Ardent investigators or lackeys?

Iowahawk is on a roll.

L: How the media see themselves
R: How everybody else sees them pic.twitter.com/c7SRdrUdeG

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) September 9, 2016

There's freedom of speech. Then there's freedom from speech

Heh.

Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) September 26, 2014

But the graphs do show an echo chamber

From Relatively Few People Are Partisan News Consumers, but They’re Influential by Brendan Nyhan.

New research shows that the great majority of people learn about political news from mainstream, relatively centrist media sources, not ideological websites or cable channels. However, relatively small numbers of partisans, especially Republicans, are heavy consumers of a highly polarized media diet.

This dynamic helps explain why there is so much concern about “echo chambers,” even though most people don’t confine themselves to one.

To learn more about where people get their political news, Andy Guess, a postdoctoral researcher in social media and politics at New York University, recruited a nationally representative YouGov online survey panel. The nearly 1,400 panelists agreed to take part in a survey and to anonymously share data on their website visits over a three-week period in early 2015. This approach avoids the pitfalls of many previous studies, which typically ask people to recall their past news consumption — an approach that is plagued with measurement error. These website visits were then matched to estimates of media outlet “alignment” that are based on the self-described ideology of people who share articles from the website on Facebook.

The resulting data, which are reported in a new working paper by Mr. Guess, show the news diet of most respondents was remarkably centrist on average for both Democrats and Republicans alike. The two most common destinations for political news in his data were MSN.com and AOL.com, two large and relatively neutral online news portals.

Lots of red flags as to the methodology though the researchers seem well-intentioned.

One of my biggest concerns is how they rate the ideological skew of the different news sources and which ones they elected to include or not.

In terms of assessing the political skew of media sources, we know that the politics of reporters in all mainstream media skew much more liberal than the average American. Even reporters (as opposed to the editors) for such "conservative" news sources as Wall Street Journal and Fox News skew left.

The calibration that they provide seems wrong to me. I do not use either Fox or Breitbart as primary, or even secondary, sources of current news. But from years of episodic exposure, I would have judged Breitbart to be a genuinely provocative right-oriented new site comparable in nature and (opposite) degree as a left site such as Mother Jones or Daily Kos. The random sampling of news articles I have seen from Fox are nowhere near as provocative or ideological as Breitbart but they are rated basically the same for the study purposes. So something seems off on the calibration. Might be me but, given their methodology and given that the ratings are by opinion rather than empirical measure, I suspect that they err in their rankings.

In the original paper, they allude to one of the biggest right-oriented sites, drudgereport.com, but I don't see any data related to Drudge in their analysis. Drudge would be over there with Breitbart. Did they omit Drudge, and if so why? Drudge is one of the single largest sources of traffic for both the Washington Post as well as the New York Times. Not in a friendly way. He will link some of their more egregious reporting which sends tidal waves of offended conservatives over to comment.

A final concern. They identify MSN and AOL as centrist news aggregators. Again, I don't use either source but glancing at the sources for their articles, most of the aggregation appears to be from significantly left leaning publications. Throwing in a few sources from WSJ or Fox doesn't significantly leaven the skew.

So those are some of the concerns.

What are the conclusions from the study? That most readers are centrist in their news sourcing but that the ideological extremists among both Republicans and Democrats spend more time on their respective more extreme new sources. That's a very neutral interpretation. Not wrong so much as not quite revealing. Look at the distribution of the news sources, keeping in mind that MSN and AOL at the center are actually about 70-80% left leaning in their aggregation.

Click to enlarge. Source is the NYT.

The conclusion again was:

New research shows that the great majority of people learn about political news from mainstream, relatively centrist media sources, not ideological websites or cable channels.

But that's not quite what those graphs show. Rather, it is not all that they show.

A different description would be:

Democrats get all their news from left-leaning media and Conservatives get most their news from left-leaning media sources.

The claim that Democrats aren't in an echo chamber rests on the fact that significant numbers of them get information from AOL and MSN which are only 70-80% left leaning. Democrats read virtually no right-leaning news sources.

