This ombudsman farewell column is well-written and insightful.
This blog entry managed to find something telling and shameful.
I'm skeptical of the arbitrary "math" in the study cited in this column, but its conclusion makes perfect sense:
In a market place with a greater variety of news sources, consumers will gravitate towards the sources who share their initial assumptions. If both the reporter and the reader/viewer agree on particular first principles, even if those first principles aren't necessarily universally held, neither of them will be consciously aware of their own biases.
This is why so many conservatives can honestly believe Fox is "fair and balanced" even as so many other people honestly believe an analogous claim about NPR, The New York Times, et al. Or revisiting the second link - why a news organization would peddle an anti-American slant in a nation receptive to that, without daring to peddle that same anti-American slant to Americans stateside.
Posted by Matt Bruce at May 22, 2005 12:12 PMI'm skeptical of the arbitrary "math" in the study cited in this column, but its conclusion makes perfect sense: In a market place with a greater variety of news sources, consumers will gravitate towards the sources who share their initial assumptions.
Actually, that is not a conclusion of the study, but an assumption, as given both in the Postrel column and in the abstract.
Overall, I'm unimpressed with the Postrel column.
First: To the consternation of many journalists, there is a widespread, and increasingly noisy, belief that the media are biased. The report in Newsweek, now retracted, about Koran desecration by interrogators at Guantánamo Bay has only intensified the criticism. Um, what about the subsequent statement by top Newsweek people (in defending themselves) that they want their magazine to be unequivocally pro-American? You'd think that someone writing about Newsweek and bias would mention what bias Newsweek claims to want to be seen as having.
Second, you are right to be skeptical of the author's description of the "math" in the study, because Postrel misrepresents it. In the economists' model, news outlets announce that they intend to be biased in their coverage and specify the degree of that bias. The bias itself also appears mathematically as a simple deviation from the truth. For instance, if the unemployment rate is 6 percent, a news outlet biased one way might report a 5 percent rate and its opposite a 7 percent rate. I cannot find anything in the model of "slant" described in the paper that assumes that news outlets will print outright falsehoods such as an incorrect unemployment rate.
Third: The article makes some provocative predictions. It suggests that adding relatively moderate competitors may push rivals to take more extreme positions to hold onto their audiences. Trying to correct Al Jazeera's bias, for example, by introducing pro-Western competition, as some analysts recommend, "might cause Al Jazeera and similar networks to further differentiate their product by advancing yet more extreme views," write the economists. "The effect might be only to radicalize, rather than moderate, their audience." Hasn't the writer heard of al-Hurra? The original paper is dated December 30, 2003, before al-Hurra's debut, but by now it's been around for more than a year, and surely it's worth mentioning in this context as something that actually exists, not as a hypothetical that "some analysts recommend".