White People Don't Riot: A Manual of Style for Ambitious Young Journalists

Last week, two motorcycle gangs clashed at a restaurant in Waco, TX. They fought with fists, chains, knives and guns. Nine of them were killed, 18 were injured and 170 were arrested.

What is the proper terminology to use when referring to this incident in the corporate media? The New York Times referred to it variously as a “confrontation,” “fight,” “shootout,” “chaos,” and “problems.” To this, CNN added “melee,” “ruckus,” “fracas,” “brawl,” and “brouhaha.” Under no circumstances, however, is it to be referred to as a “riot,” since this term is reserved for the actions of people of color.

How are the participants in this incident to be called? As Charles Blow pointed out, the Times referred to them as “biker clubs” and “outlaw motorcycle gangs,” terms that have positive, even romantic, connotations to some Americans. However, they are not to be referred to as “thugs,” since this term refers to young black men demonstrating against police brutality. Furthermore, it would be ridiculous to assume that biker gangs are representative of white culture generally, or to speculate that their behavior was influenced by heavy metal music. It is equally inappropriate to question whether their fathers were present during their upbringing.

A similar principle applies to the use of the word “terrorist.” Terrorists are Muslims who plot or engage in violent acts against non-combatants. It follows then that white people engaged in similar actions are, by definition, not terrorists. In fact, when white people do these things, one may question whether they are newsworthy at all. Here is a useful case in point.

© Doggart for Congress

Robert Doggart, an ordained Christian minister and former Congressional candidate from Signal Mountain, TN was recently convicted of plotting—on tape and on the internet—to attack the residents of Islamberg, a small, rural Muslim community near Hancock, NY. To implement his plan, Doggart recruited followers and “battle tested” his M4 rifle. His statements, recorded by an informant, included the following:

Those guys [have] to be killed. Their buildings need to be burnt down. If we can get in there and do that not losing a man, even the better.

Yet Doggart was allowed to plead guilty only to interstate communication of threats, is out on bail, and faces a maximum penalty of five years in jail.

You've probably never heard of this case, and rightly so. Attempting to report such a crime in the corporate media would likely end the career of an aspiring young journalist. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting did a search of the Nexis data base looking for media coverage of the Doggart case. It was reported in local Tennessee news media, and by a handful of mostly small newspapers in the US, UK and Pakistan. It was not covered by the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, NPR or any of the national television networks.

Imagine the saturation coverage the corporate media would have given this incident had it been a Muslim group plotting a similar attack on a small Christian community.

Where did Doggart get the idea to attack Hancock, NY?

As the Daily Beast pointed out, one reason for the lack of coverage is that the FBI chose not to put out a press release about Doggart's arrest. This stands in sharp contrast to the extensive publicity given to cases of entrapment in which an undercover agent is able to persuade some hapless Muslim to agree to participate in an FBI-planned terrorist plot. When deciding what is important, journalists are well-advised to follow the lead of the FBI.

Aspiring reporters may question whether there are any exceptions to the “white people don't riot” rule. There are. The term “riot” can sometimes refer to the behavior of groups of predominantly white people, provided they are demonstrating in favor of a liberal cause. Occupy Wall Street is a recent example. A helpful cue for predicting a "riot" is when the police show up in "riot gear."

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TV Networks on Torture: "Just Do It!"

Stuart Hall (1932-2014)

A Stroll Down Memory Lane

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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TV Networks on Torture:  "Just Do It!"

This Will Not Surprise You

Climate of Mistrust

TV Networks on Torture: “Just Do It!”

After the December 9 release of the Report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, widely known as the torture report, it became the #1 story on the weekly television news programs. Since journalists seldom express opinions on such matters as whether “rectal hydration” constitutes torture or whether politicians who approved such methods should be prosecuted, the best measure of the corporate media's position on these issues is to examine the guests who are invited to their programs to express their views.

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) surveyed the guests on nine TV news programs during the week of December 7 through 14: ABC's This Week, CBS's Face the Nation, CNN's State of the Union and Situation Room, Fox's Fox News Sunday and Special Report, MSNBC's Hardball, NBC's Meet the Press, and PBS's News Hour.

