The Monkey Cage

I’m a split-personality technophile-Luddite. I seem to buy just about every new technotoy as soon as it hits the market and love it until the next new technotoy comes along, at which point I set the old one aside and have a fling with the new one, and the cycle spins and spins and spins. Increasingly I rely on younger colleagues — the younger, the better — to help me solve the manifold mysteries that these widgets hold out for someone who grew up in a pre-television world. At the same time, while I’m reading magazines and even books online, I’m carping about how much I hate to see amazon.com and Google and JSTOR and their ilk displacing bookstores and libraries and good old-fashioned browsing, about how much I enjoy reading a real, i.e., paper copy of the morning paper, about how much better the literary quality of our professional journals was back in the old days before the spell-check and grammar-check routines that are built into word processors made it easy to scribble something down and send it off without worrying about the subtler niceties of style. So yes, I want it both ways. Nothing wrong with that.

Some of my ambivalence is nicely expressed in the following excerpt from Nicholas Carr’s essay in the current issue of The Atlantic, provocatively titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”:

Continue reading "A Lamentation of Google et al." »

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You don’t have to be a dyed-in-the-wool McLuhanite to recognize that media coverage is instrumental in setting the political agenda. If the media ignore an issue, then for large segments of the American it simply doesn’t exist. If the media play it up, public consciousness rises. This isn’t inevitable, but it’s a common enough phenomenon to register as a reliable generalization.

In that context, a story in this morning’s New York Times warrants serious notice. It turns out that ABC, NBC, and CBS have cut back — way back — on their coverage of Iraq. In 2007, the three networks jointly devoted 1,157 minutes of airtime to Iraq. So far this year, which is almost half over, the counterpart figure is 181 minutes. Oh, and what was that other place? I’d almost forgotten: Afghanistan. So far this year, 46 minutes of network coverage.

For the full story, click here.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 05:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Uncivil exchanges in political debate shows do not diminish confidence in public officials, government institutions, and the media among those who choose to watch them.

That is from a recent paper by Kevin Arceneaux and Martin Johnson. There has been growing concern that contentious political programming “hurts America.” That, of course, is Jon Stewart’s famous line when he went on “Crossfire” to take down “Crossfire.” Some political science research — discussed by Lee in this previous post — also finds that exposing people to shows like “Crossfire” makes them less trusting of government.

The problem, as Arceneaux and Johnson note, is that previous research randomly assigns people to watch specific kinds of programs, but in reality, our television habits are far from random. So Arceneaux and Johnson set up an experimental design in which people were either forced to watch a political debate show (“Hannity and Colmes”), or could choose among “Hannity and Colmes” and two other, non-political programs. This is a small pilot study, but the results are noteworthy.

The people who spent the most time watching “Hannity and Colmes” were not sensitive political naïfs. They were partisans interested in politics. Unsurprisingly, then, those subjects who were allowed to choose their program did not emerge from the experiment less trusting in government: those who might have been turned off by “Hannity and Colmes” tended not to watch it. However, even those who chose to watch “Hannity and Colmes” emerged somewhat less sure of their own ability to affect politics — an attribute political scientists call “internal efficacy” — as did subjects forced to watch “Hannity and Colmes.”

Given this research, and that of Markus Prior on increasing media choice, the next wave of media effects research will likely have to incorporate people’s tendency toward selective exposure.

The Arceneaux and Johnson paper is here. Recommended.

Posted by John Sides at 09:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

That’s what Jodi Kantor says in the New York Times:

But in recent presidential elections, Jews have drifted somewhat to the right.

Really? I took the state-level exit polls for each presidential election from 1988-2004 and combined them into one big file for each election year. This produces relatively large samples of Jewish voters (~1,000 each year). Here is the percentage of Jewish voters choosing the Democratic candidate:

Looks like a leftward drift. In 1988, 71% of Jewish voters supported Dukakis. In 2004, 79% supported Kerry. And you don’t even have to crunch the data. I typed “jewish vote” into Google and the very first link told me the same thing.¹

Kantor is not wrong about her central thesis, although she fails to cite any systematic data to prove it: Obama’s current support among Jewish Americans is lower than that of these past Democratic candidates. Since Kantor doesn’t present any polling data about an Obama-McCain match-up, I went and found some. Just like before, it was hard: I typed “poll jew obama” into Google. Here was the first hit, a poll cited in the May 9th edition of the Jerusalem Post:

A new Gallup survey found that 61% of Jewish voters prefer Obama to McCain, who got 32% of the Jewish support.

That’s how you write a story about what voters think. Don’t make vague claims about recent history, such as the “rightward shift,” without backing it up. And then, if you really want to make the case, don’t only talk to a handful of people in Boynton Beach and Boca Raton. Find some hard evidence. Google will even do it for you.

ADDENDUM: See Andrew Gelman’s post with data from the National Election Study.

[1] This webpage’s data doesn’t precisely match mine, perhaps because they are using the (smaller) national exit poll file rather than the merged state-level files that I use. In fact, they find that the percent of Jews supporting Dukakis in 1988 is even lower (64%); the difference may arise because there wasn’t a separate exit poll in every state that year and so my combined state file is missing some data. In any case, the “rightward shift” is not plausible. In fact, if anything, the leftward shift is larger, especially if you compare 1988-2004 to earlier elections in the 1970 and 1980s.

