A Blow to Baseball

Concussions are not as big an issue in baseball as they are in boxing, football or hockey, but they are a problem. Players can collide with a wall or one another on the field or basepaths. Batters can be hit in the head with a pitch, and pitchers with a batted ball. At greatest risk are catchers, whose facemasks are routinely jarred by foul tips. Concussions account for about 2% of time lost, and are increasing at a rate of 14% per year. Although baseball has a seven-day disabled list specifically for concussion victims, there is no universal time off standard. Players can return if they show no symptoms, pass a series of physical and mental tests, and have the approval of the team doctor.

© Getty Images

What makes baseball attractive for study purposes is the fact that individual performance can be quantified easily. A research team head by Jeffrey Bazarian at the University of Rochester compared the performance of 66 position players (non-pitchers) who suffered concussions from 2007 through 2013 on seven offensive metrics: at bats, batting average, on-base percentage, home runs, slugging percentage, OPS (on-base plus slugging percentage), strikeouts and walks. (Of course, these seven measures are not independent.) These data were calculated for the two weeks before the concussion (pre-event), the two weeks immediately after the player's return (post-event), and the period between 4 and 6 weeks after his return (long term post-event). To control for the possibility that performance was changed by time off alone, they computed the same measures for 68 players granted leave for paternity or bereavement. The analysis statistically controlled for position (catcher vs. non-catcher) and number of days off.

The results showed significant immediate post-event declines for concussion victims on four of the measures: batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, and OPS.  Overall, the players coming back from paternity or bereavement leave showed a slight improvement, suggesting there may be some value in mid-season rest. The concussion victims continued to hit more poorly relative to the leave group during the long term post-event period, but the differences were not statistically significant. Here are the means:

Batting Average

Event	Pre-Event	Post-Event	Long Term Post-Event
Concussion	.249	.227	.261
Leave	.255	.271	.269

On-Base Percentage

Event	Pre-Event	Post-Event	Long Term Post-Event
Concussion	.315	.287	.318
Leave	.331	.332	.333

Slugging Percentage

Event	Pre-Event	Post-Event	Long Term Post-Event
Concussion	.393	.347	.398
Leave	.393	.433	.404

OPS (On-Base Plus Slugging)

Event	Pre-Event	Post-Event	Long Term Post-Event
Concussion	.708	.633	.715
Leave	.724	.765	.736

The results suggest that these ballplayers had not fully recovered from their concussions before returning to action. The authors mention several possible explanations for the performance decline, including poorer visual acuity, slower reaction times, and problems with balance. Hitting a baseball thrown at 90 mph from a distance of 60 feet requires optimal performance of all these systems. However, the two measures most clearly associated with “seeing the ball,” strikeouts and walks, did not show significant change. Maybe the batters were hitting the ball at the same rate, but not hitting it as solidly.

I can understand why baseball players feel pressure to return to the field after an injury. The mean salary is slightly over $4 million, a loss to the team of almost $25,000 per game for time spent on the disabled list. This study suggests, however, that keeping the player on the bench longer might benefit not only the player but also the team.

Post Script

When this study was reported in the New York Times, the reporter interviewed Dr. Gary Green, Medical Director for Major League Baseball. The article states:

Dr. Green was . . . unimpressed with the study, which he said had major methodological problems and lacked proper controls. “You really can't draw many conclusions from it. If it shows anything it shows that the batting parameters—strikeouts and walks—are actually fairly consistent before and after injury.”

Green said he felt that there was no way to distinguish the changes the study found from ordinary variations over the course of the season that happens with all players.

There are several problems with Dr. Green's comments. Of course, no one is denying that there are consistent differences between players in batting performance. Since this study is a within-subjects design, one of its strengths is that it permits these individual differences to be statistically eliminated, allowing a more precise estimate of the effects of concussions. It was also disingenuous of Dr. Green to mention only strikeouts and walks, while ignoring the four other performance measures that are likely to be of equal or greater interest to the team management.

More importantly, Dr. Green has a fundamental misunderstanding of the logic of research design. When results are statistically significant, that means they are unlikely to be explained by ordinary variability over the course of the season. For example, if the probability of a result were less than .01, the likelihood of this result occuring by chance is less than one in one hundred. The probabilities of the four results reported in the above four tables were less than .005, .01, .004 and .003, respectively.

