Presented November 28, 2018
Hmielowski, J. D., Feldman, L., Myers, T. A., Leiserowitz, A., & Maibach, E. (2013). An attack on science? Media use, trust in scientists, and perceptions of global warming. Public Understanding of Science, 23(7), 866-883. doi:10.1177/0963662513480091
Access this article on our blog's shared folder: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1szn1X4bLu2t7fel9lYvkSgP0XgB4-VAL
Abstract:
In his 1863/64 essay 'Concerning Spiritualism and Materialism', Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach declared "Der Mensch ist, was er ißt." Literally translated, "man is what he eats".
The reviewed journal and this blog post explores the impact that consumed media has on it's audience. The impact is specifically focused on the different realms of belief in scientists and climate change denial. The effects of conservative news media compared to liberal news media on their respective audiences is almost universally accepted as existent, yet that impact is difficult to wholly capture using conventional scientific methods and statistical analyses.
This post not only reviews and responds to Dr. Hmielowski and his team's article, but explores other approaches by other outlets who all arrive at the same conclusion - that today's deepening media rift is spiraling in unison with an underlying societal rift.
It has been well known that media outlets in the USA cater
their delivery of the news to their respective audiences, particularly with
right-wing news outlets such as Fox and lesser-known Breitbart ‘catering to
their base’. This culture which used to
be limited to ‘slanting’ a story one way or another has in recent years been enabled
to greatly distort news, or even fabricate stories completely in an effort to
shape their narrative.
Both the left and the right will stand beside their news
outlet of choice, and will often point fingers at the opposite end of the
spectrum for spreading mistruths, or in the words of the current American President,
“Fake News”. Luckily, in today’s age of
media, anything that is said on-air is scrutinized on the internet and generally,
those peddling mistruths are discredited.
At very least, the evidence of the falsities are enshrined for future
dissection, a monumental project that several outlets have attempted to
categorize.
Pulitzer Prize winning Politifact (politifact.com) is one
such organization which has dissected significant statements made by various
personalities, various networks on various subjects and scrutinized them
against known fact on their aptly-named punditfact.com, with levels of
mis-truth gauged between “True” and one step below “False” being “Pants on Fire”.
So what’s the latest tally? (As of November 25, 2018):
Figure 1: Bar graph depicting the percentage of statements from separate outlets divided into varying levels of truthfulness, as of November 25, 2018.
With these mistruths being peddled largely by Fox News and
Right-Wing sources, it stands to serve that these distortions would trickle down
to their consumers, a trend which has been investigated by Dr. Hmielowski and
his team.
Using a scoring system to provide adequate scoring to liberal/conservative
leanings and beliefs along with control variables to prevent contamination of
data, the article lays out in a quantitative fashion what many people already
believe: that consuming leaning media leads you to be leaned yourself; You are
what you eat.
Other articles on this blog delve into the topic from other
directions using other sources, and we encourage readers to browse them. We do not intend to discourage a person from
consuming the media of their choice, but we refuse to shy away and avoid
calling blatant lies exactly what they are, which is the one point that the original
article stopped short of doing.
We feel it important, however, to point out that as the current President
appears to be an avid follower and contributor of Fox News and has shaped
policy based on the musings of on-air personalities, the danger of choosing a
network whose content rates nearly 80% as “Half True” or less.
The paper itself does conclude perfectly. We cannot improve on it’s conclusion and
therefore feel the need to repeat it once more:
“Finally, this research highlights the consequences of
the contemporary American media landscape. The increasing fragmentation of
audiences across diverse media outlets likely inhibits consensus-building and
compromise on important issues, as exemplified by our findings regarding the global
warming beliefs of conservative and non-conservative media audiences in the
USA.
Moreover, the gravitation of conservatives and
Republicans to conservative media outlets and liberals and Democrats to
non-conservative outlets (e.g. Stroud, 2011) could help explain the widening
partisan divisions in public opinion about global warming and trust in
scientists. This political polarization is contributing to national climate
change policy paralysis in the USA, and it is becoming clear that the news
media itself plays an important role in this process.”
Both the climate change caused by humans, as well as the danger of both decision makers and the public leaving their heads in the sands directly revolves around --Big Idea #9 - Humans Significantly Alter the Earth--.
As a group, we found the paper very intriguing and thought provoking, as it stimulated different potential prospect regarding media and its influence on its consumers. More valuable than simply stating our opinion, the
journal article dug deeper than simply admitting to a single belief. Its
influence is to determine other articles, sources, and outlets that have
approached the problem in different ways and have yet come to the same or
similar conclusion. The article looked at canvasing the people and was
structured into accounting one’s views and beliefs based on what they have consumed.
For instance, the pudding article goes and investigates
the differences in the media looked word by word in the media… we are sure that
there are other opinions out there
Conclusion
In summary, the hypotheses proposed by the researchers
in the article provided insight into the eventual model they developed to
predict potential media consumption patterns directed at their population
sample. This model deemed the evidence collected and analyzed in the study significantly
adequate. There was strong correlation between media use and the trust in
scientists, when determining the level of global warming belief, when independent
variables are implemented.
Further research in this field, or related fields, may be capable of igniting potential future studies in common areas that can help potential determine where unlawful media bias may be occurring. Such a study begs the question, “Are there other potential areas of media that are directing their informative bias to increase viewership, while sacrificing transparency?”.
Further research in this field, or related fields, may be capable of igniting potential future studies in common areas that can help potential determine where unlawful media bias may be occurring. Such a study begs the question, “Are there other potential areas of media that are directing their informative bias to increase viewership, while sacrificing transparency?”.
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