Posted by John Sides at 09:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)

Since I was recently complaining about the lack of political science in journalism, let me also give credit where credit is due. This piece, by John Judis in The New Republic, does a nice job surveying relevant literature about race from political science and psychology, including work by Tali Mendelberg, David Sears, Donald Kinder, Nicholas Valentino, Vincent Hutchings, and Ismail White. Judis’ piece is distinctive for treating social science as if it has some nuance — in particular, discussing existing debates rather than treating the debates as settled. There are, of course, further nuances and debates that he does not discuss, but, given the limits of magazine journalism, he still deserves kudos.

[Hat tip to Clyde Wilcox]

Posted by John Sides at 04:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The folks over at Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism have just completed a comprehensive analysis of Comedy Central’s “Daily Show,” starring the perpetually smirky Jon Stewart. The point of departure for their study was that Stewart recently tied with heavyweight teleprompter-readers Brian Williams, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Anderson Cooper in a nationwide survey as as America’s most admired journalist. (Of course, if you pay much attention to the network news shows these days, which seem to consist primarily of ads for drug companies, a headline and sound-bite or two, and lots of lifestyle fluff, you’ll realize that such recognition comes closer to guilt by association than to a true honor.)

Anyway, the Pew researchers decided to explore the extent to which what’s shown on the “Daily Show” accords with journalistic standards like comprehensive coverage of various types of news and equal time for representatives of various viewpoints. The results are contained in a lengthy report, HERE.

The main conclusions?

The results reveal a television program that draws on the news events of the day but picks selectively among them—heavily emphasizing national politics and ignoring other news events entirely. In that regard, The Daily Show closely resembles the news agenda of a number of cable news programs as well as talk radio.

The program also makes heavy use of news footage, often in a documentary way that employs archival video to show contrast and contradiction, even if the purpose is satirical rather than reportorial. At other times, the show also blends facts and fantasy in a way that no news program hopefully ever would.

In short, “The Daily Show” doesn’t pass muster as a news program. Despite the wealth of interesting detail presented in the Pew report, this is not exactly a “Stop the presses!” conclusion. After all, “The Daily Show” appears on Comedy Central and, as Jon Stewart himself has sometimes had to remind his critics, “We’re not a news show.”

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

In the spirit of John Sides’s selfless offer of himself and David Park as regression-runners and findings-interpreters for New York Times columnist David Brooks (HERE), I hereby volunteer John and David’s services to ABC News political analyst George Stephanopoulos as well. (I myself am much too busy blogging about cats to become involved in such an undertaking.)

This offer is prompted by the following exchange between anchorman Charles Gibson and Stephanopoulos on May 6, 2008, the evening of the Indiana and North Carolina primaries:

GIBSON: And joining me now is our chief Washington correspondent, George Stephanopoulos, who is here in New York tonight. …

STEPHANOPOULOS: … Let’s look at those numbers. … We did ask a question I know in the exit polls about Reverend Wright, Barack Obama’s former pastor and whether that was influencing voters. What did we find? Right down the middle. About half said it’s important, about half said it was unimportant. Of those who said it was important, look at this in Indiana, 70% went for Senator Clinton. Of those who thought it was unimportant, again right down the middle, 65% for Barack Obama. So what you thought about the importance of Reverend Wright basically determined your vote.

Now, George Stephanopoulos, who graduated summa cum laude from an Ivy League school (Columbia), is no dummy. The concluding sentence of his summary of the survey results is so fundamentally flawed, though, that one can only wonder what they were teaching in all those political science courses that he took (he was a political science major) or whether the time he spent in the Clinton White House so addled him that it’s all gotten jumbled in his head.

The most basic lesson one is supposed to learn in one’s very first research methods course is — repeat after me, everybody — “Correlation is not the same as causation.” Now, with that thought in mind, go back and re-read the offending sentence: “So what you thought about the importance of Reverend Wright basically determined your vote.” Do you begin to see the problem?

The causal spin that Stephanopoulos put on these survey results assumes, in effect, that heading into the Indiana and North Carolina primaries most voters weren’t committed to one candidate or the other. Then the Reverend Wright issue emerged, and — presto! — it split the Democratic electorate into two groups, Clinton voters and Obama voters.

Instead, let’s begin with a decidedly different, and altogether more plausible assumption. Let’s say that heading into these two primaries, which after all occurred very late in the primary season, most voters were already pretty well committed to one or the other of the two candidates. Then the Reverend Wright issue emerged. For many of those who were already intending to vote for Clinton, that issue reinforced their existing inclination; certainly it wouldn’t have transformed them from Clinton supporters into Obama supporters. For many (presumably most) of those who were already intending to vote for Obama, though, the Wright issue wasn’t sufficient to persuade them of the error of their ways and move them into the Clinton column.

Then on election day along came an exit poll interviewer asking them how important the issue had been to them. Naturally, many of the Clintonites cited it as a reason for voting for Clinton rather than Obama — because it had been consistent with that intention and also because it had also emerged late enough to still be retrievable from memory. But how many Obama supporters would cite it as a reason for having voted for Obama? As the issue played out, that simply wouldn’t make sense; it was a one-way or “valence” issue, and its valence was anti-Obama. So Clinton supporters were more likely to cite the Wright issue as underlying their vote choice than were Obama supporters — the same statistical finding that Stephanopoulos reported but with a very different interpretation.