In my opinion, a reporter has a responsibility to do more than quote spokespersons on both sides of a controversy when one of them makes erroneous or implausible statements. Letting such remarks go unchallenged is a form of false balancing. The reporter should have pressed Dr. Green to explain what methodological problems he found with the study. He also should have briefly explained the meaning of statistical significance to the reader. If he felt uncomfortable saying these things in his own voice, he could have called one of the authors of the study and asked him or her to respond to Dr. Green.

Of course, this presumes that the reporter knows enough about research design to be skeptical of Dr. Green's remarks.

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The Job Killers, Part 1

Snow Job

The corporate media, in their near-saturation coverage of extreme weather events, almost never mention climate change as an important cause of these events. This is documented in a study by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), which examines news reports about the extreme cold and heavy snowstorms that have hit the Eastern U.S. this year.

FAIR examined the transcripts of all ABC, CBS and NBC network news programs from January 25—the time of the first blizzard—through March 4. There were 417 segments that mentioned extreme cold, snow or ice, but only seven of them (less than 2%) made reference to climate change.

There is a near-consensus among climate scientists that warmer ocean temperatures lead to a greater concentration of moisture in the atmosphere above the oceans, which in turn increases the amount of snowfall during winter storms. Warmer temperatures also can increase snowfall because the greatest amount of snow falls when the temperature is between 28 and 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

There is less consensus about the causes of the extreme cold of the past two winters, but it seems to be related to the polar vortex, a cyclone-like weather pattern that circles around each pole. Less ice and snow cover at the North Pole has weakened the polar vortex, causing cold air masses to drift southward over the Northern Hemisphere.

Attributing winter storms to climate change seems counterintuitive to people who identify it exclusively with global warming. Unfortunately, four news segments were devoted to Senator James Inhofe's (R-OK) misleading stunt of bringing a snowball onto the Senate Floor to mock “global warming.”

A second finding of the FAIR study is that the corporate media gave substantially less coverage to the current drought in the Southwestern U.S. to than snowstorms in the East. There were twelve segments on the drought during the time of the study, and only one of them mentioned climate change.

That increasing temperature might lead to droughts is not at all counterintuitive. All the climate models predict less rainfall in the American Southwest. But unlike blizzards, droughts are “non-events,” which are less likely to attract media attention even thought their consequences may be quite serious.

Why are the networks so reluctant to connect extreme weather to climate change? One possibility is that they see climate change as a partisan political issue. Its mere mention as a cause of some negative event may be seen as liberal bias. But if reality has a liberal bias, this means that less reality will find its way onto the news. A cynic might also point to the networks' concern about alienating the fossil fuel companies upon whose advertising they rely so heavily.

A study by social psychologists at Rutgers University shows that when people have direct experience with extreme weather—in their case, Hurricanes Irene and Sandy—they are more likely to support politicians whose policies are intended to minimize climate change. However, if this message relating extreme weather to climate change is to reach the ubiquitous “low information voter” in time, the media must make these connections early and often. Right now, that's not happening.

Post Script

The one drought report that did mention climate change was an ABC segment which included this depressing example of false balancing.

A new study from Stanford University claims the drought in California is being fueled by human-caused climate change. But some scientists not involved in the study are questioning some of those findings.

Really? How many scientists? Who are they? Are they independent researchers or are they employed by fossil fuel corporations? What are their objections to the Stanford study? Are these objections scientifically valid? We'll never get answers to these questions from the Mouse House. ABC's message is simply the usual misleading claim that "experts disagree" about climate change.

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Climate of Mistrust

Fracking Up Baby

This study has not been peer-reviewed. It was presented at a meeting of the American Economic Association on January 4. It has also not been posted anywhere, to my knowledge. I am relying on an article written by reporter Mark Whitehouse for Bloomberg News. (I will update this post if I get further relevant information.) The credibility of the study seems to be quite high. The researchers are Janet Currie of Princeton, Katherine Meckel of Columbia, and John Deutsch and Michael Greenstone of MIT, who have previously published studies of the health effects of pollution. The study was funded by the Environmental Protection Agency and the MacArthur Foundation.

