battle begin.