The Myth of the Mainstream Media Bias

One of the prevailing myths on the political right these days is the liberal Mainstream Media (MSM).  That is the notion that most mass media disproportionately represent a liberal viewpoint.  The further one goes right from the centre, the more fervently this belief is held.

This idea is not peculiar to the right-wing.  There's examples of similar accusations of systemic media bias from the left too; the idea that the media represent corporate or political interests.  But most of the noise, at least right now, is coming from the political right.

As President of the (then infamous) University of British Columbia Engineers student body back in the mid-fourteenth century, I had some regrettable dealings with UBC's student newspaper, the Ubyssey.  I don't think I've ever run into a pack of misanthropic leftists since.  The student Engineers--brash, male-dominated, headed for prosperous careers building weapons and destroying the environment-- represented everything to be loathed by those folks, I suppose.  Not that the Engineers of UBC were angels; I and we did plenty to deserve some (but not all) of the bad press we got.  The gentle reporters at the Ubyssey may have espoused grand egalitarian ideas, but on a personal level they were just mean.  They would spend their evenings redacting the "Engineers" jacket logo from old university file photos.  Their explanation was they wanted everyone to look "representative"; the same.   Meanwhile they've got rings through their noses and their hair dyed pink.  I think the irony was lost on them.

Here's an old newspaper picture of me, as President of the UBC Enigneers,
returning the Rose Bowl we allegedly borrowed from the '92-93 Washington Hsukies.

Anyways, all that to say, if anyone should be predisposed to the idea of a liberal media, it would be me after that experience.  But I'm not convinced.

If the MSM are liberal, then why is FOX news the top-rated cable news network in the US?   Why do right-wing pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Charles Adler rule the radio ratings?   Why did virtually every major newspaper in Canada endorse the Conservatives in the last election?  It's not obvious to me that the MSM are liberal, though I'm a liberal myself, so I may not be seeing things with an unjaundiced eye.

So, I do what all good science-types do.  I went out to examine any academic studies on the subject.  Turns out there's loads. 

The one most often cited by proponents of the "liberal MSM" is a 1986 book called The Media Elite in which the authors--political science academics-- surveyed journalists and found that they tended to be more liberal, on average, than the general population.  I'm not surprised by that, actually.  I imagine a similar study conducted for, say, bank managers would find that they tend to be more fiscally conservative than the general population.  Engineers, also, are apparently given to have more conservative viewpoints.  Or so I've been told.

Let's assume that the study in The Media Elite was conducted impartially. So, even accepting that journalists tend to be liberal, does it necessarily follow that the MSM will necessarily be biased left?  I think that's speculation.  After all,   journalists don't decide what goes in a newspaper or on the air.  The owner ultimately gets to  decide that.  And media magnates like Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black don't strike me as the most liberal guys. 

It's also worth noting that the book was written before the advent of the internet, the blogosphere and cable news outlets such as CNN and FOX.  Viewers now have coverage of news 24/7 and access to thousands upon thousands of news sources from which to choose, each applying its own angle.  Consequently, I would argue, the line between news and opinion has become more blurred than ever.  And scandals by various "respectable" news outlet mean that not even the staid old giants such as the national newspapers have the appeal to authority that they used to.

The right-wing is not alone in their accusations of bias.  Noam Chomsky, in his highly cited work, Manufacturing Consent, established and tested his theory of a the Propaganda Model and concluded that the media were essentially acting as an arm of established political and economic (e.g. advertising) interests.   He measures "column inches" of coverage of various issues and finds that "deserving victims" (those portrayed as victims by the US government, such as people in Communist regimes) got more press than "undeserving victims" (such as victims of US-supported right-wing dictators in South America).  I read that book but I never found his argument that convincing.  While reading his book, I could think of several counter-examples to his model.

Chomsky's book had the same fatal flaw I find with just about every study I've seen on media impartiality.  When these studies are conducted by those with a conservative ethos, they see the media as having a liberal slant, and vice versa.  It's just another form of advocacy science that is slowly subsuming science and the quaint idea of intellectual honesty and objectivity these days.

One problem I noted is that the studies almost always concern contemporary US politics . There is no historical or geopolitical context.  Is the media biased in other countries?  Has the US media always been biased liberal?  What about government-owned news outlets such as the CBC in Canada?  Or the Xinhua news agency in China?  Is the Chinese media liberal?  Does the term "liberal" even make any sense in that context?  To me this lack of any context is an indication that most of these so-called scholarly inquiries are political in nature

Another problem with almost all most of the studies is that --surprise, surprise--that so-called scholarly inquiries into media bias tended to confirm preconceived biases of those undertaking the study.  Studies by conservative think tanks concluded that the MSM were liberal, and studies by liberal think tanks found the news slanted to the right.   

