[Newsbot]

Filibuster Cartoons
Title: Murdoch's babies (click to view)
Date: July 21, 2011
I'll admit I initially had little interest in the trials and tribulations of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. The swirls of controversy surrounding the hacking of a dead girl's cell phone that somehow led to the closure of one of Britain's oldest newspapers, seemed tragic, admittedly, but also somewhat insular in relevance. I was reminded of a fake newspaper headline from an old editorial cartoon I saw years ago, mocking a similarly high-profile journalism outrage: "Media scandal shocks media! 'Is this the end of media?' say media."

But the more I actually bother to read about Murdoch and company, the more interested I become. The man, Murdoch, is very clearly one of the great figures in the grand history of English communication, and to a considerable extent, the more we learn about him, the more we learn about ourselves.

Though the evil spectre of "media bias" is one of the favorite topics of conversation on both the right and left alike, the concept is rarely explored in anything but the most lazily ideological way. Everything that's wrong with the news, in short, is usually held to be the fault of a press that's too deep in the tank for one party over another. Certainly this is how most on the left have come to understand the sins of the Murdoch press, or at least its primary American holdings: FOX, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post. All are bad because they carry too much water for the Republicans, liberals say. All push an aggressive right-wing message with maddening single-mindedness, gleefully chopping out whatever inconvenient facts and figures are necessary en route.

And perhaps it's all true, but that sort of bias only gets you so far in today's world. National Review is vastly more conservatively biased than FOX, for instance, yet it's not exactly flying off the shelves. Why? Well, ideology unto itself is not terribly interesting. Precious few of us actually vote or watch or buy anything for strictly ideological reasons. When political content is consumed, it's more often for far less intellectual reasons; the ideology in question is simply seen to address some pressing concern of the now, some nervous anxiety in our guts, not a high-minded principle in our brain. In political parlance, this is what we call "populism" — the philosophy that there is no higher good than the reactionary public's immediate impulse — and it's populism far more than conservatism that has served as the rock upon which the Murdoch empire has been built.

A fine editorial in today's National Post defines the basic agenda of a Murdoch-owned outlet as"defending putatively 'normal' tax-payers against various supposed parasites and weirdos, an eclectic and elastic category that includes union members, gays, almost all foreigners, uppity women, and racial minorities." To this I'd add an equally voracious distrust of most anyone in a position of authority or fame: politicians, judges, academics, movie stars, royals, athletes, and occasionally even suburban lessers such as teachers, principals, and parents as well. The perennial journalistic narrative in either case is always, always an "us versus them" dichotomy, with us always in the right, always outraged, and always the victim. Any traditionally conservative notions of respectful deference to authority or admiration for the material successes of others have no place amongst the Post's crude nicknames for leading Congressmen and FOX's endless Hollywood-bashing.

Any coherently conservative message is further muddled by that other staple of the Murdoch press: titillation. From O'Reilly's overly dolled-up pundit brigade to his implausibly "reluctant" airing of TV's most envelope-pushing ads to the Post's endless chasing of celebrity cheaters and double entendre-filled headlines, the boundaries of taste always take a backseat to pushing the ribald. (Things are taken even further in England, of course, where the British Sun openly runs pornographic pictures alongside its London-is-going-to-hell editorials.) This is the sort of stuff the salacious public wants to see, after all, and what good capitalist media baron would possibly deny them that privilege?

As I touched on in my recent review of David Courtwright's No Right Turn, contemporary social conservatism is considerably threatened by a market-driven culture that celebrates individual gratification above practically everything else. This force likewise represents the strongest media bias of all, since media will never be profitable without being broadly in tune with public tastes. So-called "conservative media" is thus forever doomed to its current trashy form for reasons that really have little to do with the supposedly lewd personality of Murdoch himself, or the wickedness of his various underlings.

In a free market society, we're very much given the sort of junk we ask for, and the reactionary, bawdy populism of the Murdoch estate is apparently the sort of "conservatism" that Americans and Brits feel most comfortable with. Conservatives in either country who have served as stalwart apologists of the FOX/Sun/Post "alternative" model of journalism have some dirty ink on their hands in the wake of the present scandal, having done so little in the past to demand higher standards of output for that which was done in the name of their philosophy — to say nothing of the standards of the supposedly like-minded public who so eagerly consumed it.

