An Experiment in Media Bias

[Starlight]

Carpe, on the subject of media bias, here is a chart I think is worth talking about that I found the other day when I was looking for the link to the interview/book for you with that Harvard professor on media bias.

This chart is by the MediaBiasFactCheck people, and is a 2018 version (they have a slightly newer version but IMO it's not as clear in its groupings and a bit more confusing, so I'm going to use this one, which is the one I first came across):



Firstly, consider that bottom red rectangle containing the garbage and fake news outlets. I'll note that despite being a liberal I have never ever heard of, seen, or ever seen anyone link to anything in that bottom-left-hand corner. Those sites are so obscure and so unfrequented that I have to think the person who compiled the image was really, really, going out of their way to try and find some sort of fake news sites on the left, no matter how obscure and unvisited. Whereas the bottom right-hand corner of garbage sites is linked to regularly by people on this website, and those sites and sources command a large audience in general. That points immediately to quite a significant asymmetry between left and right - despite the picture creator's best efforts to paint the left and right wing as both having garbage sources that sit in that bottom red rectangle, in actual fact the left really doesn't make use of garbage sources whereas the right makes very heavy use of garbage sources and sites.

A second thing that caught my interest was the row that says "complex analysis" and to a lesser extent "analysis". I think this is actually the most important type of news outlet. It's all very well to be able to report an event "Today X did Y", but unless you have some wider explanation within which to understand the event occurring the event itself can be relatively meaningless. So what you want are really informed writers who are about to talk about the history of X and Y, and about whether the event implies Z, and how the event was influenced by A, B, and C, and explain that what next needs to happen is question D needs answering etc. This is especially true in the age of modern politics when a purely factual news outlet will report "Republicans said X, Democrats said Y" and then move onto the next topic... which is depressingly like a football game in which the commentator says "Team A said they won, Team B said they won, who can really know what the score is?" The whole point of the sports-commentator / news-reporter's job is to tell you what the objective facts actually are, and explain how they are relevant to the situation, quite aside from what each side says. But when you look at that chart's "complex analysis" category, the left and the right wing are not remotely equal. The left hand side is jam-packed with popular and well-known outlets so clearly people on the left are really really interested in subscribing to, buying, and reading, complex high quality analysis. Whereas on the right hand side of that category, the tumbleweeds are basically rolling. There's the Weekly Standard which closed down last year due to lack of readership, and the National Enquirer which is basically a vanity publication with few actual readers. On the edges of that category are the Fiscal Times and Reason.com neither of which I have ever heard of despite being an avid consumer of a huge variety of news resources so both must be pretty tiny. And that's pretty much it. So the right has almost no media sources which actually do serious analysis and which are actually popular. Instead the right loves their absolute garbage outlets that are in the bottom righthand corner of the diagram. The average left-wing reader is opting for "complex analysis" sites when they're not reading the "fact reporting" category of the top-middle while the average right-wing reader is opting for "contains inacccurate/fabricated info, damaging to public discourse" sites.

[rogue06]

The first two are virtually identical

1. Children Confront Senator Dianne Feinstein over Green New Deal: NYT or CNN
2. Kids Confront Sen. Dianne Feinstein Over Green New Deal: NYT or CNN
3. Dianne Feinstein scolds kids who pushed her to back Green New Deal: 'I know what I'm doing': Fox
4. Feinstein Lectures Children Who Want Green New Deal, Portraying it as Untenable: CBS
5. Grilled by children, Feinstein tries to teach lesson in politics: MSNBC
6. I know what I’m doing’: Sen. Feinstein argues with kids on climate bill: USA Today
7. Watch Feinstein's tense exchange with children over climate:CNN
8. Dianne Feinstein rebuffs young climate activists' calls for Green New Deal: Guardian

All the above are SWAGs

Soooo, how close or far off was I?

[rogue06]

Carpe, on the subject of media bias, here is a chart I think is worth talking about that I found the other day when I was looking for the link to the interview/book for you with that Harvard professor on media bias.