The problem, stated more generally, is that when pollsters ask voters which issues were most important to them, what the voters tell them can’t be taken at anything approaching face value. People just aren’t reliable reporters of their own mental processes. (The classic statement of this point is Nisbett and Wilson’s “Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes,” Psychological Review 84 (May 1977), pp. 231-259.) In the context under consideration here, this unreliability typically takes the form of ex post facto rationalizations: Those who were predisposed to vote for Candidate X cite the issues that X had raised as the decisive ones, and those who were predisposed to vote for Candidate Y cite Y’s issues as decisive. Look back over several decades of ANES post-election surveys and you’ll see this pattern time and time again. Or save yourself the trouble and hunt down a copy of Wendy Rahn, Jon Krosnick, and Marijke Breuning’s “Rationalization and Derivation Processes in Survey Studies of Political Candidate Evaluation” (American Journal of Political Science 38 (August 1994), pp. 582-600), the bottom line of which is that “Voters’ reports of the reasons for their preferences were principally rationalizations.”

My point isn’t that the Reverend Wright matter was wholly inconsequential. It may well have figured into the decision calculus of some late-deciders in Indiana and North Carolina. But that’s a world away from concluding based on the data that Stephanopoulos had in hand that “What you thought about the importance of Reverend Wright basically determined your vote.”

Columbia has an excellent political science department. Perhaps as a public service they should bring back their erstwhile star student for some refresher courses in research methods and electoral behavior. Or maybe Stephanopoulos will decide to take me up on my sincere offer of John and David’s assistance.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

In response to my post below on David Brooks, Ian McDonald comments:

Your last paragraph (tongue in cheek, I guess) makes me wonder: what do you think is the right symbiosis between good journalism and good social science?

I ask because: I think good journalism needs to take risks. I am a big David Brooks fan and I will cut him a lot of slack on factual precision, because he asks good questions, and he always entertains me. While he writes about his social disparity ideas a lot, I don’t agree that he’s completely vested in one interpretation (see the last paragraph of this Atlantic piece). http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/12/brooks.htm

Sure, some pundits get it wrong, habitually, because of self-serving motives, and thus poison the conversation. I think you would agree: Brooks isn’t one of them.

At the same time, nobody wants to be flat out wrong (I think). Maybe social scientists and journalists really can help each other. Proactively and hate free. And still make deadlines and stay interesting.

Ian raises a very good question. I completely agree that social scientists and journalists can work together.

My further thoughts are these. First, I want to distinguish between David Brooks and journalism. Obviously, he writes columns, not news articles, and thus is in the business of commentary, not reporting. Brooks is also often an amateur social scientist, and, as such, I hold him to a weaker version of the standards to which academics are held. That is to say, I wasn’t at all joking when I said this:

If it’s asking too much for Brooks to spend half an hour with the National Election Studies before writing a column like this, then consider this my job application. David Brooks, I will make pretty graphs and easy-to-read cross-tabulations for you. Just say the word. (David Park is ready to run your regressions.) Give us a call.

I would not demand that David Brooks worry about all of the ideals of empirical social science: rigorous theories, careful conceptualization and measurement, appropriate evidence, caution in drawing inferences from inherently limited data. But what I am suggesting — simple analysis to confirm the most basic thrust of a hypothesis — is not asking too much. In fact, given the platform Brooks has at the Times, it is his responsibility not to present arguments without making more of an effort to confirm them with data, where appropriate. I think his bad arguments — e.g., red and blue states — actually do violence to our discourse about politics. (See also Barry’s comment on my original post.) If Brooks wants to take risks by proffering new ideas without digging up the necessary evidence, then he needs to moderate his tone to convey the appropriate uncertainty.

Yes, I realize that columnists have an incentive to be provocative. Yes, they write on deadline. And yes, most do not have the necessary skills to analyze large datasets. That is why my offer to help Brooks do analysis is not at all facetious or sarcastic. I really would do it. And for much less than the $4000 Bill Kristol is paid to write each column.

What about reporters and journalists?

Continue reading "On the Relationship between Journalism and Social Science" »

Posted by John Sides at 09:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Televised campaign ads live two lives. First, there are the paid-for showings of the ads themselves. An ad may get shown just once in a single media market or dozens of times in hundreds of markets. In recent years, thanks to data made available by the Brennan Center at NYU and the Political Advertising Project at the University of Wisconsin, we’ve learned a great deal about how often these ads are shown, at what cost (though I’ll have more on that in an upcoming post), to how many people, and with what effects.

Second and, increasingly, there is free media coverage of the ads. Campaign ads, in a weird sort of “pseudo-events create new political reality” way, have transmogrified into one of the major media stories of modern gubernatorial, congressional, and presidential campaigns. To some extent, such media coverage may blunt the force of a particular ad by exposing misstatements or half-truths therein. Offsetting this blunting effect or perhaps, in many instances, overwhelming it, though, are the time-honored ideas that “There is no such thing as bad publicity” and “If you tell the Big Lie often enough, people will start to believe it.” That is, the charges and countercharges in a campaign ad may, thanks to the attendant publicity, take on a life of their own. And the ultimate test for a candidate may not prove to be whether those charges and countercharges are “right” or “wrong” (and few these days seem to be all of one or all of the other), but rather how the candidates react to them. If they do so slowly and haltingly (e.g., Kerry in 2004) or virtually not at all (e.g. Dukakis in 1988), then the attacks, having been aired by the parties and their allies and then given further prominence by media coverage, may sound a death knell for their candidacy. Letting oneself get put on the defensive seems increasingly to be taken as bona fide evidence that one is unqualified to serve in high political office.

