Polarizing the Media?

Guests of CBC's Anna Maria Tremonti explain how political affiliations -often outed by media source- have strained relationships and friendships in America.

Harvard Researchers Investigate Media Bias

Harvard Research, along with cloud computing, places every media outlet across the left-right political landscape.

How do different outlets recant stories proven false?

Third-party investigative journalist reviews the differences in how CNN and FOX deal with 'Fake News'.

Local TV bought out, then sells out via Sinclair Media

Formerly innocent, unbiased local TV becoming increasingly partisan after conglomerate takeover.

Links of Interest

Inside are links to pages which greatly help reinforce the issues raised and hypotheses tested in the journal article.

Tuesday 27 November 2018

ESCI1012: Term Project Presentations “Big Ideas in Earth Science”

Group 67: Dan, Jaron, and Justin

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?”.





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Tuesday 13 November 2018

Sinclair Broadcast Group Trumps Local TV


In 2017, CNN’s Brian Stelter broke the news that Sinclair Broadcast Group, owner or operator of nearly 200 television stations in the U.S., would be forcing its news anchors to record a promo about “the troubling trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories plaguing our country.” The script, which parrots Donald Trump’s oft-declarations of developments negative to his presidency as “fake news,” brought upheaval to newsrooms already dismayed with Sinclair’s consistent interference to bring right-wing propaganda to local television broadcasts.
You might remember Sinclair from its having been featured on John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight last year, or from its requiring in 2004 of affiliates to air anti-John Kerry propaganda, or perhaps because it’s your own local affiliate running inflammatory “Terrorism Alerts” or required editorials from former Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn, he of the famed Holocaust Remembrance Day statement that failed to mention Jewish people. (Sinclair also owns Ring of Honor wrestling, Tennis magazine, and the Tennis Channel.)
The net result of the company’s current mandate is dozens upon dozens of local news anchors looking like hostages in proof-of-life videos, trying their hardest to spit out words attacking the industry they’d chosen as a life vocation.
Not that any of it matters to Sinclair, which, with the help of a friendly federal government, is about to swallow up another 40 television stations—increasing its reach and its lead over competitors like Hearst and Scripps. The script, as transcribed by ThinkProgress based on the KOMO (Seattle) version, reads:
Hi, I’m(A) ____________, and I’m (B) _________________…
(B) Our greatest responsibility is to serve our Northwest communities. We are extremely proud of the quality, balanced journalism that KOMO News produces.
(A) But we’re concerned about the troubling trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories plaguing our country. The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media.
(B) More alarming, some media outlets publish these same fake stories… stories that just aren’t true, without checking facts first.
(A) Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control ‘exactly what people think’…This is extremely dangerous to a democracy.
(B) At KOMO it’s our responsibility to pursue and report the truth. We understand Truth is neither politically ‘left nor right.’ Our commitment to factual reporting is the foundation of our credibility, now more than ever.
(A) But we are human and sometimes our reporting might fall short. If you believe our coverage is unfair please reach out to us by going to KOMOnews.com and clicking on CONTENT CONCERNS. We value your comments. We will respond back to you.
(B) We work very hard to seek the truth and strive to be fair, balanced and factual… We consider it our honor, our privilege to responsibly deliver the news every day.
(A) Thank you for watching and we appreciate your feedback.
















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Harvard Researchers Investigate Media Bias

THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION SHOOK the foundations of American politics. Media reports immediately looked for external disruption to explain the unanticipated victory—with theories ranging from Russian hacking to “fake news.”
We have a less exotic, but perhaps more disconcerting explanation: Our own study of over 1.25 million stories published online between April 1, 2015 and Election Day shows that a right-wing media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world. This pro-Trump media sphere appears to have not only successfully set the agenda for the conservative media sphere, but also strongly influenced the broader media agenda, in particular coverage of Hillary Clinton.
While concerns about political and media polarization online are longstanding, our study suggests that polarization was asymmetric. Pro-Clinton audiences were highly attentive to traditional media outlets, which continued to be the most prominent outlets across the public sphere, alongside more left-oriented online sites. But pro-Trump audiences paid the majority of their attention to polarized outlets that have developed recently, many of them only since the 2008 election season.
Attacks on the integrity and professionalism of opposing media were also a central theme of right-wing media. Rather than “fake news” in the sense of wholly fabricated falsities, many of the most-shared stories can more accurately be understood as disinformation: the purposeful construction of true or partly true bits of information into a message that is, at its core, misleading. Over the course of the election, this turned the right-wing media system into an internally coherent, relatively insulated knowledge community, reinforcing the shared worldview of readers and shielding them from journalism that challenged it. The prevalence of such material has created an environment in which the President can tell supporters about events in Sweden that never happened, or a presidential advisor can reference a non-existent “Bowling Green massacre.”
We began to study this ecosystem by looking at the landscape of what sites people share. If a person shares a link from Breitbart, is he or she more likely also to share a link from Fox News or from The New York Times? We analyzed hyperlinking patterns, social media sharing patterns on Facebook and Twitter, and topic and language patterns in the content of the 1.25 million stories, published by 25,000 sources over the course of the election, using Media Cloud, an open-source platform for studying media ecosystems developed by Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and MIT’s Center for Civic Media.