This chart is by the MediaBiasFactCheck people, and is a 2018 version (they have a slightly newer version but IMO it's not as clear in its groupings and a bit more confusing, so I'm going to use this one, which is the one I first came across):



Firstly, consider that bottom red rectangle containing the garbage and fake news outlets. I'll note that despite being a liberal I have never ever heard of, seen, or ever seen anyone link to anything in that bottom-left-hand corner. Those sites are so obscure and so unfrequented that I have to think the person who compiled the image was really, really, going out of their way to try and find some sort of fake news sites on the left, no matter how obscure and unvisited. Whereas the bottom right-hand corner of garbage sites is linked to regularly by people on this website, and those sites and sources command a large audience in general. That points immediately to quite a significant asymmetry between left and right - despite the picture creator's best efforts to paint the left and right wing as both having garbage sources that sit in that bottom red rectangle, in actual fact the left really doesn't make use of garbage sources whereas the right makes very heavy use of garbage sources and sites.

A second thing that caught my interest was the row that says "complex analysis" and to a lesser extent "analysis". I think this is actually the most important type of news outlet. It's all very well to be able to report an event "Today X did Y", but unless you have some wider explanation within which to understand the event occurring the event itself can be relatively meaningless. So what you want are really informed writers who are about to talk about the history of X and Y, and about whether the event implies Z, and how the event was influenced by A, B, and C, and explain that what next needs to happen is question D needs answering etc. This is especially true in the age of modern politics when a purely factual news outlet will report "Republicans said X, Democrats said Y" and then move onto the next topic... which is depressingly like a football game in which the commentator says "Team A said they won, Team B said they won, who can really know what the score is?" The whole point of the sports-commentator / news-reporter's job is to tell you what the objective facts actually are, and explain how they are relevant to the situation, quite aside from what each side says. But when you look at that chart's "complex analysis" category, the left and the right wing are not remotely equal. The left hand side is jam-packed with popular and well-known outlets so clearly people on the left are really really interested in subscribing to, buying, and reading, complex high quality analysis. Whereas on the right hand side of that category, the tumbleweeds are basically rolling. There's the Weekly Standard which closed down last year due to lack of readership, and the National Enquirer which is basically a vanity publication with few actual readers. On the edges of that category are the Fiscal Times and Reason.com neither of which I have ever heard of despite being an avid consumer of a huge variety of news resources so both must be pretty tiny. And that's pretty much it. So the right has almost no media sources which actually do serious analysis and which are actually popular. Instead the right loves their absolute garbage outlets that are in the bottom righthand corner of the diagram. The average left-wing reader is opting for "complex analysis" sites when they're not reading the "fact reporting" category of the top-middle while the average right-wing reader is opting for "contains inacccurate/fabricated info, damaging to public discourse" sites.

Funny that they put the Drudge Report on the far right since it is a news aggregation website that utilizes sources from all sides of the political spectrum including MSNBC, Rolling Stone, Daily Kos, New Republic and Mother Jones to name a few. The only actual study that I can find of the site^[1], one conducted by George Mason University a little over a decade ago actually placed them "slightly left of center" while groups like AllSides describe them as leaning right (which means slightly right of center).







1. Pew Research did a study that placed them on the far right but this was not based on content but rather on their audience

[Cow Poke]

We're all human encouraging the pounce of the nervous Grammar Nazis

Great Question!

And he who lives by the pen dies by the pen.

[Mountain Man]

This chart is by the MediaBiasFactCheck people...

Source: Media Bias Fact Check: Incompetent or Dishonest?

The flagrant and simplistic nature of these bogus critiques suggests that Media Bias Fact Check is either inept and/or dishonest.

Siewert goes on to write that Just Facts is “a deceptive site because they do use facts, but not all the facts in order to mask their right Bias.” As proof of this, she cites two articles that take issue with the Stanford Law Review paper cited by Just Facts. Neither of these articles appeared in a journal, and one of them is from a publication “written and published entirely by Harvard undergraduates.” Siewert does not even attempt to prove whether the critiques have any factual or logical value.

Worse still, the lone excerpt that Siewert cited from these articles does not even take issue with the facts from Stanford Law Review paper that were presented by Just Facts. Thus, she must not understand the context in which Just Facts cited the paper, or she is lying about it.