The authors used Pennsylvania birth records to compare the health of newborn infants living within 2.5 kilometers (slightly over 1.5 miles) of natural gas fracking sites to a control group of infants living elsewhere in Pennsylvania. Public records allowed them to pinpoint the exact latitudes and longitudes of the gas wells and the mothers' homes. Those babies whose mothers lived near a fracking site had a 9% probability of low birth weight (less than 5.5 pounds), compared to 5.6% in the control group.

Photo by AP/Keith Srakocic

Low birth weight is an important predictor of infant health and survival, and is associated later in life with inhibited growth, lower educational attainment, and chronic diseases. There is growing evidence that one of its causes is exposure to environmental toxins. The fracking group also had a 5% chance of a low Apgar score, double the control group. The Apgar score is given by the doctor, who evaluates the child's heart rate, breathing, muscle tone, reflexes and skin coloring at the time of birth. A low score indicates problems in one or more of these areas.

This is not the first study to find that fracking is associated with infant health problems. Faith Hill, a Cornell undergraduate, found that Pennsylvania children born near fracking sites had lower birth weights and lower Apgar scores compared to a control group of infants born near permitted sites prior to any drilling. However, this study could have been confounded by migration away from the site after drilling began and a reduction in property values in the vicinity. The net result is that people living near drilling sites may have lower socioeconomic status or other characteristics that could explain their children's poorer health.

The Currie study attempts to deal with this problem two ways. It corrects statistically for geographical differences in maternal health. More importantly, it looks at a subsample of mothers who gave birth both before and after drilling began. These mothers serve as their own control group, which eliminates most alternative explanations. Of course, the mothers were older after the onset of fracking, but lower birth weight is typically associated with younger maternal age.

How does fracking result in poor infant health? The authors claim that water pollution is probably not the cause, since there were no differences between mothers who used public water systems and those who obtained their water from private wells, which are more likely to be contaminated by fracking. This leaves air pollution as the most likely possibility. Pollution may be due to leakage of gases from around the well or from open frackwater waste pools, which are allowed in Pennsylvania. 

Whitehouse ends his article with the following odd bit of false balance:

The study doesn't necessarily tell us whether or not fracking is worth doing. There may be offsetting health benefits related to the added jobs fracking creates, to lower energy prices or to the reduced use of coal or other fuels as more natural gas becomes available.

Seriously? Are children to be sacrificed for lower energy prices? The comment ignores the possibility that Pennsylvania could impose stricter regulations to reduce air and water pollution near fracking sites, if its state government were not a wholly-owned subsidiary of the natural gas industry. 

Fracking is exempt from the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and other federal anti-pollution regulations. So far, government has largely ignored the precautionary principle when it comes to fracking. The burden of proof has been placed on opponents of fracking to demonstrate health problems after the damage is done. If the drilling companies want to claim health benefits of fracking, I hope they will show us their data.

As of this morning, none of Pennsylvania's major newspapers have reported the study.

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This Will Not Surprise You

This should have been an important year for news about climate change. In September, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released part one of its fifth assessment, raising their level of certainty than global warming is human-caused from 90% to 95%, increasing their estimate of sea-level rise, and discussing climate change's irreversability. 2013 was also an active weather year, including the Typhoon Haiyan, the strongest storm ever to make landfall in recorded history. But, as usual, the corporate media are still ignoring or confusing the issue.

The release of the IPCC report fell victim to false balancing when an article in The Economist suggested that there had been a “pause” in global warming during the last 15 years. Because of natural climate variability, whether there appears to be a “pause” is largely a function of which years you choose as your start and end points. 1998 was a year of record high temperatures, so most “pause” advocates start there. Below are the exact same climate data. The top chart shows in red the long term trend that best fits the data. The bottom chart marks in blue several places where global warming might appear to have “paused.”

The IPCC may have made a tactical error by addressing and refuting the “pause” claim, which increased its familiarity and allowed the media to suggest there was a “controversy” over whether climate change was really happening. (“The global atmosphere hasn't been warming lately,” CBS reported.)

Media Matters did a study of coverage of the IPCC report from August 1 through October 1 on six TV and eight print outlets. The majority of them mentioned the “pause.”