[DrCaleb]

Quote:

Though the evil spectre of "media bias" is one of the favorite topics of conversation on both the right and left alike, the concept is rarely explored in anything but the most lazily ideological way.

There is a documenary out there called 'Outfoxed'. It's about exactly that, how the Fox message is controlled from the top down, in a very micromanagerial fashion.

Might be worth a look, to those interested in media bias.

[andyt]

Newsbot wrote:

Filibuster Cartoons
Title: Murdoch's babies (click to view)
Date: July 21, 2011


In a free market society, we're very much given the sort of junk we ask for, and the reactionary, bawdy populism of the Murdoch estate is apparently the sort of "conservatism" that Americans and Brits feel most comfortable with. Conservatives in either country who have served as stalwart apologists of the FOX/Sun "alternative" model of journalism have some dirty ink on their hands in the wake of the present scandal, having done so little in the past to demand higher standards of output for that which was done in the name of their philosophy — to say nothing of the standards of the supposedly like-minded public who so eagerly consumed it.

I have no use for Fox and think they are corrosive to society. But to conflate them with NOTW doesn't seem right either. Fox has not been accused of any dirty tricks. They just rant away from their pov, are the opposite of "fair and balanced." But so be it, it satisfies the Joe the Plumbers that it's not all a lest biased media out there.

[Psudo]

This has been repeated a million times already, but: Fox is relatively right-wing. Is it less factually sound than other sources? From the 60s to the 90s roughly 80% of Journalists voted Democratic. Sure, Fox is right of that. So is the center, the near-left, the country on average, and pretty likely the truth.

These researchers calculated the ideological bias of quite a few news outlets (and politicians and think tanks; scores are near the bottom, tables 3 & 4). A score of 50.1 is center, more is left, and less is right. Fox News' Special Report got a 39.7 (10.4 points to the right), but the average of all news sources checked including Fox was 62.6 (12.5 points to the left). This suggests Fox's actual news reporting is not more biased than news generally, it's just biased the in an uncommon direction.

Quote:

Fox News’ Special Report, while right of center, was closer to the center than any of the three major networks’ evening news broadcasts.

But what do they call the center?

Quote:

one of the simplest definitions of centrist is simply to use the mean or median ideological score of the U.S. House or Senate. [...] we list the mean House and Senate scores over the period 1947-99 [...] we use the [average] of these numbers, 50.1, as our estimate of the adjusted ADA score of the centrist U.S. voter.

The news source data was from about 2000-2003, a little out of date. I don't expect the left-wing sources have jumped to the middle to undermine Fox's title since then, but even if they did Fox deserves some credit for motivating that move. [More recent scholarly works by the same author]

I don't often watch Fox News or any other television news, but no matter where I get my information I keep it's bias in mind. Everything is wrapped in editorial, but even to be a popularly accepted lie requires a certain level of factual basis. No one from either side should be trying to discredit information based on the ideology of the source. Credit should come from the verified factual accuracy of the statement. Neither Fox nor MSNBC nor the Wall Street Journal (it, outside the editorial page, got the most liberal score) are factually unsound, and none of these is the World Weekly News. Give the other side some credit.

[Zipperfish]

I've been reflecting on media bias for years, but I think you've really articulated and connected what were fairly nebulous thoughts in my own mind.

I've never bought the shrill cries on the right (with their pejorative "MSM" labels) or the left (with their academic-sounding but ultimately empty Chomsky models). It struck me as no coincidence that the further one was from the political centre, the more fervently he held the belief that the media were biased against his point of view.

There are some very successful healthy restaurants in Vancouver--organic ingredinets, vegetarian entrees, deliciously served. But they never have and probably never will do the volume of business that McDonalds does. Perhaps it's the same with our media. The real money has has always been in entertainment, not edification. And you can sneer down your nose at Rotten Ronnies, but at the end of the day, they are laughing all the way to the bank.

[andyt]

Zipperfish wrote:

And you can sneer down your nose at Rotten Ronnies, but at the end of the day, they are laughing all the way to the bank.

And killing us softly. Damn those elites for pointing that out.

[xerxes]

Zipperfish wrote:

I've been reflecting on media bias for years, but I think you've really articulated and connected what were fairly nebulous thoughts in my own mind.