By Siewert’s logic, if someone cites a peer-reviewed paper, and anyone argues against it, then the person who cited the paper is “deceptive” and “masking their bias” if they don’t cite the critique—regardless of whether it has any merit or relevance. This inane standard would apply to just about every scholar.

https://www.justfactsdaily.com/media...-or-dishonest/

© Copyright Original Source

Source: Can you trust what "Media Bias/Fact Check" says about PolitiFact?

Media Bias/Fact Check bills itself as "The most comprehensive media bias resource." It's run by Dave Van Zandt, making it fair to say it's run by "some guy" ("Dave studied Communications in college" is his main claim to expertise).

We have nothing against "some guy" possessing expertise despite a lack of qualifications, of course. One doesn't need a degree or awards (or audience) to be right about stuff. But is Van Zandt and his Media Bias/Fact Check right about PolitiFact?

Media Bias/Fact Check rates PolitiFact as a "Least-biased" source of information. How does MB/FC reach that conclusion? The website has a "Methodology" page describing its methods:

The method for (rating bias) is determined by ranking bias in four different categories. In each category the source is rated on a 0-10 scale, with 0 meaning without bias and 10 being the maximum bias(worst). These four numbers are then added up and divided by 4. This 0-10 number is then placed on the line according to their Left or Right bias.

This system makes PolitiFact's "Truth-O-Meter" almost look objective by comparison. An 11-point scale? To obtain objectivity with an 11-point scale would require a very finely-grained system of objective bias measures--something that probably nobody on the planet has even dreamt of achieving.

It comes as no surprise that Van Zandt lacks those objective measures:

The categories are as follows (bold emphasis added):

1. Biased Wording/Headlines- Does the source use loaded words to convey emotion to sway the reader. Do headlines match the story.
2. Factual/Sourcing- Does the source report factually and back up claims with well sourced evidence.
3. Story Choices: Does the source report news from both sides or do they only publish one side.
4. Political Affiliation: How strongly does the source endorse a particular political ideology? In other words how extreme are their views. (This can be rather subjective)

Likely Van Zandt regards only the fourth category as subjective. All four are subjective unless Van Zandt has kept secret additional criteria he uses to judge bias. Think about it. Take the "biased wording" category, for example. Rate the headline bias for "PolitiFact Bias" on a scale of 0-10. Do it. What objective criteria guided the decision?

There is nothing to go on except for one's own subjective notion of where any observed bias falls on the 0-10 scale.

If the scale was worth something, researchers could put the rating system in the hands of any reasonable person and obtain comparable results. Systems with robust objective markers attached to each level of the scale can achieve that. Those lacking such markers will not.

Based on our experience with PolitiFact, we used Van Zandt's system on PolitiFact. Please remember that our experience will not render Van Zandt's system anything other than subjective.

Biased Wording/Headlines: 4
Factual/Sourcing: 3
Story Choices: 4
Political Affiliation: 3

Total=14
Formula calls for division by 4.
14/4=3.5
3.5=Left Center Bias

Why is Van Zandt's rating objectively more valid than ours? Or yours?

...


The temptation of subjective rating scales is obvious, but such scales misinform readers and probably tend to mislead their creators as well.

A rating scale that fails to base its ratings on quantifiable data is worthless. Van Zandt's ratings are worthless except to tell you his opinion.

https://www.politifactbias.com/2017/...check.html?m=1

© Copyright Original Source

Source: Scam site “Media Bias Fact Check” caught cribbing its ratings from Wikipedia

The “Media Bias Fact Check” scam is built around the premise of convincing gullible internet users that various respected news outlets are compromised because they’re “biased” in way or another. This allows its victims to believe they know something that others don’t know, and causes them to comment with links to these phony ratings in reply to articles posted from the news outlets in question. But the Media Bias Fact Check ratings often read like a fifth grader’s unfinished homework assignment or worse.

https://www.palmerreport.com/politic...ikipedia/2342/

© Copyright Original Source

[carpedm9587]

One of the ways Feinstein mocked these people was to say that the 16 year old girl she was talking to couldn't have voted for her. She particularly doesn't care about them because she'll be dead from old age before they can vote for her. As I explained with regard to why Oregon is right to lower the voting age to 16, politicians strongly respond to incentives, and *who* their voters are is a big incentive. Feinstein is showing precisely that response here: Her view is that they are not her voters and hence she could hardly care less about them. If there were no lower age limit on voting and a politically interested 12 year old could vote if they wanted, she would not be so contemptuous of and dismissive towards these kids.