In a forthcoming article in the Political Research Quarterly (“Free Advertising: How the Media Amplify Campaign Messages”), Travis Ridout and Glen R. Smith of Washington State University turn the spotlight on the second life of campaign ads by intensively exploring media coverage of commercials in ten of the 2004 Senate campaigns. Ridout and Smith report two basic results:

• “Ad amplification” via media coverage of paid commercials is indeed widespread. I think it’s fair to say that we already “knew” this, but having our impressions and intuitions validated via careful analysis is valuable nonetheless.

• The most media-amplified ads are the comparative and negative ones. Positive ads capture less media attention.

It’s the second result, of course, that’s really interesting. Media definitions of what is “news” encompass dimensions like conflict, drama, corruption, and malfeasance. By these and related standards, an ad proclaiming that Senator X has been voting against the public interest because of financial contributions from malevolent lobbying groups — well, that’s likely to bear looking into as a good news story. Meanwhile, an ad proclaiming that Governor Y has done an effective job of introducing some new programs and administering some existing ones — that’s no story at all. (Until, that is, Governor Y’s opponent calls those claims into question. Now, that’s news. And so it goes.)

Even if media coverage of a particular ad is critical, identifying distortions or counterpoints, it keeps the ad alive by exposing those who missed it when it aired on TV to what the candidates are saying about one another – adding fuel to the fire sparked by the ad itself and, given the media’s disproportionate focus on negative and comparative ads, thereby adding to the viciousness of this particular vicious cycle.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 04:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There have been many criticisms and self-criticisms of media coverage in the months before the Iraq War began (see, e.g., here and here). But systematic data is only starting to emerge.

Matt Guardino and Danny Hayes have examined every story about Iraq that appeared on ABC and CBS between August 1, 2002, and the beginning of the war, March 19, 2003 — 908 stories in all.

Their main conclusion is:

Bush administration officials were the most frequently quoted sources, the voices of anti-war groups and opposition Democrats were barely audible, and the overall thrust of coverage favored a pro-war perspective.

Dissenting views did appear, but, notably, they came not from domestic sources, such as Democrats and others opposed to the war:

Instead of emanating from Democratic elites, leaders of the anti-war movement within the United States, or other sources of domestic dissent, however, the campaign against a war—at least according to network TV news—was spearheaded by Saddam Hussein and other foreign leaders.

Guardino and Hayes note that perhaps relying on Hussein and, say, Jacques Chirac doesn’t put the anti-war case in the best possible light:

But by going overseas for that perspective—to France, Germany, Iraq, and elsewhere—the anti-war view was accorded a difficult position, from the perspective of domestic public opinion. It is well known that source credibility is central to the persuasiveness of communication, political or otherwise. And while many Americans were skeptical of the Bush administration’s motivations for a confrontation with Iraq, we would surmise that even greater skepticism infused Americans’ perceptions of Saddam Hussein’s arguments about why war was a bad idea.

That is putting it mildly, needless to say. The paper is here.

Posted by John Sides at 08:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Conspiracy theories of major sociopolitical events abound. The September 11 tragedy is no exception — indeed, it may be the textbook case. Who believes in conspiracy theories of the September 11 attacks, and where did they get these ideas?

Those are the questions that motivated Carl Stempel, Thomas Hargrove, and Guido Stempel III’s study of “Media Use, Social Structure, and Belief in 9/11 Conspiracy Theories” (Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Summer 2007).

The study drew on two theoretical perspectives. According to the “paranoid style” theory, “conspiratorial thinking is more prevalent among members of marginalized … or declining groups for reasons of insularity, status insecurities or declining status, powerlessness, and weak communal ties.” Moreover, “less legitimate and less regulated media sources, such as tabloids, Internet blogs [Now hold on a minute! “The Monkey Cage” is an extremely legitimate source!], and radio talk shows” play a major role in creating and spreading conspiracy beliefs,but “establishment’ media have no such impact.

The “cultural sociology” theory places greater emphasis on the rational aspects of conspiracy thinking. “In this view the media do not promote conspiracy theories so much by circulating particular rumors and conspiracies, as by raising people’s awareness and cynicism about how much goes on in the backstages of governmental and corporate power.” This perspective implies that belief in 9/11 conspiracy theories shouldn’t be restricted to a small group of social and cultural isolates; rather, it should be “aligned with mainstream political divisons and the discourses built up around those divisions.” Thus, for example, Democrats might be more accepting of 9/11 conspiracy theories “because they fit their view that influential members of the Bush administration were looking for an excuse to invade Iraq.”

Overall, 36% of the members of the national sample for his study considered it at least somewhat likely that “People in the federal government either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to prevent the attacks because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East.” 12% went so far as to consider it somewhat or very likely that “The Pentagon was not struck by an airliner but instead was hit by a cruise missile fired by the millitary.” And 16% thought it somewhat or very likely that “The collapse of the Twin Towers in New York was aided by explosives secretly planed in the two buildings.”

Whereas readers of daily newspapers were less likely to consider the first of those three scenarios likely, getting news from blogs and tabloids was positively associated with conspiratorial thinking; blogs were the only news source related to believing in that U.S. forces had bombed the Pentagon; and both blog and tabloid readers were more likely to accept the idea that bombs had been planted in the World Trade Center. In terms of social characteristics, believers of all three conspiracy ideas were, as expected, more likely to be members of less powerful social groups or categories.

