Two Different Worlds

By now, just about everyone has seen this clip of Newt Gingrich in the final South Carolina debate among the presidential candidates of the Elephant Party.

First of all, the moderator, John King, asked Gingrich the wrong question. Does he want to respond to his ex-wife? Of course not! The question should have been about the hypocrisy of carrying on this affair while leading the charge to impeach Bill Clinton and marketing himself as a family values politician. Secondly, Gingrich knows how to work a room full of Elephants: by appealing to their contempt for the news media, in this case for ABC and CNN.

On January 17, Public Policy Polling released its second annual survey of trust in the TV news media. It was a telephone survey with 700 respondents and a marging of error of + or -3.7%. For each of eight networks, participants were asked whether they trusted it, did not trust it, or were not sure. Their press release stressed that PBS had the highest overall ratings, and that Fox News was both the most and least trusted news outlet. However, as Kevin Drum of Mother Jones pointed out, the most interesting finding involves a comparison between conservatives, moderates and liberals. Liberals and moderates trusted all the networks except Fox, while conservatives trusted only Fox.

I constructed the table below by subtracting the percentage who distrusted each network from the percentage who trusted it. Thus a positive number indicates that the majority in that ideological group trusted that network, while a negative number (or shaded cell) indicates a majority distrusted it. (To make the table fit, I omitted Comedy Central and MSNBC, but they showed the same pattern as the other five non-canine networks.) The results show that conservatives differ greatly from liberals and moderates, but liberals and moderates do not differ very much. Do conservatives live in a different world from other Americans?

	ABC	CBS	CNN	NBC	PBS	Fox
Very liberal	43	25	64	64	60	-57
Liberal	32	45	43	53	64	-49
Moderate	39	38	34	45	55	-27
Conservative	-44	-41	-30	-40	-11	47
Very conservative	-66	-68	-61	-66	-45	70

Cognitive psychologists have identified two types of rationality: instrumental and epistemic. Instrumental rationality refers to behaving in such a way as to maximize the chances of getting what you want, or in other words, making the choice with the highest expected utility. For example, if your goal is to make money on the stock market, do you choose stocks that increase in value? Epistemic rationality refers to how well your beliefs correspond with reality. Claiming not to “believe” in global warming or evolution is a failure of epistemic rationality. Bill Maher was talking about epistemic rationality when he quipped that Gov. Jon Huntsman—now out of the race—was the only one of the Elephant presidential candidates who believes that when an apple falls out of a tree, it hits the ground.

I certainly don't want to imply that all the other TV networks except Fox are free of errors and biases. News bias is difficult to measure, since there is usually no absolute standard of accuracy with which to compare a news story. Available research suggests that journalists, with the exception of Fox, are slightly to the left of the public on social issues, and slightly to the right of the public with respect to economics and foreign policy.

Centrism can also be a bias. One symptom of centrist bias is false balancing, in which the news media, apparently trying to be fair, claim that liberals and conservatives, Jackasses and Elephants, are equally extreme in their opinions, or routinely engage in equal amounts of deviant behavior. But if examples are given, they often show that the two sides are not really equivalent. Carrying a loaded gun to a political rally, for example, is not the same as carrying a rude sign.

For better or worse, the nightly network news represents a social consensus about what the most important events of the day were and what they mean. People who call themselves moderates find these newscasts, with the exception of Fox, to be largely trustworthy. So do liberals. By this criterion, conservatives live in an alternate universe from the one occupied by moderates and liberals.