Of the 104 guests on these programs, 53 of them indicated whether they supported or opposed the “enhanced interrogation techniques” described in the report. Thirty-five of them (66%) supported the CIA's actions, while the remaining 18 (34%) were opposed. While some progressive critics worried that the networks would give equal time to torturers, they probably didn't anticipate that the “liberal” media would present more advocates of torture than opponents by a two-to-one margin. (Of course, most of those who supported the CIA's actions usually also claimed that they did not constitute “torture.”)

Sixty-five of the 104 guests were journalists, most of whom remained neutral. The second largest group was 35 current and former government officials. Nine CIA officers were among them, seven of whom defended their agency's practices. Of those who were political partisans, 19 were Republicans and 7 were Democrats. Four of the Democrats spoke against torture while the others had no opinion. Sixteen of the Republicans favored the CIA's actions and three opposed them. For more details on what was actually said, see this report.)

Of course, the most prominent Republican guest was former VP Dick Cheney, who said the report was “full of crap.” As Glenn Greenwald noted, Dick Cheney should be in prison rather than having his ass kissed by the Sabbath gasbags (my language, not his). So far, the only person to be jailed over the CIA torture program is John Kiriakou, a whistleblower who helped to expose it.

While the perpetrators of torture had many opportunities to defend themselves, torture victims were seldom heard from. Their only voice was indirect. Two lawyers representing torture victims, Joseph Margulies and Meg Satterthwaite, were invited to participate in the discussions.

Given this kind of media coverage, it's not surprising that in a Pew Research Center survey of 1001 Americans conducted December 11-14, 51% said the “CIA's interrogation methods” were justified, 29% said they were not justified, and 20% had no opinion. Were they effective in preventing terrorist attacks? The Senate Report concluded they were not, but 56% of respondents thought they were effective, 21% said they were not, and 16% didn't know. The public was almost evenly divided on whether the Senate Report should have been made public. Forty-three percent thought releasing the report was the wrong decision, 42% thought it was the right decision, and 15% had no opinion.

It seems that a lot of Americans are O. K. with torture. They just don't want to know about it.

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Zero Thirty Darkness

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Who Cares What THEY Think?

Fracking and Public Health, Part 2

The Coverage

Please read part 1 about the Rabinowitz survey of fracking and health.

With the exception of USA Today, the response of the corporate media to the Rabinowitz study has been a collective yawn.

Since Washington County is part of the area served by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, one might expect the survey to be front-page news. On the contrary, the study was buried in a short article on page 4 of the local section, with what seems like a deliberately uninformative headline, “Study looks at gas wells, health.” Three of its nine paragraphs were devoted to rebuttal from Travis Windle, a spokesman for the Marcellus Shale Coalition, an industry group.

© All rights reserved by jeffs4653

In an unusually harsh attack on the integrity of the researchers, Mr. Windle stated, "This study, done in partnership with a local activist group, was designed to put selective and unproven data behind a predetermined and biased narrative." The activist group is presumably the Southwest Pennsylvania Environmental Health Project, which is opposed to fracking. They are credited with assistance with the survey; specifically: "The survey was pre-tested with focus groups in the study area in collaboration with a community-based group and revised to ensure comprehensibility of questions." If this is all they did, they played only a limited role in the study.

Pittsburgh's avowedly right wing newspaper, the Tribune-Review, offered an unusual take on the Rabinowitz study. First of all, they claim that this study is balanced by a “confllicting” 2014 study by Penn State geologist Terry Engelder and colleagues. This study found no evidence that fracking fluids, injected deep underground into the Marcellus shale, were migrating toward the surface and contaminating the ground water. Rather than conflicting, the two studies are actually irrelevant. Rabinowitz attributed the symptoms he discovered to air pollution, pollution of ground water from fluids leaking from around the drilling site, and stress. Migration of deep underground fluids, if it occurs, is presumably a problem for future generations to deal with, long after the drilling companies have taken their money and run.