When we map media sources this way, we see that Breitbart became the center of a distinct right-wing media ecosystem, surrounded by Fox News, the Daily Caller, the Gateway Pundit, the Washington Examiner, Infowars, Conservative Treehouse, and Truthfeed.


Our analysis challenges a simple narrative that the internet as a technology is what fragments public discourse and polarizes opinions, by allowing us to inhabit filter bubbles or just read “the daily me.” If technology were the most important driver towards a “post-truth” world, we would expect to see symmetric patterns on the left and the right. Instead, different internal political dynamics in the right and the left led to different patterns in the reception and use of the technology by each wing. While Facebook and Twitter certainly enabled right-wing media to circumvent the gatekeeping power of traditional media, the pattern was not symmetric.
The size of the nodes marking traditional professional media like The New York TimesThe Washington Post, and CNN, surrounded by the Hill, ABC, and NBC, tell us that these media drew particularly large audiences. Their color tells us that Clinton followers attended to them more than Trump followers, and their proximity on the map to more quintessentially partisan sites—like Huffington Post, MSNBC, or the Daily Beast—suggests that attention to these more partisan outlets on the left was more tightly interwoven with attention to traditional media. The Breitbart-centered wing, by contrast, is farther from the mainstream set and lacks bridging nodes that draw attention and connect it to that mainstream.







https://www.wgbh.org/news/2017/03/15/politics-government/major-new-study-shows-political-polarization-mainly-right-wing

https://www.cjr.org/analysis/breitbart-media-trump-harvard-study.php
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Monday 12 November 2018

CBC - The Current - Political Divide based on Media Choices

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/after-u-s-midterms-voters-describe-friends-families-drifting-apart-over-political-divide-1.4895288

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-november-7-2018-1.4895184/wednesday-november-7-2018-full-transcript-1.4896400#segment2

@7:00:
MICHAEL NOKER: Absolutely. So my mother, growing up, was always very feminist person shoes or is a very strong woman. I mean she raised me to definitely stand up not only for other women but also to stand up for the underdog in general. So always been taught to be very about injustice and to make sure that people are taking care of. Regardless of what we have ideally happening economically, we always had to watch out for people first. And that is the most important thing. And that's still the most important thing in my life. Whereas over the last couple of years she has definitely shifted. She's gotten a lot more- I guess I would say that she's gotten actually less trusting of certain people and their intentions. And so watching that after being raised by her to be a certain way, and then watching her act in the opposite way has been incredibly frustrating and even confusing at times.

AMT: Well she's now a Trump supporter, correct.

MICHAEL NOKER: That's correct yes.

AMT: She's a FOX News devotee.

MICHAEL NOKER: Yes.Yes indeed.


...


AMT: And you lost it over being a Democrat or being against Trump? What changed you?

MARIE KRESGE: It was definitely over. I was neither Democrat at that time it was right after the election in the day when he won which was shocking. I was upset and concerned about the direction America would take. And I texted my girlfriend, like we always did. We texted back and forth a lot. She sent me a text about how he was ordained for a time as this, and that he's not a racist and that's just the media portrays him, and he has given himself to God, surround himself with Godly people and so on and so forth. And it was just- you know she's a Fox news watcher and that's what it comes down to.


...


CINDI STEVENS: I would say I have no idea what she's talking about. I don't see racism anywhere in my life amongst Trump's supporters, people who are lukewarm on Trump. I dont see racist behavior. I am not a Fox News watcher so I get my information from a lot of different places. I collect information from left-wing sources as well as right wing sources. And I am currently working at low income school in Northern Virginia and you know everybody gets along. It doesn't matter what your skin color is. They're students who are of Muslim belief, who wear hijabs and all sorts of skin color and backgrounds. And there's no drama. There's no conflict. So I just don't see it and I've never seen it. I've lived in or 20 years which is a very left leaning place. I've never seen anyone treated in a racist fashion. [145.8]

AMT: Michael Noker, as you listen to my other two guests, what are you thinking?

MICHAEL NOKER: I kind of wonder what news first Cindi is getting actual information from, when she says both left wing and right wing. You just wonder what outlets she's actually referring to. I know that my mom also maintains that she doesn't watch Fox News. And she'll bring up a story or something and I'll kind of ask her where she heard that. She'll say 'Well, Fox and friend'. Okay. If you say so. Then I've tried to encourage her to more actively seek out - not necessarily left wing - news media because they dont necessarily think that that would resound with her. I don't think that she would trust it. I dont necessarily think that that's a good thing. I believe that the news should be very unbiased completely, politically, only reporting on very credible information. So I do encourage her to you know read the Christian Science Monitor, for example. It is always very well sourced. It is always very well written, not packed emotional words that are really telling you how to think about anything. It's just sort of reporting.
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