Probably. Or maybe she's just showing her "grouchy granny" proclivities.

[carpedm9587]

CNN is far left?

Yeah. They've slid about as far left as Fox has slipped right. They've basically adopted the Fox model but on the liberal side. MSNBC is doing pretty much the same. I've been noting it over time, and my observation is confirmed by the changes in their rankings at both allsides.com and mediabiasfactcheck.com. I tend to use those sites to sanity-check my observations, and to assess a source (usually after I've read the relevant article).

The trouble with this story as a media yard-stick is there are multiple corporate biases operating. There is the anti-Progressive bias, where the millionaires paid by billionaires on corporate media loathe anything that is progressive or would upset their nice fat paychecks. There is the pro-establishment bias, where the anchors and media owners love hob-nobbing at their cocktail parties with the elites and love to be able to name-drop and say things "oh, I was chatting with Dianne Feinstein the other day, and she said to me...", and equally their network policy is to appease politicians currently in power so as to be able to get interviews and leaks in future from those politicians. Then there is the anti-Climate-Change bias from the right-wing end of the media spectrum. And the anti-Democrat bias from the right-wing. Some of these tendencies interact - for example left wing sources are more likely to care about Climate Change in the first place, but MSM sources are going to want to be nice to Feinstein.

But let's group the headlines:

Children Confront Senator Dianne Feinstein over Green New Deal
Kids Confront Sen. Dianne Feinstein Over Green New Deal
Dianne Feinstein rebuffs young climate activists' calls for Green New Deal

These are similar, with the first 2 very similar which could both be read as implying no hostile response - children walking up to Feinstein with a poster and being warmly embraced by her could generate those headlines. It's how Feinstein's own PR people would want to write up the negative exchange - so as to hide her negativity. So I'd want to assign this to a MSM outlet desperate to suck up to the powerful. Candidates would thus be, CNN, MSNBC, NYT, or possibly CBS which I'm not personally very familiar with.

The 3rd is slightly more informative as it implies a negative response from Feinstein, but it's still worded pretty mealy mouthed. Probably also from one of the above outlets.

And, on reflection, I'm tempted to include "Grilled by children, Feinstein tries to teach lesson in politics" in with the above 3. It looks like it might have the perspective of "Knowledgeable Feinstein schools ignorant children who foolishly refuse to listen to her wisdom" which is the disgustingly condescending we-the-establishment-know-best perspective. So probably one of the above listed outlets again.

Dianne Feinstein scolds kids who pushed her to back Green New Deal: 'I know what I'm doing'
I know what I’m doing’: Sen. Feinstein argues with kids on climate bill

These are similar and indicate a certain level of antipathy toward Feinstein on the part of the media outlet. Nothing in the headline implies the outlet is anti the Green New Deal. So here we are probably looking at more progressive outlets, which are supportive of the Green New Deal, and skeptical of Feinstein's lack of progressivism and her pro-establishment stances. From your list, that means it's USA Today and the Guardian, with an outside chance of being MSNBC. Again, I don't know CBS well so this could be them I guess.

Feinstein Lectures Children Who Want Green New Deal, Portraying it as Untenable
Watch Feinstein's tense exchange with children over climate

The first is anti-Feinstein, and possibly anti the Green New Deal (or possibly pro the Green New Deal, and even more anti-Feinstein by portraying her opposition to it). The second is just anti-Feinstein. So Fox News is an obvious candidate for either of these two, probably the first one. The other must be a progressive outlet, so USA Today or the Guardian probably.

What do I win?
Interesting exercise. I've never done anything like it before.