The Tribune-Review also suggested that both studies are biased due to their source of funding. The Engelder study was supported by the Marcellus Shale Coalition and included an employee of Shell International as one of its co-authors. The primary supporter of the Rabinowitz study was the non-profit Heinz Foundation. The Heinz Foundation underwent a turnover of its executive staff beginning in August 2013, which is widely interpreted as a shift toward opposition to fracking. Previously, Heinz had been a member of the Center for Sustainable Shale Development, a coalition of environmental and industry groups that was supposed to establish voluntary safety rules for drilling. However, the Rabinowitz study was completed in 2012, while Heinz was still friendly with the drilling industry.

It's clear that we need an improved vocabulary for talking about real or imagined conflicts of interest in research, one which, at a minimum, distinguishes between financial and ideological conflicts of interest. If your research is supported by a for-profit corporation and its results are contrary to corporate interests, two consequences are likely. First, the research results will never be made public, and second, you will never again receive financial support from that corporation. Those outcomes are unlikely when your research is supported by a non-profit foundation.

The Tribune-Review seeks to expand the category of conflicts of interest to include those cases when the researchers or their sponsors have an opinion about the research topic. But this is unrealistic, since investigators almost always have opinions about their research, opinions which often explain why they were interested in the topic in the first place. Even when the research topic is completely non-political, scientists are often professionally committed to their research hypotheses. Good research design ensures that the researchers' expectations, and those of their financial supporters, do not influence the results.

I can't comment on the design of the Engelder study because I lack expertise in geoscience. I described the Rabinowitz study in some detail because it seems to me that the authors have done a good job, under the circumstances, of minimizing researcher bias and evaluating alternative explanations. Right now, the best advice to people on both sides of the issue is replicate, replicate, replicate. For example, studies of fracking and health are in progress at the Geisinger Health Center in central Pennsylvania. Ultimately, whether researchers have successfully eliminated bias is an empirical question. If studies are replicated often enough, it should be possible to determine through systematic reviews whether researchers with different sources of funding have obtained inconsistent results.

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Fracking and Public Health, Part 1

Fracking Up Baby

Motivated Reasoning

And Then There Were Five, Part 2

This post will discuss the implications of the Comcast purchase of Time Warner for the internet. But first, please read Part 1, which focuses on cable television.

The Comcast-Time Warner merger is particularly troubling for those of us who get a lot of our news and information from the internet. The internet was developed at taxpayer expense through government-sponsored research and development, but was given away to private interests in one of the largest examples of corporate welfare in US history. Because of their near monopoly status, internet service providers (ISPs) have no real incentive to upgrade their transmission lines. The result is similar to that of our dysfunctional health care system. We pay the highest prices, yet we are one of the most backward of the developed countries. In a 2013 study of 16 countries by Open Signal, our average download time was faster than only the Philippines. Yet the New America Foundation found that the average cost of “triple play” (phone, TV and internet) service in nine US cities in 2013 was $90, compared to an average of $35 for faster service in 15 cities in Europe and Asia.

In January, the US Court of Appeals struck down the FCC's net neutrality policy, stating that it did not have the constitutional authority to regulate an information service. Net neutrality is the policy that requires internet service providers to transmit all signals at the same speed and for the same price. Without net neutrality, ISPs can slow down the service of competitors and other disfavored sources, then charge them a fee if they want faster service, the cost of which would be passed on to consumers. According to Craig Aaron of Free Press, “(T)heir long-term plan is to take a free and open internet and turn it into something like cable TV, where they pick the channels and they speed them up and slow them down based on who pays the most.”

Comcast is formally committed to net neutrality until the end of 2017 as a condition of the NBC purchase, but not after that. However, both Comcast and Verizon have already been charged with slowing down some internet services, such as Netflix. But this is difficult to prove because the connections through which internet traffic flows, so-called “peering” links, are considered proprietary information and are kept secret.