Meanwhile, Republicans clearly get the great majority of their news from left-leaning sources. They also happen to get some 20%(?) of their news from right leaning sources. One might say that they are much more committed to reading diversely than are Democrats if one wanted to be snarky.

Somebody has already made this point elsewhere, perhaps Jonathan Haidt. In fact, I think it is Haidt who did research asking left leaning and right leaning people to describe the policy positions of their opposite number. Around foreign policy, religion in school, abortion, safe spaces, gun control, all the normal hot button issues. People on the right were able to accurately describe left policy positions whereas people on the left were unable to accurately describe the policy positions of the right. The conclusion, or speculation, of the research was that people on the right aren't necessarily smarter than those on the left. They are simply more exposed to the left's positions than those on the left are exposed to the positions of those on the right.

This new research seems to support that conclusion.

Anonymity by not using a family name? Not anymore.

Found via Tyler Cowen. He's quoting from an original newspaper account that reads:

In the northwest corner of Phnom Penh’s Boeng Keng Kang market, a new stall is creating a buzz among shoppers.

Its occupant is a 28-year-old former U.S. Peace Corps volunteer who offers tarot-card readings in Khmer. And customers say her predictions are on point.

With strings of fake leaves hanging from the ceiling, colorful paper butterflies affixed to one wall, and a sign that reads “Mantis Magic,” the booth—which has been open for two weeks—stands out from the neighboring hairdressers and food stalls.

“I didn’t have a job, I needed something to do and I wanted to help people through my spiritual work. I was getting messages to do this, so I just followed my gut,” said Eileen, who speaks conversational Khmer and asked to be identified only by her first name so that her mother in the U.S. would not find out about her new trade.

Originally from New York, Eileen said she graduated from West Virginia University with degrees in gender studies and criminal investigations before relocating to Cambodia nearly five years ago with the Peace Corps.

I can't help but feel that Eileen's confidence in retaining her anonymity by not using her last name might, perhaps, be misplaced when she is further identified as 28 years old, a Peace Corps volunteer, from WVU with a major in gender studies. I would have guessed that she hadn't heard of LinkedIn except that she has a LinkedIn profile that turns up with a search on the quoted characteristics.

What this country really needs is a good five-cent nickel

I start with a review of a collection of books about Dorothy Parker, Brilliant, Troubled Dorothy Parker by Robert Gottlieb. Gottlieb describes Parker's literary beginnings.

In 1915, Parker, aged twenty-two, went to work at Vogue (for ten dollars a week), writing captions, proofreading, fact-checking, etc., and after a while moved over to the very young Vanity Fair; her first poem to be published had recently appeared there. She happily functioned as a kind of scribe-of-all-work until three years later she was chosen to replace the departing P.G. Wodehouse as the magazine’s drama critic. She was not only the youngest by far of New York’s theater critics, she was the only female one.

It was at the magazine that she met the lovable and sympathetic Robert Benchley, who would become the closest friend of her life, as well as Robert Sherwood, long before his four Pulitzer Prizes (three for drama, one for biography). They became a threesome, and started eating lunch together at the nearby Algonquin Hotel because it was affordable and the food was okay. At about the same time, another threesome drifted in, graduates of Stars and Stripes, the overseas army’s weekly newspaper. They were Alexander Woollcott, Harold Ross, and Franklin Pierce Adams, who as “F.P.A.” was the most influential newspaper columnist of the day. Soon Adams was quoting Parker’s Vanity Fair verses and, even more effectively, her bon mots. Quickly “Dorothy Parker” was a celebrity.

Parker, Benchley, Woolcott, Ross. I have read works by all these. Sherwood I recognize but have not read any of his works.

But who is this FPA. I have been familiar with the Algonquin Round Table since at least college. I must have come across his name before. Apparently it never quite registered.