Although climate change coverage had been improving in recent years, the “pause” story brought about an increase in false balancing, with more attention given to climate skeptics. As usual, Fox News and The Wall Street Journal were the worst, but doubters were 20% of those quoted by CBS and 17% by The Washington Post. USA Today published side-by-side op-eds giving equal weight to the IPCC and its skeptics.

Another depressing feature of news coverage is their failure to mention climate change when reporting extreme weather events consistent with climate predictions. Scientists, being a cautious lot, have often said that no single weather event can be definitely attributed to climate change. The media seem to have interpreted these statements to mean that it would be irresponsible to even mention climate change when reporting on hurricanes, tornados, wildfires, droughts, etc.

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) did an analysis of reports on extreme weather on ABC, CBS and NBC TV news from January through September—ending before Typhoon Haiyan. The results could hardly have been more conclusive.

As Jim Naureckas has pointed out, every weather event is caused by the climate. While it's theoretically possible to imagine that Typhoon Haiyan might have occurred in a parallel universe in which we had not heated up the global temperature, defining “cause” that narrowly makes it impossible to ever attribute a weather event to the climate. This is not helpful when planning public policy. It's time for climate scientists to demand a new norm for reporting extreme weather. Current weather events should be compared to the historical record and changing trends should be reported every time the media do a weather story to which climate change is relevant.

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Climate of Mistrust

Situation Alarming--But Not Serious

It's sometimes said that liberals are concerned about violence in the mass media but not sexuality, while conservatives are concerned about sexuality but not violence. If so, then a new study by social psychologist Brad Bushman and his colleagues suggests that the Motion Picture Association of America's (MPAA) rating system is a system of conservatives, by conservatives, and for conservatives.

The PG-13 rating was introduced in 1984 to solve a financial problem for the film industry: Too many popular films were being rated R, and an R rating meant that children under 17 could not attend unless accompanied by a parent or guardian. According to the MPAA, a PG-13 film “may go beyong the PG rating in theme, violence, nudity, sensuality, language, adult activities or other elements, but does not reach the restricted R category.” With respect to violence, they say, “There may be depictions of violence in a PG-13 movie, but generally not both realistic and extreme or persistent violence.” So, how's it going?

First, the methodology. Bushman drew up a list of the 30 top-grossing films of each year from 1950 to 2012 (1890 films), from which they randomly selected half, or 945 films. Trained coders watched the films and identified violent sequences, defined as “physical acts where the aggressor makes or attempts to make some physical contact with the intention of causing injury or death.” This definition excludes natural disasters, accidents and sports injuries. A sequence refers to the continuous action of a character, regardless of the number of discrete acts in the sequence. This solves an important practical problem, because it is not necessary to count the exact number of violent acts, i.e., punches, gunshots, which is a major source of unreliability in measuring violence. Using this approach, they achieved a reliability of α = .80, which is pretty good.

(I have very few questions about this approach, but one problem that concerns me is the scoring of scenes with large numbers of participants, such as battle scenes. Since there is one violent sequence for each character, how do you measure the number of participants? And how do you prevent such scenes from skewing the data?)

Next, they divided the films into 5-minute segments. The number of violent sequences in each segment was counted, and each film was given a score representing the rate of violent sequences per hour. In case you're wondering, 94% of all films between 1950 and 2012 had at least one violent sequence.

Bushman also counted the number of sequences involving guns, a gun being defined as “a weapon that can be carried with one or both hands that fires a bullet or energy beam with the intention of harming or killing a living target.” Hunting and target shooting were excluded. The reliability in scoring these sequences was even better (α = .91). A violent scene involving a weapon is less ambiguous than other forms of violence.

For purposes of analysis, films after 1984 were divided by rating into three categories: G and PG, PG-13 and R. G and PG were combined because there were fewer films with these ratings among the box office hits.

First, Bushman looked at the overall trend from 1950 to 2012. Not surprisingly, there was an increase. The level of violence more than doubled. The rate of increase was not simply linear, but gradually accelerated over the 63-year period.

Then they looked at gun violence during the period from 1984 to the present. Again, there was an increase, but there were important differences by rating. The G- and PG-rated films averaged 1.26 gun sequences per hour, and the overall rate declined slightly. The R-rated films averaged 2.15 sequences per hour and the rate did not change. However, violence in PG-13 films increased significantly, more than tripling over the 29 years. It started at near-zero, but accelerated sharply in recent years. From 2009-2012 the rate of gun violence was higher in PG-13-rated films than in R-rated films, flatly contradicting the MPAA guidelines.

