June 16, 2024Media Bias and Social ScienceJames has already done a good job of dealing with the broader issues of Goldberg's piece in today's WSJ on the topic of media bias, but the following jumped out at me as bringing back the debate of a month or so ago in the blogosphere on social science (e.g., here and here), and also an example of sloppy thinking that I was arguing about in my Sosa/corked bat post (i.e., just because you think that something is true, doesn't mean that it is, and often systematic study can reveal the truth of the matter, where anecdotes and personal opinion fail). The following presents a relatively simple quantitative test, and is amenable to empirical analysis. On the one hand, the relative influence of the various media outlets cited below is easy to measure: viewership and readership are metrics which are easy to obtain. And from there, relatively simple content analysis could determine the political slants of the sources in question: Mr. Alterman rails against the conservative perfidy of Fox News, yet sees little to no evidence that ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN or MSNBC might be liberal. Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, Harper's, NPR, etc. don't warrant much attention or worry. But he insists that the (vastly tinier) Weekly Standard has dangerous influence. As such, social science could easily answer the questions that Alterman fails to ask in his book. The Fox News issue is the best example: liberals rant over the influence of Murdoch, Ailes and Fox News, but really, how many people (relative to the population) watch Fox News? The simple answer is that far more people watch Brokaw, Jennings and Rather than watch Brit Hume--far more. And can be no doubt that empirically Time is more influential than the Weekly Standard. Source: OpinionJournal Posted by Steven Taylor at June 16, 2024 11:01 AM | TrackBackComments
And exactly which untenured social scientist do you think would touch this one with a ten-foot pole? :-) That being said, you don't even need to be a social scientist to figure this out; a hand calculator and middle school math will solve this problem without any need to fire up Excel or SPSS, much less a real stats package. Posted by: Chris Lawrence at June 16, 2024 11:22 AMIndeed. And I was hardly arguing for extensive regression analysis of situation--simple counting will do :) Posted by: Steven at June 16, 2024 11:28 AM(Sorry, I didn't finish my thought...) Of course, the hard part is the content analysis. If you had the data online, you could do something like what lying in ponds does. Otherwise, you could OCR it and then do the automated analysis. And by "you," of course I mean an RA or two. Posted by: Chris Lawrence at June 16, 2024 11:30 AMA little sacriligeous thought. Ian--there is something to the fact that "bias is in the eye of the beholder". However, there are clear cases that run in both directions. The remarkable thing about Alterman, and many on the left, is that they see no liberal bias whatsoever. Posted by: Steven at June 16, 2024 04:23 PMThe most difficult part of determining bias in television is the lack of adequate paper trails. IF you were going to do such an analysis, it would involve heavy lifting to analyze 30-minute broadcasts from all three major networks, along with FOX, CNN, MSNBC, etc. over a sufficient period of time to give you meaningful data. This is much more difficult than doing a Lexus-Nexis search of newspaper articles and claiming it represents bias. :-) Or relying on a few anecdotes from whatever show you happened to be watching at the moment, or establishing spider webs of conspiracies to fit your preconceived perceptions. Posted by: bryan at June 17, 2024 02:38 PMWell, thanks to FCC mandates, you could use the closed captioning content of those shows (a PC with a TV decoder card can take the closed captioning and store it in a text file). Plus I think most of those shows are already transcripted by a number of companies; you could buy those transcripts. I don't think it's impossible. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's been done, but probably just published in some obscure journals. If I weren't entirely lazy I'd do a search. Posted by: Chris Lawrence at June 17, 2024 04:51 PMTo truly undertake a full blown study would require some work, yes, but it is far from impossible. And really, Alterman's assertion doesn't require a full blown study to counter, as his positions on Fox News and the Weekly Standard are hard to sustain vis-a-vis broadcast tv or major news magazines like Time. Posted by: Steven at June 17, 2024 04:54 PMThink simple. Learn different. Macinstruct.net Posted by: Noe at July 5, 2024 05:18 PM
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