This seems to be one of those temporal ironies. At the time of the Algonquin Round Table, Franklin Pierce Adams was probably the best known and most popular writer in the group. He started his column The Conning Tower in 1914. Wikipedia notes:

During World War I, Adams was in the U.S. Army, serving in military intelligence and also writing a column, "The Listening Post", for Stars and Stripes editor Harold Ross. After the war, the so-called "comma-hunter of Park Row" (for his knowledge of the language) returned to New York and the Tribune. He moved to the New York World in 1922, and his column appeared there until the paper merged with the inferior New York Telegram in 1931. He returned to his old paper, by then called the New York Herald Tribune, until 1937, and finally moved to the New York Post, where he ended his column in September 1941.

During its long run, "The Conning Tower" featured contributions from such writers as Robert Benchley, Edna Ferber, Moss Hart, George S. Kaufman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, John O'Hara, Dorothy Parker and Deems Taylor. Having one's work published in "The Conning Tower" was enough to launch a career, as in the case of Dorothy Parker and James Thurber. Parker quipped, "He raised me from a couplet." Parker dedicated her 1936 publication of collected poems, Not So Deep as a Well, to F.P.A. Many of the poems in that collection were originally published in "The Conning Tower".

Much later, the writer E. B. White freely admitted his sense of awe: "I used to walk quickly past the house in West 13th Street between Sixth and Seventh where F.P.A. lived, and the block seemed to tremble under my feet—the way Park Avenue trembles when a train leaves Grand Central."

The irony is that, aside from a few media history majors or American literature majors, who might recognize FBA as a household (college educated household) name today?

I am guessing virtually no-one. But among the people who held him in high esteem and who benefitted from his mentorship? E.B. White, Dorothy Parker certainly would be recognizable and perhaps Woollcott, Ross and Benchley.

Time is a cruel winnower of past reputations.

For all that, FPA's words may be forgotten by most but they have a certain contemporary pertinence.

Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody.

Digging a little further, I find that there is an FPA quote I recognize.

There are plenty of good five-cent cigars in the country. The trouble is they cost a quarter. What this country really needs is a good five-cent nickel.
- Reported in Jacob Morton Braude, Complete Speaker's and Toastmaster's Library: Remarks of famous people (1965), p. 53.

Almost certainly from my economic reading rather than from my literary reading.

Indeed, What regiment?

From A Literary Education by Joseph Epstein. Page 10.

When a student in the Lionel Trilling story "Of This Time, Of That Place" tells the professor who is the story's protagonist that he used to be an English major, the professor, in the only humorous remark I have discovered in all of Trilling's writing, replies: "Indeed, What regiment?"

Peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice

From A Troublesome Inheritance by Nicholas Wade. Page 234.

In the lapidary words of Adam Smith, "Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things." But the "little else" is something of an understatement. Peace, easy taxes and justice are seldom found together in history. Only in Europe was this magic formula achieved, and it became the basis for Europe's unexpected ascent in the world.

I stand between you and the apocalypse

I know the Grey Lady is in her dotage but I find it inexplicable that, as deeply supportive of Hillary Clinton as they are, that they let this reporting through the editorial process.

A couple of weeks ago Trump garnered positive headlines for being the first national politician to bring attention to and visit Louisiana in its storm plight, goading a vacationing Obama to visit first thing after he was back but apparently having no effect on Clinton's priorities (fund raising). In the past week, Trump has been doing serious outreach to Mexico and getting plaudits for his presidential mien. Yesterday he made a major presentation to the Black faith community and, again, has been receiving, albeit sometimes reluctant, plaudits for his efforts and performance.

The New York Times can't help that Clinton spent her day, characteristically, raising money from the rich vested interests of rent seekers, but, while accurate, the contrast between these two opening paragraphs and the Trump machine is startling.

From Where Has Hillary Clinton Been? Ask the Ultrarich by Amy Chozick and Jonathan Martin. This is the same Amy Chozick who a few weeks ago struggled (and failed) to present the Clintons as having been in financially parlous condition early in their marriage, thus explaining, or so went the theory, Hillary Clinton's need for money. I analyzed that reporting in Let The Sun Shine.

Demonstrating the same incapacity to hide the ball as showed in the earlier article, Chozick opens today's reporting with:

At a private fund-raiser Tuesday night at a waterfront Hamptons estate, Hillary Clinton danced alongside Jimmy Buffett, Jon Bon Jovi and Paul McCartney, and joined in a singalong finale to “Hey Jude.”