I've never bought the shrill cries on the right (with their pejorative "MSM" labels) or the left (with their academic-sounding but ultimately empty Chomsky models). It struck me as no coincidence that the further one was from the political centre, the more fervently he held the belief that the media were biased against his point of view.

There are some very successful healthy restaurants in Vancouver--organic ingredinets, vegetarian entrees, deliciously served. But they never have and probably never will do the volume of business that McDonalds does. Perhaps it's the same with our media. The real money has has always been in entertainment, not edification. And you can sneer down your nose at Rotten Ronnies, but at the end of the day, they are laughing all the way to the bank.

Too true. The thing about FOX is, it's a propaganda network not because of Rupert Murdoch, but because of Roger Ailes. Murdoch only cares about making money and if he saw a profit to be had in a lefty version of FOX, we'd see Sean Hannity reading from Das Kapital by the end of the week.

That's what this is ultimately about, IMO. Murdoch's desire for profit and for dominance led his newspaper staffs to do criminal, unconscionable things. This isn't left v. right (not that there isn't a lot of schadenfreude from the left over this), but right v. wrong.

[Zipperfish]

Psudo wrote:

These researchers calculated the ideological bias of quite a few news outlets (and politicians and think tanks; scores are at the bottom). A score of 50.1 is center, more is left, and less is right. Fox News' Special Report got a 39.7 (10.4 points to the right), but the average of all news sources checked including Fox was 62.6 (12.5 points to the left).

I read this report and it suffered from the common fallacy that they had no method of accounting for the bias of the people conducting the study. And that bias is evident pretty early on in the study. (For instance they mention that journalists are overwhelmingly liberal, yet fail to mention that it is publishers, not journalists, who deicide what goes into a newspaper). So like many "scientific" studies these days, it looks like a bunch of folks designing a study to confirm their own beliefs.

The media, being the competitive business that is, is probably a better arbiter of where the political centre is than any social science study. After all, the biggest chunk of the market is right under the centre of the bell curve and the media are finely attuned through their ad revenues, of exactly where that constantly-moving centre is.

[Psudo]

Zipperfish wrote:

For instance they mention that journalists are overwhelmingly liberal, yet fail to mention that it is publishers, not journalists, who deicide what goes into a newspaper
[...]
The media, being the competitive business that is, is probably a better arbiter of where the political centre is than any social science study

the study wrote:

Of course, however, just because a journalist has liberal or conservative views, this does not mean that his or her reporting will be slanted.
[...]
However, contrary to the prediction of the typical firm-location model, we find a a systematic liberal bias of the U.S. media. This is echoed by three other studies—Hamilton (2004), Lott and Hasset (2004), and Sutter (2004), the only empirical studies of media bias by economists of which we are aware.

They specifically state the market forces argument, calling it "compelling" and making no argument against it except that their data didn't match it's predictions. Arguably, Fox News' financial success demonstrates the validity of it; isn't it still the most profitable and highest rated cable news network?

All in all, I think you underestimate the study.

Even so, I don't think the "O woe unto the world that is so biased against conservatives!" argument holds much water these days. Reagan was elected in what was probably the high-water mark of liberal news bias, and there have been significant gains for conservative news media since. The complaining set still see the world of 1979 around them, which just isn't there anymore. Even when it was, it didn't obviously undermine conservatives' political power.

[Zipperfish]

Psudo wrote:

Zipperfish wrote:

For instance they mention that journalists are overwhelmingly liberal, yet fail to mention that it is publishers, not journalists, who deicide what goes into a newspaper
[...]
The media, being the competitive business that is, is probably a better arbiter of where the political centre is than any social science study

the study wrote:

Of course, however, just because a journalist has liberal or conservative views, this does not mean that his or her reporting will be slanted.
[...]
However, contrary to the prediction of the typical firm-location model, we find a a systematic liberal bias of the U.S. media. This is echoed by three other studies—Hamilton (2004), Lott and Hasset (2004), and Sutter (2004), the only empirical studies of media bias by economists of which we are aware.

They specifically state the market forces argument, calling it "compelling" and making no argument against it except that their data didn't match it's predictions. Arguably, Fox News' financial success demonstrates the validity of it; isn't it still the most profitable and highest rated cable news network?

All in all, I think you underestimate the study.