These findings wee consistent with predictions based on both of the theories from which the authors drew their research hypotheses, suggesting that acceptance of conspiracy theories of September 11 ican be understood in ways that are consistent with two broad perspectives on social structuring and media use.

These results are provocative, but it remains an open question whether Stempel et al. have really isolated a causal relationship in which certain social factors —-> media use patterns —-> acceptance of conspiracy theories. The obvious fly in the ointment is that of self-selection. That is, an assumption underlying the “paranoid style” and “cultural sociology” theories was that reading certain types of material fosters certain types of beliefs. It could well be, though, that holding certain types of beliefs leads people to read certain types of material. Although untangling that causal knot is a task well beyond the capacity of a cross-sectional survey, the findings presented in this study could provide a good starting point for experimental research that can speak more directly to the issue of causality.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Most American newspapers — all but a select few — rely on syndicates and wire services for their coverage of national and international affairs. A paper may have its own distinctive editorial slant, but its shared reliance, with hundreds of other papers, on a common set of sources of national and international news undoubtedly introduces greater homogeneity into news coverage than would exist if most papers sent their own reporters out to cover the news. (To be sure, even then considerable homogeneity would remain, given the tendencies toward news management by those in positions of authority and toward “pack journalism” among news reporters.)

This is not to say, however, that newspapers are merely passive recipients of what they tear off the AP or Reuters news ticker. They print only a small fraction of the enormous volume of materials that they receive every day, and what they deem fit to print may be a highly unrepresentative slice of those materials.

Analyses of media content typically focus on the spoken or written word, but a recent study (“What Katrina Revealed: A Visual Analysis of the Hurricane Coverage by News Wires and U.S. Newspapers,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, August 2007) has turned the spotlight on the visual component of media coverage. The starting point for that study was the criteria that journalists use to define “newsworthiness”: prominence/importance, human interest, conflict/controversy, unusualness, timeliness, and proximity. The authors of the study, Shahira Falmy, James D. Kelley, and Yung Soo Kim, hypothesized that these criteria would be borne out in press coverage of the devastation that Hurricane Katrina caused to the Gulf Coast in 2005. To test their hypothesis, they sampled photographs from the AP and Reuters archives and matched them against the photos that actually appeared on the front pages of 400 American newspapers.

These comparisons revealed that the photos that actually appeared in these papers were unrepresentative of the photos that they received from the wire services. Among other things, the pictures that made it into these papers conveyed greater emotionality, portrayed more victims of the storm and fewer public officials, and (presumably in line with the norms of “up close and personal coverage”) showed fewer aerial depictions of the storm’s devastation.

Who, then, were the real gatekeepers? That is, who decided which images the reading public would receive of the aftermath of Katrina? The first cut was made by the wire services, in the form of their decisions about which photos to make available to their client newspapers. That first cut was obviously crucial, for newspapers can’t publish pictures that they never receive in the first place. But neither can they publish more than a few of the pictures that they do receive, and it was at this stage that a second round of gatekeeping decisions got made in the case of Katrina coverage. As the authors conclude:

Photojournalism has its own entrenched traditions, practices, and values. These represent the filters through which the day’s photos are routinely screened for presentation in our daily newspapers. The visual reporting in newspapers is much more than a playlist provided by the wire services passed on to readers. Instead, photo editors reference news values particular to their discipline and audience as they produce the dialy visual report of a news event.

Not all the biases of news coverage are “partisan” or “political.” Many of them stem directly from long-established, deeply-entrenched journalistic professional values, norms, and standards. Falmy, Kelley, and Kim’s study provides new confirmation of the operation of these factors and their potential for shaping public reactions to the news of the day.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The mass media in China, though still largely state-owned and centrally controlled, are enjoying greater freedom, sometimes even to carry “very negative and critical stories” about government officials. “Although these negative reports [are] mostly restricted to local officials,…still it is a big step forward compared to the past.”

Here, in support of that conclusion, is a data snippet from a recent analysis (abstract here) of news reports, 1990-2003, that have won the China Radio and Television Awards, which were established as an incentive to excellence in Chinese journalism.

As the author of the study, Xi Chen (a Ph.D. candidate in the Planning, Governance and Globalization Program at Virginia Tech), concludes:

The facts that journalists are reporting ‘dark’ stories which are not supposed to increase support for the party and government … and are disclosing the frauds and deceptions practiced by local officials, and paying more attention to the harsh situation in the remote western and southwestern area of the country all demonstrate that they are becoming more professional and are playing more of a role of agent rather than the mouthpiece for the government as before.

Now, let’s not go overboard. No one is claiming that China now has anything approaching a free press that provides “fair and balanced” news coverage — see, e.g., this recent posting by James Fallows on Chinese coverage of the situation in Tibet. But a step forward is…well, a step forward.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Over the years, scholarly and popular treatments of government-media relations have alternated between depicting the press as a watchdog or a lapdog, or even both at the same time. In a recent issue of the American Sociological Review (Ihere) a team of researchers from UCLA and the RAND Corporation headed by Steven Clayman takes up this issue in the context of the aggressiveness of reporters’ questions in presidential news conferences.