“I stand between you and the apocalypse,” a confident Mrs. Clinton declared to laughs, exhibiting a flash of self-awareness and humor to a crowd that included Calvin Klein and Harvey Weinstein and for whom the prospect of a Donald J. Trump presidency is dire.

"I stand between you and the apocalypse?" What is this, the French Revolution? All very Marie Antoinette. The echoes of the two women are striking. From that Wikipedia article:

Despite her initial popularity, a growing number of the population eventually came to dislike her, accusing L'Autrichienne, "the Austrian woman" (a nickname given her upon her arrival to France by Louis XV's daughters, Mesdames de France), of being profligate, promiscuous, and of harbouring sympathies for France's enemies, particularly her native Austria. The Diamond Necklace affair damaged her reputation further. During the Revolution, she became known as Madame Déficit because the country's financial crisis was blamed on her lavish spending and her opposition to the social and financial reforms of Turgot and Necker.

Madame Deficit indeed. There is further elaboration of Marie Antoinette's behavior (and its similarities to the current candidate) here, Declining Popularity.

Now that Chozick has put us on the track of perfidious French Royalty, isn't there at least a passing kinship between L'Etat, c'est moi (I am the State) and a certain "What difference at this point, does it make?"

But back to the reporting.

Mr. Trump has pointed to Mrs. Clinton’s noticeably scant schedule of campaign events this summer to suggest she has been hiding from the public. But Mrs. Clinton has been more than accessible to those who reside in some of the country’s most moneyed enclaves and are willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to see her. In the last two weeks of August, Mrs. Clinton raked in roughly $50 million at 22 fund-raising events, averaging around $150,000 an hour, according to a New York Times tally.

And while Mrs. Clinton has faced criticism for her failure to hold a news conference for months, she has fielded hundreds of questions from the ultrarich in places like the Hamptons, Martha’s Vineyard, Beverly Hills and Silicon Valley.

“It’s the old adage, you go to where the money is,” said Jay S. Jacobs, a prominent New York Democrat.

Mrs. Clinton raised about $143 million in August, the campaign’s best month yet. At a single event on Tuesday in Sagaponack, N.Y., 10 people paid at least $250,000 to meet her, raising $2.5 million.

If Mr. Trump appears to be waging his campaign in rallies and network interviews, Mrs. Clinton’s second presidential bid seems to amount to a series of high-dollar fund-raisers with public appearances added to the schedule when they can be fit in. Last week, for example, she diverged just once from her packed fund-raising schedule to deliver a speech.

So hobnobbing with the rich and ignoring everyone else is just who she is. Let them eat cake.

With this kind of reporting, either Chozick really doesn't like Hillary Clinton (improbable given her employer), or she is making the very best of the little she has given Clinton's deeply corrupt behavior (quite possible), or perhaps she is playing a very deep game.

If Hillary Clinton is the corrupt, money grubbing, interest favoring, favor dealing, deficit spending, ignorant, clueless Marie Antoinette, then who is Trump? Maybe Chozick is trying to evoke Maximilien Robespierre? But Robespierre had two phases, an early, more noble one where he was advocating for democracy, the poor, equality of rights, suffrage, abolition of slavery, etc. And then there was his second phase as leader of the brutal Committee of Public Safety which played a central role in the Reign of Terror during which some 50,000 people were summarily executed or guillotined.

That seems a little apocalyptic. Godwin's Law only has so much reach.

Perhaps Chozick is being more subtle and casting Trump as the buffoonish, crazy, madman, morally execrable Jean-Jacques Rousseau with his many illegitimate children? Rousseau had a deep influence on the leaders of the Revolution (and progressive totalitarians everywhere) but was kind of a messy monster in his personal life. Perhaps that is the take-away Chozick wishes to invoke.

Possible, but I think a deep game is probably the least likely explanation for this reporting.

The seed of books planted in dry ground

From A Troublesome Inheritance by Nicholas Wade. Page 228.