Yes, we're introducing an old nemesis of this blog: advocacy science.  And the fundamental theorem of advocacy science:  Torture the data long enough and it will confess to anything.   (No that's not my line, but I wish it were!) 

I also checked Wikipedia, more for a laugh than anything.  Sure enough, their article on media bias is quite a hodgepodge, and a visit over the "talk" page for the article shows why.  It's full of people decrying the article in particular and Wikipedia in general as having a liberal or conservative bias.

And let's say that a Perfectly Objective Observer managed to conduct a Perfectly Objective study that determined irrefutably that, yes indeed, the MSM were liberal, or that the MSM were conservative.  What then?  Pass a law?  You do not want to go there.  Shame them?  If the media had a conscience there wouldn't be paparazzi.  Or start your own media enterprise--which is exactly what has happened with the blogosphere.

The fact is that if you are right-wing you will see a Perfectly Objective news item (if there were such a thing) as slanted left.  The further right you are, the more slanted it will seem.  If you fail to account for the fact that you are a biased viewer, if you assume that you are a Perfectly Objective Observer, then you will likely draw a false conclusion.  It's the Theory of Relativity applied to politics.

There's a political motivation as well.  Complain about a liberal bias, or a conservative bias, loud and long enough and maybe people will start to believe you, and maybe you can create the perception of bias even where none exists.   Maybe, if you can get enough followers or if you can get folks like Sarah Palin to run with the baton, you can even get media outlets to consciously swing their news to your political viewpoint, to counter the perception of bias.  So part of the "liberal MSM" movement is probably aimed at trying to move the "centre" towards the right.

Newspapers and networks are highly competitive enterprises.  Taking political viewpoints as a typical bell curve, the most profit is to be made by appealing to the centre. You can create niche markets to the left and right of centre, but that gets more difficult as you approach the fringes.  People who own media companies are interested in making lots of money--no surprise there.  You don't make lots of money by appealing to the fringes of the bell curve. You make lots of money by printing a paper that appeals to preconceived beliefs.  A buxom beauty on Page 3 doesn't hurt either.

And the White House Burned Burned Burned (But the Americans Won't Admit It)

Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject, so you know you are getting the best possible information.

   -- Michael Scott, The Office

Canada is celebrating the bicentennial of the War of 1812 this year. All year.  In 1812, the United States declared war on Britain for various stated reasons, none of which included conquering Canada.  Then they promptly tried to conquer Canada (or what was then known as Upper and Lower Canada, to be specific).  The British forces, allied Indian tribes and Canadian militia repelled several attacks by the US. Ten American armies invaded Canada.  Ten armies were sent home.

Read all about it on Wikipedia.  The article itself insists that the war was a tie or that all sides (except the Indians) won. It’s quite a little rah-rah piece if you’re an American, waxing poetic about great feats of the nascent American navy against those nasty British.  The idea that the US would invade Canada for reasons as base as US expansionism is dismissed.  Americans?  Expand?  Fie!  The Americans had no interest in Canada at all, and were quite surprised to find themselves there!  Sure Thomas Jefferson said that conquerig Canada was a mere matter of marching--but he was talking about a game of Risk.  And I'm sure that if one of the reasons the US declared war was to snatch Canada while Britain was busy with Napolean, then the politicians at the time would have said so.

The Talk page that accompanies every Wikipedia article forbids any more discussion about who won the war.  Not that that stops anyone; it's practically the only topic of conversation, and even when not being discussed directly is not far below the surface influencing everything.  Mostly filled with outraged blustering Canadians and gormless Americans shocked--shocked--that anyone would accuse them of bias.

One outraged commentator insists that Wikipedia “is not a popularity contest.”  Really?  I beg to differ.  That is exactly what Wikipedia is.  It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but the first step to recovery is acceptance. Acceptance that, yes,  Wikipedia is a popularity contest.  Anyone (in principle) can change an article, so it stands to reason that, given equal zeal, the side with the greater numbers will eventually see the article they want to see. 

And just about every wiki commentator swears up and down that he is not biased, and is just taking time out of his busy day as a Perfectly Objective Observer to correct bias he sees.  Hogswash and Codswallop!  We’re all biased.  I’m biased.  Do you think, if I were a Nepalese Buddhist monk, I’d be cruising the “Talk” page of the War of 1812 Wikipedia entry?  I wouldn't be getting snippy right now if my (biased) Canadian nationalist sensibilities were not offended. The very fact that I am reading the piece at all means that I have some interest in the subject.  