Even so, I don't think the "O woe unto the world that is so biased against conservatives!" argument holds much water these days. Reagan was elected in what was probably the high-water mark of liberal news bias, and there have been significant gains for conservative news media since. The complaining set still see the world of 1979 around them, which just isn't there anymore. Even when it was, it didn't obviously undermine conservatives' political power.

I don't think I have underestimated the study. I have the same criticisms of Chomsky academic analysis (the Propaganda Model). Chomsky used a different approach, measuring column-inches (pre-internet) devoted to each side of given conflicts. I'm just suspicious of science which "proves" the predetermined bias of those conducting the study. In this case, conservatives associated with the American Enterprise Institute. I didn't particularly see the relevance of their methodology (which think tanks were cited most often) as being a reasonable correlation, nor did I see their justification for the statistical approach used (Weinbull distribution) or their selection of shape parameters for that model.

Nor do the conclusions accord much with common sense. The New York Times is more conservative than the Wall Street Journal. The Drudge Report leans left.

Perhaps the most damning feature is the huge disparity in the findings of various media bias studies. The very fact that decades of research has failed to find anything even close to a consensus view tells me that the filed is probably beyond the scope of something that can be determined by social science methods. Perhaps some basic assumptions are wrong--"left" and "right" can be defined over such a huge area. I'm a social liberal fiscal conservative, for instance. To my mind it's difficult to boil these things down to a simple left/right dichotomy.

As I said, I think the networks themselves, through the instant feedback of ad revenue are more attuned to where the "centre" is than any science study could hope to be.

[Psudo]

I guess I underestimated your analysis of their methodology. I certainly agree that political ideology does not easily reduce itself to a point on a number line. They mention three other studies; do they have the same flaws?

Zipperfish wrote:

Nor do the conclusions accord much with common sense. The New York Times is more conservative than the Wall Street Journal. The Drudge Report leans left.

The Wall Street Journal's editorial page is well-known to be right-wing. ("On our editorial page, we make no pretense of walking down the middle of the road." -- William H. Grimes) but I've been told their actual news reporting (what was measured in this study) is generally accepted to be left-biased. Is that untrue?

As for Drudge, the illusion of left-wing bias comes from the fact that it links to other sources. It's measured bias is very similar to (just a hair right of) the industry's bias generally, which is what I would expect. Perhaps I cannot take what is intellectually automatic, plausible, and comfortable in my own mind and call it "common sense."

Zipperfish wrote:

I think the networks themselves, through the instant feedback of ad revenue are more attuned to where the "centre" is than any science study could hope to be.

I think of market pressures as gravity toward an ever-changing target; things fall towards optimization to reality. They are not necessarily there at any given moment, though, because the location of "there" is not the same one moment to another. The sudden appearance and instance success of Fox News looks like a market correction to me. If it is, that means there was a significant gap before that.

The study does not consider the editorial world, including that right-wing monopoly that is political talk radio. Perhaps the difference between the market's ideological center and the news media's is that the right-wing has a greater supply of editorials to supplicate them.

The primary reason I'm inclined to believe the study is because it does seem to me to correspond to common sense. I don't like the implications if you and I cannot agree on what common sense dictates.

[Zipperfish]

Psudo wrote:

I guess I underestimated your analysis of their methodology. I certainly agree that political ideology does not easily reduce itself to a point on a number line. They mention three other studies; do they have the same flaws?

There's tons of other studies. I've read quite a few of them. I became interested in media bias after I read Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent." I was an impressionable young liberal back then, convinced that the media were controlling the print and airwaves for their corporate owners. And here was Chomsky--a respected academic--going through a rigorous exercise to prove just that. Imagine my disappointment at the end of the book when I realized that that the edifice of his arguments was built on clouds--namely, implicit assumptions in his analysis.

I read others and noted the same thing. I concluded, after having rad many, that the subject itself is problematic for objective research, simply because those who study these kinds of things don't tend to be objective researchers.

Some studies have found that conservative reserachers tend to conduct experiments that find a liberal bias, and liberal auhtors tend to find a conservative bias. Not surprising. That accords with my own belief that the entire field of study of media bias has little to do with science, and more to do with applying political pressure to media companies to "game" the system towards the authors' points of view. It's quantum physicist Hesienberg's Uncertainty Principle applied to social science: the very act of observing an event changes the event, so objectivity is impossible, even in principle.