Islamic rulers long kept challenges away by forbidding the printing press and squelching troublesome lines of inquiry. In Europe, interest in new knowledge was not confined to an elite but pervaded societies in which literacy was becoming widespread. By 1500 there were 1,700 printing presses distributed in 300 European cities in every country except Russia. In the Ottoman empire, a decree of Sultan Selim I specified the death penalty for anyone who even used a printing press. Istanbul did not acquire a printing press until 1726 and the owners were allowed to publish only a few titles before being closed down.

There are few controlled experiments in history

From A Troublesome Inheritance by Nicholas Wade. Page 215.

I wouldn't invest too much significance into this but it is none-the-less, revealing.

In 1608 Hans Lippershey, a spectacle maker in the Dutch town of Middelburg, invented the telescope. Within a few decades, telescopes had been introduced from Europe to China, to the Mughal empire in India and to the Ottoman empire. All four civilizations were thus on equal footing in terms of possessing this powerful new instrument with its latent power for observing the universe and deducing the laws of planetary motion.

There are few controlled experiments in history, but the historian of science Toby Huff has discovered one in the way that the telescope was received and used in the 17th century. The reactions of the four civilizations to this powerful new instrument bear on the very different kinds of society that each had developed.

In Europe the telescope was turned at once toward the heavens. Galileo, hearing a description of Lippershey's device, immediately set to building telescopes of his own. He was firt to observe the moons of Jupiter, and he used the fact of Jupiter's satellites as empirical evidence in favor of Copernicus's then disputed notion that the planets, including the Earth were satellites of the sun. Galileo's argument that the earth revolved around the sun brought him into conflict with the church's belief that the Earth cannot move. In 1633 he was forced to recant by the Inquisition and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.

But Europe was not monolithic, and the Inquisition was powerless to suppress the ideas of Copernicus and Galileo in Protestant countries. What Galileo had started was carried forward by Kepler and Newton. The momentum of the Scientific Revolution scarcely faltered.

In the Muslim world, the telescope quickly reached the Mughal empire in India. One was presented in 1616 by the British ambassador to the court of the emperor Jahangir, and many more arrived a year later. The Mughals knew a lot about astronomy, but their interest in it was confined to matters of the calendar. A revised calendar was presented to the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in 1628, but the scholar who prepared it based it on the Ptolemaic system (which assumes that the sun revolves around an immobile Earth).

Given this extensive familiarity with astronomy, Mughal scholars might have been expected to use the telescope to explore the heavens. But the designers of astronomical instruments in the Mughal empire did not make telescopes, and the scholars created no demand for them. "In the end, no Mughal scholars undertook to use the telescope for astronomical purposes in the seventeenth century," Huff reports.

Wade goes on.

Telescopes had reached Istanbul by at least 1626 and were quickly incorporated into the Ottoman navy. But despite Muslim eminence in optics in the 14th century, scholars in the Ottoman empire showed no particular interest in the telescope.

What about China?

Outside of Europe, the most promising new users of the telescope were in China, whose government had a keen interest in astronomy. Moreover, there was an unusual but vigorous mechanism for pumping the new European astronomical discoveries into China in the form of the Jesuit mission there. The Jesuits figured they had a better chance of converting the Chinese to Christianity if they could show that European astronomy provided more accurate calculations of the celestial events in which the Chinese were interested. Through the Jesuits efforts, the Chinese certainly knew of the telescope by 1626, and the emperor probably received a telescope from Cardinal Borromeo of Milan as early as 1618.

[snip]

The puzzle is that throughout this period the Chinese made no improvements on the telescope. Nor did they show any sustained interest in the ferment of European ideas about the theoretical structure of the universe, despite being plied by the Jesuits with the latest European research. Chinese astronomers had behind them a centuries-old tradition of astronomical observation. But it was embedded in a Chinese cosmological system that they were reluctant to abandon. Their latent xenophobia also supported resistance to new ideas. "It is better to have no good astronomy than to have Westerners in China," wrote the anti-Christian scholar Yang Guangxian.