peristaltor (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
peristaltor) wrote2013-12-25 04:36 pm
peristaltor) wrote2013-12-25 04:36 pm
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"Liberal" Media Myth #2: Sampling Error
When last I shared, I noted that we in the United States have no liberal media bias, at least not when it comes to the mainstream, commercially-supported variety so dominant in our society. No sooner did I dare to mention this then the trickle of disclaimers dripped in. "Ah!," some deigned to note, "but look at these examples! Your thesis is therefore bunk!" And indeed, a link had helpfully collected the most egregious examples of pinko commie liberalism from broadcast and major print outlets.
I invite you to check them out. It won't take long; the examples run from September, 2009 to October 2013. All 13 examples.
And here we find a sampling error, exactly the same kind that failed to note the sudden extinction of ammonites following the Chicxulub asteroid impact that also killed the larger dinosaurs.
This is an ammonite (image from this site), one of thousands of similar species of aquatic shelled critters common before the dinosaurs went extinct. Of those critters, only the chambered nautilus remains alive on earth. That most of them went extinct is not debated; how they all died and when was until very recently quite hotly debated.
You see, the asteroid impact theory of dinosaur extinction is a fairly recent theory, introduced in 1980 by father-and-son scientists Luis and Walter Alvarez. After publishing their hypothesis, they implored paleontologists to gather more data that would confirm their theory, based at that time on world-wide iridium layer that marks where the dinosaur fossils peter out.
And here was the problem. According to Stephen Jay Gould, most paleontologists would find a fossil, dig it out, hold it up and say "Hurray!" before noting the fossil's location within the fossil bed. Without this exacting information, no one bothered to note whether or not certain species, let alone families or phyla of organisms, disappeared from the fossil record slowly or suddenly. The Catastrophists and the Gradualists were therefore two warring camps of scientists sparring without much evidence for many, many years.
Paleontologist Peter Ward took up the Alvarez challenge, noting that it was more than a matter of going back in the notebooks and seeing where the ammonites (his specialty) could and could not be found.
The Alvarez iridum layer and its proposed source as an evolutionary game changer changed that ancient argument into a testable hypothesis. Without the tenured and senior scientists willing to revisit their old digs, therefore, "it looked as if all new collecting had to be conducted."
Ward's mentor Jost Wiedmann of Tübingen University was one such established expert, an avowed Gradualist. He pooh-poohed the Alvarez hypothesis every time Ward mentioned it. That didn't stop Ward from finding a Cretaceous-Tertiary layer in France and doing a dig himself.
Shit got ugly. On the financial day in 1987 so dark it has since been called Black Monday, paleontologists gathered to present recent research and papers. Wiedmann went first, followed by Ward.
From the relationship-ending revelation of a scientist, I return you now to the world of media, the reporting, the spinning, the ignoring, the obfuscating that, taken together, provides us a view into the world around us. I have no problem admitting that there is some liberal bias in media; but the main forces foisting the liberal bias myth have a great deal of trouble accepting that there is any other kind of bias. Why? It's one of scale. Take AM talk radio.
Alterman continues with the observation that things drastically changed from radio days past.
Therefore, if listeners so insisted, no one viewpoint could be dominant—or at least go unchallenged—on any given station. This allowed the public airwaves to retain a sense of public space, rather than the flavor of privately owned and disseminated.
What happened?
"Marketplace reality" is a very simple concept to understand. Take anything in print or broadcast on television or radio. Analyze it for its constituent make-up. Does anything in this content threaten the profit margins of the outlet? If so, it needs "balance," often in the form of a disclaimer or a quote from someone who disputes the veracity of the speaker/source. It doesn't matter if that dissenting voice is a lone voice; one need not show that quack, extreme ideas are held by extremists if those ideas support the profit margin of the outlet.
If the ideas do not challenge/question the means of acquiring ever more wealth for the media outlet, the ideas can be printed or broadcast whole.
So, here we are today with a media voice that completely ignores substantive issues and belabors other, less supported issues not only without question, but without need to address that there are questions others raise about said issues. And any outlet that dares admit that there is a question to be raised can easily be dismissed as "liberal". And due to the overwhelmingly difficult job it would be to correct the assertion of such bias, few bother to question whether or not the accusation is warranted.