Clayman and his colleagues drew a sample of four news conferences per year, 1953-2000, coding the questions that reporters asked according to their active versus passive content, their directness, their assertiveness, their adversarialness, and their calling upon the president for justification of his policies or actions. They then related these scores to a wide array of situational factors that they hypothesized to underlie differences from news conference to news conference in the aggressiveness of the reporters’ questions. These analyses revealed that:

• Over the period encompassed by the study, which ranged from the beginning of Eisenhower’s first term — the photo above is from his first press conference — to the end of Clinton’s second term, reporters’ aggressiveness increased significantly.

• Second-term news conferences evoked more aggressive questioning than their first-term counterparts, though no short-run “honeymoon” effect surfaced during a president’s first term.

• A president’s current standing in the polls had no independent effect on reporters’ aggressiveness.

• Aggressiveness was, however, greater when the unemployment and prime interest rates were higher.

• Reporters were less aggressive when asking about foreign than domestic affairs.

Based on this set of results, Clayman et al. conclude that:

…journalists modulate their aggressiveness in complex ways that do not readily map onto any single model of the journalism-state relationship. Some patterns (e.g., aggressive questioning is conditioned by objective economic circumstnaces rather than presidential popularity) are consistent with an elaborated version of the watchdog model. Other patterns (e.g., aggressiveness is reduced for foreign and military questions) identify domains of journalistic deference toward the president, although even foreign/military questions become more aggressive when the economy is in decline.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 04:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Tune in to a political talk radio show these days and what are you likely to hear? Probably a conservative host lambasting the left (or, for that matter, excoriating John McCain). A 2007 report by the Center for American Progress and Free Press documented the conservative dominance of political talk radio.

First a clarification: The political leaning of the researchers obviously tilts leftward (the Center for American Progress bills itself as a “progressive think tank”), but their methodology was so straightforward and transparent that one can judge for oneself the extent to which this could have mattered. (See below for one response from conservative critics of the report.) What they did was (1) classify the various talk show hosts as either “conservative” or “progressive” (placing, for example, Bill Bennett, G. Gordon Liddy, and Rush Limbaugh in the former category and Air America, Bill Press, and Al Sharpton, among others, in the latter); and (2) second, record the amount of airplay that each side got on the 257 news/talk stations owned by the top five commercial station owners during May of 2007. Here are some of their findings:

Continue reading "Conservative Dominance of Political Talk Radio" »

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 09:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

While no-one ever went broke underestimating the tastefulness of the American public, I suspect that this video will not be winning many new voters over to Hillary 2008.

Posted by Henry at 04:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I suspect that this viral video is going to get a lot of pick-up … (via Chris Hayes)

Posted by Henry at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Need a quick briefing on recent developments in research on voter decision-making? Where do you turn? How about an academic journal like Political Psychology? Fine, but maybe it’s too specialized for your purposes. Or a “bridge” journal that has as part of its mission presenting highly specialized political science research in a way that the rest of us can digest, like Perspectives on Politics? Yup, but they may never get around to the topic you’re interested in. Maybe even The New Yorker, which regularly publishes articles along parallel lines by Malcolm Gladwell? Well, okay, but again, you might have to wait for years until anything pertinent appears there. Well, then, how about a newsweekly – Time, Newsweek, or US News? Nah – that would be silly.

But yah. The very first words on the cover of the February 11 issue of Newsweek, right up there where you can’t miss ‘em, are: “The Science of Voting.”

Open up the issue and beginning on page 34 you’ll find a piece, here, by Sharon Begley, who does a pretty good job of delivering cognitively-oriented political psychology to the masses, or at least to that portion of the masses that takes enough interest in public affairs to subscribe to a newsweekly. Included in the article are quotes from and/or references to research by political scientists Rick Lau, Sam Popkin, George Marcus, and Pippa Norris. The Newsweek story is inevitably superficial – no one could realistically hope to provide in-depth coverage of such a complicated and wide-ranging topic in three pages (which is a lot for a Newsweek story, though it would be a mere drop in the bucket for The New Yorker) – but it’s not bad at all, and it’s nice to see political scientists being treated as serious researchers rather than just as inside dopesters.

(By the way, Newsweek is on something of a cognitive neuroscience kick. See Begley’s “Mind Reading Is Now Possible” piece in the January 21 issue, here.)

[Hat tip to Stanley Feldman]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 09:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Eszter Hargittai and her colleagues have some interesting research,¹ which I’ve blogged about before, on linking patterns and partisanship in the blogosphere. Among the other data they report is some that suggests that conservatives are more likely to respond substantively to liberals than vice-versa.

Straw-man arguments account for 43% of the 42 links from conservative blogs to liberals in our sample, and 54% of the 63 links from liberal blogs to conservatives in our group of entries that include cross-ideological linkages. …Posts that concretely address the content of a blog entry from an ideological opponent represent about a quarter (26%) of all conservative and about one fifth (21%) of all liberal posts with cross-ideological links. Substantive disagreement accounted for 12% of links from conservative to liberal blogs and 16% of links from liberals to conservatives, while substantive agreement accounted for 14% of links from conservatives to liberals and 5% of pointers from liberals to conservatives.

Continue reading "Conservative and liberal bloggers" »

Posted by Henry at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

Yesterday I posted about a study of the growth of “image bites” and the decline of “sound bites” on network television news. After reading that post, my colleague Gina Lambright asked whether any other research has been done on the political impact of video versus audio; this was a natural question for her to ask, for her spouse is a news photographer. Anyway, the answer is yes. As Exhibit A (other exhibits will follow in due course), let me point to a nice piece of work that Jamie Druckman completed a few years ago.