The study does not report any measures of nudity or sexuality in films, but one of the co-authors, Daniel Romer, said that they measured sexuality, and it is much more likely to get an R rating than violence. I presume these results will appear in a future publication.

The relationship between filmed and televised violence and aggressive behavior is one of the strongest findings in social science, replicated in hundreds of experimental and correlational studies. The American Psychological Association and several other professional organizations have issued position papers highlighting these findings and recommending public policy changes. When you statistically combine the results of these studies in a meta-analysis, the relationship between filmed violence and aggressive behavior turns out to be almost as strong as that between smoking and lung cancer, and higher than many other statistical relationships that society takes very seriously, i.e., exposure to lead and IQ, homework and academic achievement. Exposure to media violence also makes participants less likely to help a person in need.

Daniel Craig as the PG-13-rated James Bond

Gun violence is a particular concern due to the weapons effect. Experiments show that the mere presence of a weapon—or a picture of a weapon—in the environment increases aggressive behavior in both angry and non-angry participants, which is probably why the presence of a gun in the home increases homicides.

While preparing this blog entry, I read at least a dozen reports about Bushman's study in the corporate media. Sadly, most of them contained false balancing (such as this one and this one). That is, they “balanced” Bushman's findings with comments from skeptics who dismissed the idea that violence in films might influence real-world aggressive behavior. (Science Daily was a notable exception.) The most common argument was that homicides have declined in this country in recent years, even as filmed violence has increased. This reasoning is, of course, completely fallacious, since there are many other variables that influence the homicide rate.

False balancing creates the mistaken impression that “experts disagree” over whether gun violence in movies really matters. Considering the popularity of violent films and television shows, this may be exactly what their audience wants to hear. Bushman has recently written an article suggesting several ways people rationalize away these findings. It is also worth noting that most of these news organizations are owned by larger media corporations that profit from the sale of filmed and televised violence. Bushman and Anderson have found that as the findings linking media violence and agression have gotten stronger, the news media have become more assertive in dismissing them.

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The Job Killers, Part 1

Laffing All the Way to the Bank

For more than three decades, Republicans have argued that higher taxes, especially higher taxes on the rich, hurt the economy by discouraging work and investment, or alternatively, that the economy will be stimulated by tax cuts. This prediction was illustrated by the Laffer curve, named for economist Arthur Laffer, who claimed that under most circumstances government revenue increases when taxes are cut, since economic growth more than compensates for loss of revenue due to the tax cut itself.

That this rhetoric is still central to the Republican message is illustrated by Sen. Marco Rubio's rebuttal to President Obama's State of the Union speech:

[A]s you heard tonight, his solution to virtually every problem we face is for Washington to tax more, borrow more and spend more. . . . And the idea that more taxes and more government spending is the best way to help hard-working middle-class taxpayers—that's an old idea that's failed every time it's been tried.

True to his word, Rubio was one of eight senators who voted against last month's “fiscal cliff” agreement, presumably because it raised taxes on Americans earning over $400,000 per year ($450,000 for couples).

What's the actual relationship between marginal tax rates and economic growth? An article by economist Gerald Friedman in the latest issue of Dollars and Sense addresses this issue with two important charts.

As I've noted before, when it is impossible to do a controlled experiment to test a hypothesis about social policy, we must turn to two types of quasi-experiment. In a time series design, you look at how the outcome variable (economic growth in the United States) changes from before to after a change in the social policy (a tax cut) that is hypothesized to affect it. This table shows the relationship between tax rates on the wealthy and gross domestic product (GDP) growth during all the presidencies after World War II.

The biggest tax cuts came under Reagan and Bush II. You might object that it takes time for tax cuts to stimulate the economy, but Bush I and Obama presided over even lower GDP growth than their predecessors. The main counterargument to a time series design is that the results might be explained by other historical changes that happened to coincide with tax policies.

The alternative is a comparison group design. Since tax policies are national decisions, the United States must be compared to other similar countries that have different marginal tax rates. The historical change argument is partially negated by the fact that the countries are compared over the same time period.