Yes, we’re all biased.  But that's not the problem. The problem is when we refuse to admit as much.

Wikipedia is a great place to learn about a Taylor series expansion or what a pancreas does.  But head on over to controversial social, cultural or political topics and there's a roiling thunderstorm underneath that clean Wikipedia front, a subterranean world populated by folks with sensitivities as delicate as a desert orchid, and the zeal of a Jehovah Witness on speed.

And so, behind the scenes a the War of 1812 page, the arguments go on and on and on and on.  And this is some relatively obscure war from 200 years ago.  You should see the pages regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict.  Those articles are clenched up tighter than Rick Santorum’s buttcheeks at a Gay Parade, and it’s a real bunfight over in  the Talk pages.

But you have to remember that this is the Era of the Internet; we live in a post-objective world and Rule 1 in the Post-Objective World is:

Not  a bad definition really.  I don’t think philosophers have managed all that much better as far as a workable definition of truth goes.  After all, we say that a  psychotic is suffering “delusions” based solely on the fact that he is experiencing a reality that is not shared by the consensus.  Conversely, if nine out of ten people tell you that Fiddy Cent is flying around in a pink tutu and fairy wings, then the truth is that Fiddy Cent is flying around in a pink tutu and fairy wings. And the War of 1812 was a tie.

I've submitted an edit to the War of 1812 page (it, like most popular Wikipedia pages is locked, and you have to submit to some anonymous person somewhere to make a change) mentioning the results of a recent poll (where Canadians rate victory in the War of 1812 second only to universal health care as defining their national identity), and also pointing out that Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie released a popular song in Canada called "The White House Burned (The War of 1812)" that pokes fun at Amercian sensitivity on the outcome of the war.  We'll fly that one up the flagpole and see who salutes, so to speak.

I’ll let you know how it goes:

Here’s the refrain the song:

And the white house burned, burned, burned.

But the Americans won't admit it,

It burned, burned, burned.

While the president ran and cried,

It burned, burned, burned.

And things were very historical,

And the Americans ran and cried like a bunch of little babies (Wah-Wah-Wah)

In the war of 1812.

Anyways just in case you thought Wikipedia was bad, check out Cracked.com Terrifying Bastardizations of the Wikipedia Model  just for lulz.


Edit:  For clarification, I'm not suggesting that Canadians (or Upper Canada militia) burned Washington.  My understanding is that the British Navy burned Washington, and there were probably as many Upper Canada militiamen involved as there were impressed American seamen, i.e. not many.  I'm sure Three Dead Trolls knows this too.

Is a fact, in fact, a fact?

I'm very interested in the climate change debate, not just as an environmental scientist, but also because of my abiding fascination with epistemology.  Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with knowledge:  how do we know what we know; or how we know what we think we know; or how we think we know what we know.  You get the drift.

Nothing characterizes the debate over environmental issues more than the accusations that the other side is ignoring science.  Today for example, I typed "ignores science" into Google:

• Arkansas legislature ignores science, mandates toxic fluoridation for entire state
• Government's badger-culling plan "ignores science"
• DeGette Embryonic Stem Cell Research Bill Ignores Science

In the climate change arena, you have on one side the combined weight of virtually every scientist conducting research in a relevant field stating with a high degree of probability that global warming will likely be quite nasty for future generations.  And you have on the other side a collective "Pshaw!"  What is fascinating to me is the enormous success the Pshaw! side is having.  They have basically managed the climate change file off the top ten list of government policy.

People agitating to do something about climate change are somewhere between puzzled and livid.  They double-down:  "Very well then, we'll do even more research, and present them with even more facts, with even more certainty. That'll learn 'em!"  But, of course it doesn't.

This is because facts are vastly overrated.  It's one of our enduring illusions that we, humans, are rational beings. 

Look at addicts--their worlds can be collapsing around them, but they will all steadfastly maintain that their addiction is not a factor.  We view this behavior as pathological, but all of us, I think, in our minds, build these elaborate labyrinths of mirrors and glass so that we simply don't see what we don’t want to see.  We're all, untimately, prisoners of our own biases.

René des Cartes, the founder of modern philosophy, sought to unshackle himself from those bonds of bias.  His primary motivation for his seminal work Meditations on First Philosophy was to find a single,  irrefutable fact.  His epiphany, perhaps the most famous one-liner in philosophy, was Cogito, ergo sum.  I think therefore I am.  But of course, people refuted it.

Even the word itself--fact--is suspicious. What is the difference between "I am in Kabul" and "It is a fact that I am in Kabul"?  They both say the same thing; the second just emphasizes the point by appealing to truth, to the set of Things That Are Real.  Therefore, preceding a statement with "It is a fact that..." is not a logical argument, but a rhetorical one.  I don't go around saying "It is a fact that my name is Adam" because I don't need  to persuade people to believe it.  "I am Adam" suffices.