The first Kennedy-Nixon debate in the 1960 presidential campaign has lived on in memory as a turning point not so much because of what the candidates said but rather because of how they looked. Kennedy looked like … well, Kennedy, and Nixon looked like an especially unflattering caricature of himself. Everyone “knows” that Nixon’s unattractive appearance led him to be perceived as the loser of the debate. However, the evidence that supports that conclusion turns out upon inspection, to be somewhere in the range of weak to nonexistent. Until Druckman’s study, the only reasonably credible evidence came from a post-debate survey that indicated that those who had listened to the debate on the radio were more likely to think Nixon had won, but those who watched it on television were more likely to see Kennedy as the winner. That’s a nifty result, if valid, but Druckman questions its validity for a host of methodological reasons that I won’t go into here except to say that they’re pretty compelling.

In an attempt to clear things up, Druckman ran an experiment, the participants in which (mostly undergraduate students) had no prior knowledge of the Kennedy-Nixon debates. These participants were either shown the debate on television or had the audio played for them. Druckman suspected that watching the debate would lead them to base their assessments of the candidates more on personality traits, and that proved to be the case; at the same time, agreeing with a candidate on the issues significantly affected the audio-only participants’ assessments of the candidates, but the same didn’t hold true for those who had had the video as wel as the audio input. Druckman also expected viewers to learn more factual content than listeners, largely because television is more likely to hold people’s attention than audio-only input is. That, too, proved to be the case. As for “bottom-line” evaluations of the two candidates, viewers did turn out to be more likely to see Kennedy as the winner of the debate. As Druckman concluded:

This is compelling evidence that television – by enhancing the impact of image – can make a difference in overall candidate (debater) evaluations. It also is the first clear empirical evidence consistent with the widespread assertion of viewer-listener disagreement in the first Kennedy-Nixon debate. In sum, television images have an independent effect on individuals’ political judgments: they elevate the importance of perceived personality factors, which can in turn alter overall evaluations.”

Here, then, we have an instance in which rigorous social science research supports the conventional wisdom. What everybody “knew” turned out to be right after all. (Click here for an abstract of Druckman’s study.)

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The operation of source-credibility effects — roughly, that I may believe something if X says it but discount it if it comes instead from Y — is well established in social psychological research on attitude formation and change. But here’s an interesting new twist, in the context of current controversies over “fair and balanced” political coverage by the media.

In a study reported in the latest issue of Political Behavior (abstract here), Joel Turner notes that many Americans perceive TV news coverage as ideologically biased. As cases in point, Turner singles out the widespread sense that the Fox News Channel tilts to the right while CNN leans left.

Studies of bias in reporting of the news typically “content analyze” news reports from various media outlets to determine whether they are presenting more or less the same picture of current events. The bias hypothesis is sustained to the extent that such content is found to vary across outlets.

Turner took a different tack. He deliberately held content constant and looked for another type of bias — bias among TV viewers based not on what they were seeing and hearing, but on the channel they (thought they) were watching.

Continue reading ""Fair and Balanced" Perceptions of TV News Coverage?" »

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

When most Americans discuss politics, their conversations are with those who share their own political perspectives. How, then, do they hear the “other side of the story,” and what happens when they do? Television is one of the primary conduits through which they are exposed to contrary views — and a study by Diana Mutz in the November 2007 issue of the American Political Science Review “suggests that television does, indeed, have the capacity to encourage greater awareness of oppositional perspectives.”

That isn’t necessarily good news, though, for under certain circumstances familiarity appears more likely to breed contempt than empathy. The uncivil, “in-your-face” character of much televised political discourse can, Mutz finds, “cause audiences to view oppositional perspectives as less legitimate than they would have otherwise.” People do learn from such exchanges, but “The ‘in-your-face’ intimacy of uncivil political discourse on television discourages the kind of mutual respect that might sustain perspections of a legitimate opposition. …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.”

Click here for the full text of this article.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From this piece (gated) in Campaigns and Elections magazine:

Since most Republicans live in rural America, where they are less likely to have broadband Internet, “we’re not fighting with a fair piece of the pie,” [“Republican Internet strategist David] All says. [Carol] Darr [a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School] also points to differences between the parties. “The people who are white and working-class tend to be Republican, particularly those who are white, working-class, and religious.” She characterizes Democrats as “ostensibly being the part of the poor and working class, but they end up being the yuppie party and most people at universities tend to be Democrats.”

Percentage of Republicans who live in rural areas: 24%
[Source: 2004 American National Election Survey]

Percentage of Republicans who have Internet access: 77%
Percentage of Democrats who have Internet access: 69%
[Source: 2004 American National Election Survey]

Percentage of Republicans who do not have broadband access: 21%
Percentage of Democrats who do not have broadband access: 21%
[Source: November 2006 Pew Survey. Lack of broadband access is defined as someone who uses the Internet at home via a dial-up modem.]

The claims that “most” Republican live in rural areas and that Republicans have less access to high-speed Internet access are easy to verify. Too bad no one did.

Posted by John Sides at 09:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

In response to my original post, John Samples of the Cato Institute expands on his comments on the post over at Cato’s blog. Because this is a long post, I’ll respond to several of John’s comments below the fold.