I thought of it when I saw the list of headlines and realized I was having a reaction to them that aligned to their source. So I wrote down the various headlines and asked my very liberal wife to pick out the Fox News headline. She couldn't. Neither could four of my other liberal friends or three of my right-leaning friends (including my VERY far right sister and her husband - far right enough to actually admire Sarah Palin and think of her as a viable candidate for president). That made me think to post it here. Of course, there is no controlling who does and does not actually look up the titles, so here it is an "on your honor" exercise.

But it told me a little bit about my own implicit bias. I need to find a way to counter that effect, but I have no clue how.

[carpedm9587]

I would be interested in the results. However, I don't believe the headlines mean very much in terms of bias. I'd be more curious to see an analysis done on the articles themselves(though I know that'd be asking a lot): which sources emphasize which parts of the story, how they're worded, who they chose to interview, etc. There was a while ago I did this myself on a story that was rather insignificant, and the disparity was incredible. Not always between one source and the next(many of them were copied word-for-word), but taking the most extreme endpoints, you get an entirely different impression of what happened. There is a bias in media, but the problem is not which political position is more prominent. It's that we can choose which facts we follow, and that those facts may not necessarily line up with reality.

Headlines are interesting to me because they are the first message the reader sees - and many reader's don't go very far past the headline. As a result, a reader can get a very polarized view of the world by simply "scanning the headlines" of one media outlet or another. Scan the titles at Brietbart or Mother Jones if you want an object lesson on skewed headlining.

[carpedm9587]

Carpe, on the subject of media bias, here is a chart I think is worth talking about that I found the other day when I was looking for the link to the interview/book for you with that Harvard professor on media bias.

This chart is by the MediaBiasFactCheck people, and is a 2018 version (they have a slightly newer version but IMO it's not as clear in its groupings and a bit more confusing, so I'm going to use this one, which is the one I first came across):



Firstly, consider that bottom red rectangle containing the garbage and fake news outlets. I'll note that despite being a liberal I have never ever heard of, seen, or ever seen anyone link to anything in that bottom-left-hand corner. Those sites are so obscure and so unfrequented that I have to think the person who compiled the image was really, really, going out of their way to try and find some sort of fake news sites on the left, no matter how obscure and unvisited. Whereas the bottom right-hand corner of garbage sites is linked to regularly by people on this website, and those sites and sources command a large audience in general. That points immediately to quite a significant asymmetry between left and right - despite the picture creator's best efforts to paint the left and right wing as both having garbage sources that sit in that bottom red rectangle, in actual fact the left really doesn't make use of garbage sources whereas the right makes very heavy use of garbage sources and sites.

A second thing that caught my interest was the row that says "complex analysis" and to a lesser extent "analysis". I think this is actually the most important type of news outlet. It's all very well to be able to report an event "Today X did Y", but unless you have some wider explanation within which to understand the event occurring the event itself can be relatively meaningless. So what you want are really informed writers who are about to talk about the history of X and Y, and about whether the event implies Z, and how the event was influenced by A, B, and C, and explain that what next needs to happen is question D needs answering etc. This is especially true in the age of modern politics when a purely factual news outlet will report "Republicans said X, Democrats said Y" and then move onto the next topic... which is depressingly like a football game in which the commentator says "Team A said they won, Team B said they won, who can really know what the score is?" The whole point of the sports-commentator / news-reporter's job is to tell you what the objective facts actually are, and explain how they are relevant to the situation, quite aside from what each side says. But when you look at that chart's "complex analysis" category, the left and the right wing are not remotely equal. The left hand side is jam-packed with popular and well-known outlets so clearly people on the left are really really interested in subscribing to, buying, and reading, complex high quality analysis. Whereas on the right hand side of that category, the tumbleweeds are basically rolling. There's the Weekly Standard which closed down last year due to lack of readership, and the National Enquirer which is basically a vanity publication with few actual readers. On the edges of that category are the Fiscal Times and Reason.com neither of which I have ever heard of despite being an avid consumer of a huge variety of news resources so both must be pretty tiny. And that's pretty much it. So the right has almost no media sources which actually do serious analysis and which are actually popular. Instead the right loves their absolute garbage outlets that are in the bottom righthand corner of the diagram. The average left-wing reader is opting for "complex analysis" sites when they're not reading the "fact reporting" category of the top-middle while the average right-wing reader is opting for "contains inacccurate/fabricated info, damaging to public discourse" sites.

