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- With the abundance of claims about bias emanating from both the right and left, these claims amplify strong partisan's natural tendency to view even favorable coverage as biased to their political view points.
This last cause is a common finding in the literature across studies and topics. As I have written with my colleague John Besley in a recent study, this psychological tendency even likely accounts for why elite groups like scientists hold a pervasive belief in media bias, despite a mainstream media that typically covers science in strongly favorable terms.
"But not all scoops are created equal. I see four main types. The politics of credit-claiming vary, depending on which type of scoop we're talking about. "
"As you can see from the chart, the percentage of Americans who had a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust in the news media has declined from over 70 percent shortly after Watergate to about 44 percent today.
Why? That is my question in this post."
"Many hopeful individuals cite internet-based social media as a networked communications system capable of improving democracy by routing around the corporate “noise” and towards a vibrant non-market public sphere. The internet has produced new conditions for peer-to-peer and disintermediated communication, it is true. But what the cynical scholars and activists are saying might be true as well. Democracies require explicitly engaged citizens that demand civically minded, accessible, and participatory media systems to thrive. Are these pre-conditions for democracy being met in America?"
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Scholars estimating the public sphere in the age of information opulence, telecommunications convergence, and interactive media must discuss these issues:
1) Media Ecology: observe interactive social media, static consolidated television networks, and grassroots activists as working within the socio-technical boundaries of a media ecology (Srinivasan and Fish 2011)
2) Political Diversity: examine the relative balance of political ideological diversity of constituents, activists, and voices on American television news networks and social media networks within the media ecology (Hindman 2005)
3) Cultural Silos: acknowledge that grassroots activism networks, as well as social media and television news consumption and production communities tend towards ‘silos,’ ‘filter bubbles,’ or personalized spaces of homogeneity; recognize that digital democracy is likely a myth (Pariser 2011, Boczkowski 2010, Hindman 2009)
4) Neoliberal Governmentality: see both social media and cable television news companies as impacted by neoliberal governmentality–state regulation and market ideology (Foucault 1978-1979)
5) Media Reform Movements: acknowledge the impact of neoliberal resistance, ideological diversity, and non-market actors (Klinenberg 2009, McChesney and Pickard 2011).
"We propose a new method for measuring the relative ideological positions of newspapers, voters, interest groups, and political parties. The method uses data on ballot propositions. We exploit the fact that newspapers, parties, and interest groups take positions on these propositions, and the fact that citizens ultimately vote on them. We find that, on average, newspapers in the U.S. are located almost exactly at the median voter in their states. Newspapers also tend to be centrist relative to interest groups. "
In the information age, journalism needs to go further. Information bombards us. What is scarce is insight, understanding and knowledge.
The news industry is built on the assumption that if you give a reporter a notebook and a few days to ramp up, he can write authoritatively on any subject. That's not enough anymore. In today's information-rich world, reporters need to bring more to the table. To provide readers with truly insightful experiences, they need to have the kind of expertise that will allow them to see the story behind the story, to see what's really going on.
"Sharon Dunwoody is Evjue-Bascom Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as Interim Associate Dean for Graduate Education in the Graduate School. Among other affiliations, she is a member of the Governance Faculty of the university’s Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and is a faculty affiliate of the Science and Technology Studies program.
As a scholar, she focuses on the construction of media science messages and on how those messages are employed by individuals for various cognitive and behavioral purposes. Illustrative of this large domain are her current research streams:
How do individuals use information to inform their judgments about environmental risks?
What role do perceptions of both journalists and scientists play in the construction of news about science?"
"Next month I will have taught journalism at New York University for 25 years, an occasion that has led me to reflect on what I have tried to profess in that time.
Or, to put it another way, what I think I know about journalism.
It comes down to these four ideas.
1. The more people who participate in the press the stronger it will be.
2. The profession of journalism went awry when it began to adopt the View from Nowhere.
3. The news system will improve when it is made more useful to people.
4. Making facts public does not a public make; information alone will not inform us."
@JohnPostill (Twitter)
I am an anthropologist (PhD UCL) specialising in the study of media. Currently I am Senior Lecturer in Media at Sheffield Hallam University and a Fellow of the Digital Anthropology Programme, University College London (UCL).
"How have journalistic ideals of public service arisen? To what extent do journalists live up to these ideals? Can we make any claims as to the social conditions that this performance depends on? Using Bourdieu’s theory of fields of cultural production, this article addresses these questions with evidence from the history of journalism in the United States. What is most distinctive about modern journalism is a specific practice: active news-gathering or reporting. "
"The Right concentrated on gaining control of the information flows in Washington and on building a media infrastructure that would put out a consistent conservative message across the country. As part of this strategy, the Right also funded attack groups to target mainstream journalists who got in the way of the conservative agenda.
The Left largely forsook media in favor of “grassroots organizing.” As many of the Left’s flagship media outlets foundered, the “progressive community” reorganized under the slogan – “think globally, act locally” – and increasingly put its available money into well-intentioned projects, such as buying endangered wetlands or feeding the poor.
So, while the Right waged what it called “the war of ideas” and expanded the reach of conservative media to every corner of the nation, the Left trusted that local political action would reenergize American democracy."
links to press release on Stanford study and PNAS for the study
Welcome to the Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab, located in the Communication Department at Stanford University.
Our laboratory focuses on uncovering fundamental relationships between humans and interactive media. We are interested both in advancing the overall understanding of human psychology and in exploring the practical implications of our discoveries.
Clifford Nass is currently the Thomas M. Storke Professor at Stanford University; he has been a professor at Stanford since 1986. ...Nass's research focuses on (laboratory and field) experimental studies of social-psychological aspects of human-interactive media interaction. Specifically, Nass discovered that people use the same rules and heuristics when interacting with technology as they do when interacting with other people. This approach is called the "Computers are Social Actors" (CASA) paradigm or "The Media Equation" (media equals real life).
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