Psudo wrote:

The Wall Street Journal's editorial page is well-known to be right-wing. ("On our editorial page, we make no pretense of walking down the middle of the road." -- William H. Grimes) but I've been told their actual news reporting (what was measured in this study) is generally accepted to be left-biased. Is that untrue?

This business about separating editorials from news seems to me like separating a pound of flesh without a drop of blood.

Quote:

The study does not consider the editorial world, including that right-wing monopoly that is political talk radio. Perhaps the difference between the market's ideological center and the news media's is that the right-wing has a greater supply of editorials to supplicate them.

Which would be another flaw in the study. The title of the study is "A measure of Media Bias." In fact, they are only examining a small subset of the media: news reporting.

Quote:

The primary reason I'm inclined to believe the study is because it does seem to me to correspond to common sense. I don't like the implications if you and I cannot agree on what common sense dictates.

Common sense--for me--is that the Wall Street Journal is a rather stolid, fiscally conservative newspaper and the Drudge Report is a right-winger muckraker. I assert that this a rather widely held viewpoint. So when conclusions don't accord with that, I think assupmtions need to be carefully examined.

Also, common sense tells me that studies by political activists who reaching conclusions that further their political ends need to be examined closely.

[DrCaleb]

Zipperfish wrote:

Psudo wrote:

The primary reason I'm inclined to believe the study is because it does seem to me to correspond to common sense. I don't like the implications if you and I cannot agree on what common sense dictates.

Common sense--for me--is that the Wall Street Journal is a rather stolid, fiscally conservative newspaper and the Drudge Report is a right-winger muckraker. I assert that this a rather widely held viewpoint. So when conclusions don't accord with that, I think assupmtions need to be carefully examined.

Also, common sense tells me that studies by political activists who reaching conclusions that further their political ends need to be examined closely.

Thanks guys, for demonstrating Cognitive Bias.
Edit: And I just ran across this little gem. : http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj20n3/cj20n3-7.pdf

[Zipperfish]

DrCaleb wrote:

Thanks guys, for demonstrating Cognitive Bias.
Edit: And I just ran across this little gem. : http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj20n3/cj20n3-7.pdf

That's a beauty all right.

We're all prisoners of our own biases, utlimately.

[Psudo]

I'm a bit disappointed with this whole thread. Sure, I imagined I had found some kind of legitimate proof of my position that fit my perceptions quite snugly, but I've been proven wrong before. That bothers me, but in a typical way.

It bothers me more that we seem to have disproven the existence of "common sense." I cannot concede that so easily. Maybe this is just reactionary denial on my part, but I don't believe so.

Zipperfish wrote:

This business about separating editorials from news seems to me like separating a pound of flesh without a drop of blood.

Okay, technically they were separating sources that call themselves as "news reporting" from sources that call themselves editorializing. All the flaws of self-identification apply, but it's pathetically easy to separate the newspaper section that says Op/Ed at the top from the sections that don't.

Zipperfish wrote:

Which would be another flaw in the study. The title of the study is "A measure of Media Bias." In fact, they are only examining a small subset of the media: news reporting.

Scope is not a flaw. No possibly study could be conducted that had a universal scope. I specifically denoted the scope in my very first post in this thread.

Zipperfish wrote:

the Drudge Report is a right-winger muckraker

99% of the Drudge Report's right-wing bias is from giving clearly right-wing alternate headlines to others' stories. The study looked at the stories themselves, including the very few Drudge wrote himself and the very many which come from other media sources. The fact his score is very similar to the general score of everyone is an obviously predictable artifact of their methodology. It's like saying a spool of thread is the size of a city block because it would reach a city block if unrolled; the reasoning is technically true in it's sense, and the conclusion is misleading if taken at face value, but the whole line of reasoning taken together and understood in context is illuminating truth. "Wow, I never knew a spool of thread held that much thread."

(Note: I have no idea how much thread is on a single spool. That example was illustrative, not literal.)

Maybe you're right and the study suffered from such intrinsic bias as to be meaningless. But at least consider it on it's actual traits and internal logic rather than the cultural environment in which it exists.

I'm out of time and have only read half of the Cato paper. I'll comment on it once I get the time to finish it, probably later tonight.
Edit: Having finished it, I leave this quote with which I powerfully agree: "Partisan media bias [...] may be a thing of the past."