This chart is particularly stark in its condemnation of U. S. tax policy. The main counterargument to a comparison group design is that the countries are simply not comparable—for example, that all these other countries have some advantage that the U. S. lacks which accounts for their greater economic growth. Really?

I don't mean to suggest that these two charts exhaust the arguments against low taxes or tax cuts for the wealthy. For example, Friedman also shows that there is no relationship between top marginal tax rates and investment. Returning to Sen. Rubio's argument, it appears that it is not tax increases but tax cuts that have failed every time they have been tried.

The evidence that higher taxes and tax increases do not harm the economy seems so clear that it may be time to call into question the media's policy of false balancing, or quoting statements like Rubio's without comment or evaluation. It is difficult for public attitudes to change when the media merely act as a conduit for false information.

The "Job Killers," Part 1

Students of persuasion from Aristotle to Adolf Hitler have advised propagandists that statements can acquire the illusion of truth through repetition. Let's suppose you hear a plausible statement, but you are unsure whether it is true, i.e., “Greenland has about 50,000 inhabitants” or “Zachary Taylor was the first president to die in office.” Research in social psychology has shown that the more frequently you are exposed to such statements, the more likely you are to judge them to be true. A recent statistical analysis of 51 studies found this “illusion of truth effect” to be highly reliable. The effect is largely unconscious. People judge familiar statements to be true even when they can't remember whether they've heard them before.

Here's a statement I'll bet you've heard quite often in the past few years: “Government regulations are job killers.” Peter Dreier and Christopher Martin, Professors of Political Science and Communication respectively, did a content analysis in which they looked at every instance of the phrase “job killer” in the Associated Press, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post from 1984 to 2011. There were 381 articles that contained the phrase “job killer” and its variations. (If you think that's not very many, remember that stories from these four organizations are widely reprinted. The Associated Press alone serves 1700 newspapers and 500 radio and TV stations. The authors cite one article that received 12,800 citations.)

The first thing they noted is that use of this phrase has become more frequent in recent years. In fact, it increased dramatically after Barack Obama took office. From the first three years of the George W. Bush administration to the first three years of the Obama administration, appearances of “job killer” increased by 1156%; that is, there were about 11.5 times as many “job killer” stories.

Most of the accusations focused on federal (65%) and state (12%) government policies designed to regulate business. The top four policies claimed to be job killers were environmental regulations (18%), tax policies (17%), health care reform (10%), and wage policies (8%), usually proposals to increase the minimum wage.

Not surprisingly, the most common sources in stories claiming that something was a job killer were Republican politicians (42%) and business spokespersons (19%). But the third most frequent source was the authors themselves. 17% of the time, the newspaper used the phrase in articles or editorials without attributing it to any source, suggesting that the claim that government regulations are job killers is part of the conventional wisdom. The Wall Street Journal was more likely than the other organizations to use the phrase without attribution.

91.6% of the articles alleging that a government policy was or would be a job killer did not present any evidence to support that claim, either from the source or from the article's author. In the 8.4% of cases where evidence was presented, the most frequent types reported were anecdotes (3.4%), quantitative data (1.6%), a study (1%), and the opinion of an economist (.8%). The authors did not find a single case in which journalists attempted on their own to investigate the veracity of a job-killing claim.

In cases where a source claimed that a policy was a job killer, reporters provided a counterclaim from an opposition source only 7% of the time. I find this especially noteworthy. Even when claims have broad empirical support, such as the evidence for global warming, reporters usually engage in false balancing by citing the opinions of a small minority of global warming skeptics. However, claims of job-killing seem to be exempt from the norm of balance which requires journalists to present both sides of the issue. Are other conservative statements similarly exempt? Does labeling a statement “controversial” only apply to claims made by liberals?

Concerns about unemployment are higher during economic hard times, so you might expect articles about job killers to increase during a recession. However, there was no correlation. The only historical variable that predicted job-killing claims was the occupant of the White House. They were up during Democrat administrations and down when Republicans were in power.

Dreier and Martin cite journalism textbooks and the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics, which state that it is a reporter's job to verify what newsmakers say. This advice is apparently now archaic. To report that a politician's or businessman's statement is true or false risks being accused of bias, especially at this historical moment, when the truth appears to have a liberal bias.