But first, let me highlight a paper cited by another commenter, which is authored by Valentino Larcinese, Riccardo Puglisi, and James M. Snyder, Jr. and is available here:

We study the agenda-setting political behavior of a large sample of U.S. newspapers during the last decade, and the behavior of smaller samples for longer time periods. Our purpose is to examine the intensity of coverage of economic issues as a function of the underlying economic conditions and the political affiliation of the incumbent president, focusing on unemployment, inflation, the federal budget and the trade deficit. We investigate whether there is any significant correlation between the endorsement policy of newspapers, and the differential coverage of bad/good economic news as a function of the president’s political affiliation. We find evidence that newspapers with pro-Democratic endorsement pattern systematically give more coverage to high unemployment when the incumbent president is a Republican than when the president is Democratic, compared to newspapers with pro-Republican endorsement pattern. This result is not driven by the partisanship of readers. There is on the contrary no evidence of a partisan bias — or at least of a bias that is correlated with the endorsement policy — for stories on inflation, budget deficit or trade deficit.

Now, on to John Samples’ comments…

Continue reading "More on the Media and Ideological Bias" »

Posted by John Sides at 03:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Washington Post runs a daily presidential campaign feature titled “The Trail.” Today’s edition includes three separate items — one on support for Hillary Clinton’s candidacy from three major groups, another on the cancellation of a key Senate vote that would have forced some candidates to alter their schedules, and the third … the third … about … well, it’s hard to say. Here it is, in toto (though, last time I checked, Toto was back in Kansas, not in Iowa):

AMES, Iowa — Chancey and Bud Montang are a couple without a candidate.

Bud, a financial analyst, and Chancey, who worked in advertising before she quit several years ago to home-school their four children, had beensome of the leading backers in Ames of Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), who recently dropped out of the race after struggling to raise money and to move in the polls.

When the agreed to watch Mitt Romney’s faith speech with a reporter Thursday morning, both said before it started that they were unlikely to back the former Massachusetts governor — not because of his Mormonism but because of their concerns about his previous support of abortion rights. He not only failed to win over either of them with his speech, but he didn’t seem to move them any closer to his side.

The Montangs, who are heavily involved in their Catholic church, kept pointing to what they saw as a contradiction in Romney’s speech; in their minds, he was saying that his faith is important but that it will not affect his decisions.

“If his faith is truly in the fiber of his being, every decision he makes is affected by it,” Bud Montang said. “You can’t say your faith isn’t going to affect your decisions. It is who you are completely.” As Romney said he would not “jettison” his religion, but not take guidance from Mormon leaders, Chancey Montang grew frustrated.

“You can’t have it separate and together,” she said. “It’s one or the other.”

—Perry Bacon Jr.

Just exactly what is newsworthy here? That two people who weren’t attracted to a candidate before he gave a speech still weren’t attracted to him afterwards? Stop the presses! That the Montangs are such important people that we need to know what they thought of Romney’s speech? With all due respect to the Montangs, who may be very nice folks, they don’t seem more important than, say, the average Iowan. Oh! Maybe that’s the point — they’re supposed to be, in effect, an N=2 microcosm of Iowa. But the very fact that they were supporters of Sam Brownback establishes that they aren’t representative of much of anything.

This is lazy “human-interest” journalism at its worst, and it’s hard to fathom why the Post would run an item like this one. Maybe tomorrow they’ll carry an equally enlightening feature about how beautiful Dennis Kucinich’s wife is — but, no, that was yesterday!

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 09:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Are the media ideologically biased? Yes, and they’re liberal, if you’re Bernard Goldberg or countless others. Yes, and they’re conservative, if you’re Noam Chomsky or countless others.

Courtesy of Brendan Nyhan — himself a political science graduate student — here is a “no” vote from former White House advisor Dan Bartlett:

TM: Do you think the press corps is responsible for putting that word out—that the president was lying [about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq]?

BARTLETT: I don’t think they’re purposely doing it. Look, I get asked the question all the time: How do you deal with them when they’re all liberal? I’ve found that most of them are not ideologically driven. Do I think that a lot of them don’t agree with the president? No doubt about it. But impact, above all else, is what matters. All they’re worried about is, can I have the front-page byline? Can I lead the evening newscast? And unfortunately, that requires them to not do in-depth studies about President Bush’s health care plan or No Child Left Behind. It’s who’s up, who’s down: Cheney hates Condi, Condi hates Cheney.

Continue reading "Are the Media Ideologically Biased?" »

Posted by John Sides at 05:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

In the December 1 Wall Street Journal, Tom Brokaw steers readers toward five books that in his view collectively “present a peerless portrait of journalism’s high aims and low comedy”: The Boys on the Bus, by Timothy Crouse; All the President’s Men, by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein; Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh; Murrow, by A.M. Sperber; and Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman.

For conveying an understanding of media coverage of American politics, I hereby second Brokaw’s nominations of The Boys on the Bus and Amusing Ourselves to Death. But Brokaw’s a newsman and I’m not. Instead of the up-close-and-personal journalism thrust of the other three items on his list, I’d replace those selections with a dated but still pertinent journal article and three old-favorite books that just keep on giving: Warren Breed’s “Social Control in the Newroom: A Functional Analysis” (Social Forces, 33 (May 1955), pp. 326-335); The Symbolic Uses of Politics, by Murray Edelman; The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, by Daniel Boorstin; and, inescapably, Understanding Media, by Marshall McLuhan.

My selections may well reflect nothing more than my idiosyncrasies — or, for that matter, my age — so disagreements and alternative suggestions would be more than welcome.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 06:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)