Interesting chart and analysis. A great deal aligns with my experience. I would have placed CNN further left on the chart, based on my reading and viewing.

The other thing I have to wonder about this chart is the degree to which it conflates "talk programs" with "news programs." I realize the line between them has significantly eroded, but I don't think of Hannity and Maddow as news programming. When it comes to just the news programs themselves, it seems to me that Fox, NPR, and CNN are of a kind. I say that because I get most of my news by downloading the news podcasts of various outlets (NPR, Fox, ABC, VPR, NYT, CBS). I note that their news stories are almost identical, tend to cover the same issues with the same general message. But when you shift to the talk programs, they skew solidly right and left. I listen to 538 politics (middle), Left Right and Center (spans), Ken Rudin (left), On Point (left), Brookings (mid-left), Maddow (left), This Morning (right), and Potomac Watch (right), The Federalist (right), and Conservative Conscience (right) and they most definitely skew consistently with the chart above.

I have to admit that I eschew the most vitriolic voices from the right (Hannity, Coulter, Beck, Limbaugh, Ingraham, etc.), and I frankly don't know any such voices from the left, but I would eschew those as well.

[carpedm9587]

Soooo, how close or far off was I?

I want others to be able to do the challenge, so you'll have to check for yourself. Just put the title in your search engine.

[Mountain Man]

Funny that they put the Drudge Report on the far right since it is a news aggregation website that utilizes sources from all sides of the political spectrum including MSNBC, Rolling Stone, Daily Kos, New Republic and Mother Jones to name a few. The only actual study that I can find of the site^[1], one conducted by George Mason University a little over a decade ago actually placed them "slightly left of center" while groups like AllSides describe them as leaning right (which means slightly right of center).







1. Pew Research did a study that placed them on the far right but this was not based on content but rather on their audience

As I noted in post #20 Media Bias/Fact Check -- or as I like to call them, Biased Media Fact Check -- has its own bias problem. The rankings are nothing more than someone's wholly subjective opinion being passed off as objective analysis, but liberals love because it aligns with their point of view.

[rogue06]

I want others to be able to do the challenge, so you'll have to check for yourself. Just put the title in your search engine.

You coulda just said I got x number right/wrong without saying which ones

[carpedm9587]

As I noted in post #20 Media Bias/Fact Check -- or as I like to call them, Biased Media Fact Check -- has its own bias problem. The rankings are nothing more than someone's wholly subjective opinion being passed off as objective analysis, but liberals love because it aligns with their point of view.

The mediabiasfactcheck methodology is published for folks to examine. They have had a couple glitches which, AFAICT, they addressed. Mostly it is the right complaining about them - but their assessments generally align with allsides.com, which also publishes their methodology.

No site is going to be perfect, and I can understand why so many on the right will want to impugn them vociferously. After all, if you cling to Brietbart for news, any site that lists Brietbart as badly skewed and untrustworthy MUST be bad, right?

[carpedm9587]

You coulda just said I got x number right/wrong without saying which ones

I didn't make a record of which goes with which, because I never intended to provide "the answer." I just knew which one was Fox and which CNN, because of my initial exposure. The rest I just quickly cut/paste the title and added it randomly into the list, and cut and paste the source and added it randomly into THAT list.

So to answer you, I'd have to do the google search myself. I figure folks can self-check if they are interested.

[Mountain Man]

The mediabiasfactcheck methodology is published for folks to examine.

And that's precisely why we know it's worthless. I guarantee that you and I could apply their methodology to a dozen news articles and arrive at completely different conclusions. That's because it's entirely subjective.

"If the scale was worth something, researchers could put the rating system in the hands of any reasonable person and obtain comparable results. Systems with robust objective markers attached to each level of the scale can achieve that. Those lacking such markers will not."

https://www.politifactbias.com/2017/...check.html?m=1