It turns out, though, that when one bothers to wade through the entire media landscape and categorize each story, assertion or frame as along a political spectrum, one finds that the bias is actually the opposite of liberal.
So, calling the entire media (except your outlet) "liberal" is as accurate as a scientist declaring that there was no sudden disappearance of ammonites simply because he didn't bother noting exactly where in the strata they thrived and where their fossils were found no more. It's like zooming in on a few freckles and declaring a skin brown. To determine the actual tone of the skin, you have to zoom back and just look at the whole face, not just freckly anomalies.
As to whether or not a media should be liberal, decide for yourself, this time based on the literal definition of the word:
X-Posted to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
talk_politics.
I invite you to check them out. It won't take long; the examples run from September, 2009 to October 2013. All 13 examples.
And here we find a sampling error, exactly the same kind that failed to note the sudden extinction of ammonites following the Chicxulub asteroid impact that also killed the larger dinosaurs.
This is an ammonite (image from this site), one of thousands of similar species of aquatic shelled critters common before the dinosaurs went extinct. Of those critters, only the chambered nautilus remains alive on earth. That most of them went extinct is not debated; how they all died and when was until very recently quite hotly debated.You see, the asteroid impact theory of dinosaur extinction is a fairly recent theory, introduced in 1980 by father-and-son scientists Luis and Walter Alvarez. After publishing their hypothesis, they implored paleontologists to gather more data that would confirm their theory, based at that time on world-wide iridium layer that marks where the dinosaur fossils peter out.
And here was the problem. According to Stephen Jay Gould, most paleontologists would find a fossil, dig it out, hold it up and say "Hurray!" before noting the fossil's location within the fossil bed. Without this exacting information, no one bothered to note whether or not certain species, let alone families or phyla of organisms, disappeared from the fossil record slowly or suddenly. The Catastrophists and the Gradualists were therefore two warring camps of scientists sparring without much evidence for many, many years.
Paleontologist Peter Ward took up the Alvarez challenge, noting that it was more than a matter of going back in the notebooks and seeing where the ammonites (his specialty) could and could not be found.
For fossils the size of ammonites, it turned out that multiple seasons, not days, were required to accumulate sufficient numbers of data points to allow any sort of meaningful analysis. Very few good paleontological studies were available. Thus, for the second part of the Alvarez impact hypothesis, there was far less acceptance, at least among those best trained to make a meaningful decision.
(Peter Ward, Under a Green Sky, Smithsonian Books, 2008, p. 28.)
The Alvarez iridum layer and its proposed source as an evolutionary game changer changed that ancient argument into a testable hypothesis. Without the tenured and senior scientists willing to revisit their old digs, therefore, "it looked as if all new collecting had to be conducted."
The entire section had to be measured, and whenever a fossil was found, it would have to have its level in meters below the impact layer exactly noted. With enough collecting in this way, one of the major predictions of the Alvarez impact hypothesis could then be tested: Did the ammonites disappear suddenly or gradually? If many species and individuals were found just below the boundary, it would be evidence of sudden extinction. But a long, slow diminution would be a major blow against Alvarez et al.
(Ward, ibid., pp. 12-13.)
Ward's mentor Jost Wiedmann of Tübingen University was one such established expert, an avowed Gradualist. He pooh-poohed the Alvarez hypothesis every time Ward mentioned it. That didn't stop Ward from finding a Cretaceous-Tertiary layer in France and doing a dig himself.
Shit got ugly. On the financial day in 1987 so dark it has since been called Black Monday, paleontologists gathered to present recent research and papers. Wiedmann went first, followed by Ward.
When it was time for my talk, Wiedmann moved to the front row and listened intently. He had just presented a paper in which he reasserted that no animal could have gone extinct in any sort of asteroid impact, since (1) there had not been an impact and (2) even if there had been one, all the ammonites were already extinct before the end of the Cretaceous period. As I presented slide after slide showing the ammonites not only present but thriving up to the boundary, he turned increasingly pale. At the end of the talk he slowly walked out the door and headed to his car. He sped off, and we were never to speak or even communicate again.
(Ward, ibid., p. 33.)
From the relationship-ending revelation of a scientist, I return you now to the world of media, the reporting, the spinning, the ignoring, the obfuscating that, taken together, provides us a view into the world around us. I have no problem admitting that there is some liberal bias in media; but the main forces foisting the liberal bias myth have a great deal of trouble accepting that there is any other kind of bias. Why? It's one of scale. Take AM talk radio.