And there are virtually an infinite number of facts from which to choose, so the selection of even perfectly "objective" facts (if there were such an animal) itself becomes subjective.  Even if it's the same fact.  For instance one person says that 99% of all UFO reports are proven false, and another says that 1% of UFO sightings cannot be explained. 

Science actually has a way around this. Scientists tend to use the term "observation" instead of fact.  Instead of "It is a fact that it is raining" they say "I observe that it is raining."  So they move out of the "objective reality" of a fact to the "subjective perception" of the observer.

So hammering the so-called deniers over the head with facts is ultimately futile, in our post-objective world.  The main reason the skeptics deny climate change is because it challenges values.  And facts may be transient, but beliefs and values are not.  They are bedrock, baby. 

The deniers are almost exclusively on the political right--that's telling right there.  What the so-called deniers are denying is not climate change itself but the implied policy remedies to climate change--one-world government; international regulation of capital; centrally planned wealth distribution; unrepresentative technocracy.  These things are all more threatening to many than some potential nastiness with the weather fifty years down the road.

If you want to get somewhere, start the discussion with values, not facts. And state the way you see things as observations instead of facts.   But I grow weary.  More of this another day.

Global Warming is Real and it's Happening. Probably.

There is no such uncertainty as a sure thing.

    -- Robbie Burns (attrib.)

People who are interested in global warming—a subset which comprises about 0.0625% of the population—have asked me what I think about it, given that I'm an environmental scientist and all.

I have delved into the subject over the years, through arguing with friends about it on political chat forums on the internet (Canadaka, great site).  Yes, that's right, I'm one of these people:

Wit courtesy of xkcd.com

So here it is, folks.  I'm only going to post this once, so pay attention:

Global Warming is real and it's happening.  Probably.

When I say probably, I'm talking about a probability above 95% that human-induced (i.e. anthropogenic—those scientists just have to have a fancy name for everything, don't they?) emissions of carbon dioxide are causing measurable changes to the planetary climate and will likely cause significant damage down the road at the rate we're going.

But of course, everyone knows that already.  Even the great majority scientists that are trotted out as "skeptics" readily admit this, although their probably is a lot less probably than my probably.  The so-called "deniers"—the ones that dismiss any anthropogenic influence at all—tend not be scientists, and are more concerned about the perceived policy implications of global warming (wealth distribution, "one-world government," fettering of capital, etc.) than global warming itself.

And I'm pretty sure, as a planet, we'll pretty much sit around with our thumbs up our butts until the whole thing starts to be, in the inimitable words of the Brits, a "damn nuisance."  But we'll save that discussion for another day.

But, Adam, isn’t it certain?  What about the overwhelming consensus. The evidence before our eyes right now. 

Well, there is a boatload of evidence for sure, but science isn't about certainty, it's about uncertainty.  Certainty is a tenet of faith.  Faith is when you're certain of something despite any evidence to the contrary.  Faith is utterly unassailable by reasons, facts and science. It's a wonderful thing that way. 

So, despite the overwhelming evidence in support of AGW, as a good scientist I have to allow for the possibility that we're all just wrong about some of this.

That was all well and good before anthropogenic global warming (AGW) became a political debate.  Politicians don't like uncertainty.  The pulpit-pounding pontificators on cable news exploited this uncertainty thing:  "Well the scientists aren't even sure about this, but we are." Fervent belief is not a valid argument in a scientific paper, but it sure as hell plays in Peoria.  The AGW proponents started to lose ground.

Scientists who were—rightly—concerned that folks were ignoring a critically important issue fought back.  They became communicators themselves, and stopped with the uncertainty and other wishy-washy language. The communication of the message became even more important than the science supporting the message.

And they got caught.  Sophomoric errors found in peer-reviewed papers.  Exaggeration of conclusions.  Personal attacks against prominent scientists skeptical of AGW theory.  Alleged attempts to stop "skeptical" papers from appearing in the more prestigious journals.  Data manipulation to try to show results in a way to maximize communication impact, as opposed to maximize scientific illumination (the infamous "Hide the Decline" episode).

The damage to science has been, in my opinion, significant.  Science, in this hyperpartisan era, has lost its appeal to objectivity in this important debate.   The screaming on both sides makes it difficult to discern the sound of reason.

Or maybe I'm just being naïve.  Maybe we live now in a post-objective world and the whole notion impartiality is just quaint these days.  That feels right. I'll explore that idea some more.