Failure of reporters to investigate the claims of politicians has the obvious consequence of making it more difficult for the public to determine whether their statements are true. It also means that politicians pay no penalty for lying, since they are never called out for it. This would seem to encourage further falsehoods. Perlstein has argued American politics has become a fact-free zone where lying has become the new normal.

It's obvious that the job killer meme—along with the equally suspect claim that the wealthy are “job creators”—has become a powerful weapon in the hands of Elephant politicians and their allies in the corporate media. Few journalists seemed concerned when the House of Representatives passed an attempt to kill the Affordable Care Act (ACA) entitled “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Act.” In fact, an analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted that the ACA would not lead to significant layoffs, only voluntary retirements. Politifact rated House majority leader Eric Cantor's statement that Obamacare was a job killer as “false” for that reason.

To what extent do government policies protecting workers, consumers or the environment actually lead to job loss? It's hard to say, since there hasn't been a lot of good research. One policy that has been extensively studied is the minimum wage, where research shows that increasing the minimum wage does not increase unemployment. For another example, see Part 2 of this post.

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.

The Mourning After

Three years ago, President-elect Obama, while naming his science advisors, promised to take an entirely different approach to science than his predecessor. He said it was time to “once again put science at the top of our agenda.” Science is about facts and evidence, he said, that “are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology.”

It's about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it's inconvenient—especially when it's inconvenient. Because the highest purpose of science is the search for knowledge, truth and a greater understanding of the world around us. That will be my goal as President of the United States.

One area where the Bush administration flagrantly ignored scientific evidence was reproductive policy. They rejected any change that the Religious Right mistakenly assumed would encourage gay or premarital sex. This included their outright refusal to allow the sale of Plan B One-Step, the morning after contraceptive pill, to anyone without a prescription in 2004, and their refusal to allow sale without a prescription to minors in 2006.

Of course, politics would never trump science with the Jackass Party in power, right?

The other day, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius announced that the Obama administration would reject the unanimous recommendation of the scientific advisory board of the Food and Drug Administration that Plan B be made available to teenage girls without a prescription.

In defending the decision, President Obama said that Secretary Sebelius was not sure that “a 10-year-old or an 11-year-old” would be able to understand how to use the product. The age reference is pure propaganda, considering how unlikely it is that a 10- or 11-year-old will first have sex, then be able to afford the $40-50 per dose fee, and, finally, find a pharmacist willing to sell it to her. But what is particularly upsetting thing about the President's statement is that the FDA conducted studies specifically to test teenagers' understanding of how to take the pill. The FDA Commissioner wrote:

CDER (Center for Drug Evaluation and Research) carefully considered whether younger females were able to understand how to use Plan B One-Step. Based on the information submitted to the agency, CDER determined that the product was safe and effective in adolescent females. . . . Additionally, the data supported a finding that adolescent females could use Plan B One-Step properly without the intervention of a healthcare provider.

Not only did Sebelius and Obama ignore this advice, they dishonestly spoke as if such research had never been done.

It's hard to believe that the President will pick up any votes from the Religious Right as a result of this decision. But with the way the 2012 campaign is shaping up—with the Elephant Party choosing among candidates who seem to lack an accurate conception of reality, and with no challenger from the progressive side—the President apparently feels free to poke his most loyal supporters in the eye with a sharp stick any time he feels like it.

Finally, let me give a shout-out to Marie McCullough, a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette now has a cooperative relationship with the Inquirer, which undoubtedly allowed them both to lay off some reporters, but which resulted in her article being published in Pittsburgh. After describing pressure from the manufacturer to approve the sale of the drug, she made the following comment:

On the other side of the campaign were conservative religious and political groups. They believed easy access to contraception would lead teenagers to have earlier, riskier sex; overuse the backup method while neglecting more reliable birth control; avoid consulting physicians; and become victims of sexual abuse. With about a thousand studies of emergency contraception now in the medical literature, there is no evidence to support these beliefs, but conservatives continue to hold them. (Italics mine)

We live in a media environment in which reporters and editors slavishly follow a norm of false balancing in which every political opinion, no matter how far-fetched, is treated as equally credible, and reporters never mention evidence to suggest which side of a political controversy is factually correct. Ms. McCullough is to be congratulated. I hope she doesn't lose her job.