Edward Monks, a Eugene, Oregon, attorney, calculates that in his city, conservatives enjoy a 4,000-to-zero hour advantage over liberals on the radio. He wrote in The Register-Guard: "Political opinions expressed on talk radio are approaching the level of uniformity that would normally be achieved only in a totalitarian society. . . . There is nothing fair, balanced or democratic about it."
(Eric Alterman, What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News, Basic Books, 2003, p. 71.)
Alterman continues with the observation that things drastically changed from radio days past.
Monk noted that as recently as 1974, such domination would have been not only inconceivable, but illegal. Back then, the Federal Communications Commission was still demanding "strict adherence to the [1949] Fairness Doctrine as the single most important requirement of operation in the public interest—the sine qua non for grant for renewal of license." This view was ratified by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1969 when it reaffirmed the people's right to a free exchange of opposing views, with roughly equal time given to all sides, if demanded, on the public airwaves.
(Alterman, ibid.)
Therefore, if listeners so insisted, no one viewpoint could be dominant—or at least go unchallenged—on any given station. This allowed the public airwaves to retain a sense of public space, rather than the flavor of privately owned and disseminated.
What happened?
The doctrine was overturned by the Reagan-appointed FCC in 1987. The chairman then, Mark Fowler, made clear his view that "the perception of broadcasters as community trustees should be replaced by a view of broadcasters as marketplace participants." Meanwhile, media companies, together with cigarette and beer companies, working with Republican Senator Bob Packwood, set up the Freedom of Expression Foundation to fight the fairness doctrine in the U.S. Court of Appeals for Washington, D.C. The companies won in a 2-to-1 decision in which the two judges ruling in their favor happened to be Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia. President Reagan vetoed attempts by Congress to reinstate the doctrine, and the net result has been the complete far-right domination of the nation's airwaves, owing entirely to what analysts call "marketplace realities."
(Alterman, ibid., pp. 71-72.)
"Marketplace reality" is a very simple concept to understand. Take anything in print or broadcast on television or radio. Analyze it for its constituent make-up. Does anything in this content threaten the profit margins of the outlet? If so, it needs "balance," often in the form of a disclaimer or a quote from someone who disputes the veracity of the speaker/source. It doesn't matter if that dissenting voice is a lone voice; one need not show that quack, extreme ideas are held by extremists if those ideas support the profit margin of the outlet.
If the ideas do not challenge/question the means of acquiring ever more wealth for the media outlet, the ideas can be printed or broadcast whole.
So, here we are today with a media voice that completely ignores substantive issues and belabors other, less supported issues not only without question, but without need to address that there are questions others raise about said issues. And any outlet that dares admit that there is a question to be raised can easily be dismissed as "liberal". And due to the overwhelmingly difficult job it would be to correct the assertion of such bias, few bother to question whether or not the accusation is warranted.
It turns out, though, that when one bothers to wade through the entire media landscape and categorize each story, assertion or frame as along a political spectrum, one finds that the bias is actually the opposite of liberal.
In a careful 1999 study published in the academic journal Communications Research, four scholars examined the use of the "liberal media" argument and discovered a four-fold increase in the number of Americans telling pollsters that they discerned a liberal bias in their news. But the evidence, collected and coded over a twelve-year period, offered no corroboration whatever for these view. The obvious conclusion: News consumers were responding to "increasing news coverage of liberal bias media claims, which have been increasingly emanating from Republican Party candidates and officials."
(Alterman, ibid, p. 13.)
So, calling the entire media (except your outlet) "liberal" is as accurate as a scientist declaring that there was no sudden disappearance of ammonites simply because he didn't bother noting exactly where in the strata they thrived and where their fossils were found no more. It's like zooming in on a few freckles and declaring a skin brown. To determine the actual tone of the skin, you have to zoom back and just look at the whole face, not just freckly anomalies.
As to whether or not a media should be liberal, decide for yourself, this time based on the literal definition of the word:
Open to new behavior or opinions and willing to discard traditional views; favorable to or respectful of individual rights and freedoms; concerned mainly with broadening a person's general knowledge and experience.
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talk_politics.