To add to the confusion, it was announced on February 23 that Comcast and Netflix have reached an agreement in which Netflix will pay an unspecified amount for faster internet service. This violates the principle of net neutrality and would appear to be a tacit admission that Comcast has been slowing down Netflix's signal. In fact, it suggests that Comcast has been deliberately creating customer dissatisfaction in order to use it as a bargaining chip to extort money from Netflix. It also implies that Comcast has not lived up to the agreement it made with the Justice Department when it purchased NBC. But, hey, what's a little cheating between golfing buddies, right?

After the Court of Appeals rejected the FCC's attempt to enforce net neutrality, the FCC announced it would not appeal the court's decision, but proposed a new net neutrality rule that differs from the old one only in that it cites a different paragraph of the Communications Act as its authority. However, critics pointed out that the Court had already implied that the new rule is unconstitutional when it said that they don't have the authority to regulate an information service. The fact that the FCC appears to be ignoring the text of the Court ruling suggests to some that they may only want to give the appearance of defending net neutrality.

The problem, according to internet experts, is that the Bush-era FCC classified broadband as an “information service” rather than a “telecommunications service.” The FCC only has the authority to impose neutrality on a telecommunications service, or common carrier, the best example of which is the telephone. In other words, to preserve net neutrality, they must reclassify the internet as a telecommunications service (as advocated by this petition).

Classifying the internet as a common carrier would appear to make sense. Back in the '90s, the internet was referred to as the “information superhighway,” a metaphor than has fallen out of favor. But access to the internet may be as important to society as access to the George Washington Bridge. Unlike television, the internet could be argued to be essential to participation in society, as it is often necessary to interact with businesses, the government and other citizens. However, reclassifying the internet as a vital resource is considered a radical step for the FCC to take. It might require an act of Congress, which seems hopeless given the political power of Comcast and the other ISPs.

Even more troubling than violations of net neutrality is the potential power of ISPs to block access to certain messages altogether. Internet censorship is the ultimate violation of net neutrality. The alleged threat of pornography was used to justify internet censorship,until the Communications Decency Act was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1997. (This battle is still being fought in Britain, which has an opt-in “porn filter.”) The Edward Snowden revelations have been suggested as an excuse for government to require ISPs to censor the internet in the name of national security—a slippery slope given the government's runaway tendency to classify documents as “top secret.” Given the extent to which ISPs have cooperated with the NSA, is it far-fetched to suppose that they might voluntarily comply with government requests to block certain websites or content categories?

The Comcast-Time Warner merger reminds us of how easily our access to news and entertainment can be manipulated or taken away. One of the major fault lines in media research is the debate over how much people's attitudes are influenced by media exposure. Are we active audiences who counterargue against media messages with which we disagree, or are we mindless consumers of media propaganda? In fact, we are both. The problem is that talking back to the media requires a level of attention and effort that is difficult to sustain, especially when we were expecting to relax and be entertained.

The problem is complicated by a well-established cognitive bias, the third person effect—the tendency for people to believe that they are personally less affected by media messages than other people are. For example, in a room of 50 people, everyone thinks that he or she is less influenced by advertising than the other 49. This virtually guarantees that we will underestimate how much the media affect our thoughts. More troublesome is the fact that, although we don't have to believe what the media tell us, most of us can't know, and therefore can't think about, what they don't tell us. (What are they telling us, for example, about the Comcast-Time Warner merger?)

What is at stake here could be nothing less than the contents of our consciousness.

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And Then There Were Five, Part 1

Stuart Hall (1932-2014)

And Then There Were Five, Part 1

I've been trying to finish this post for over a week, but I keep finding new information that forces me to revise it. Maybe I can make some progress by breaking it into two parts. Let's start by moving the chart on media ownership from it's prior location in my piece about Stuart Hall to here.

You'll notice the chart is slightly out of date. In 2011, Comcast moved to the top of the leftmost pyramid when the Obama administration, in spite of public pressure, gave its approval to Comcast's purchase of NBC-Universal from General Electric. As of 2013, GE is no longer involved with either Comcast or NBC-Universal.

On February 13, Comcast, the nation's largest cable TV and broadband provider, announced its intention to buy Time Warner, the second largest cable company, for $45.2 billion. This will reduce the number of conglomerates that control over 90% of the country's supply of news and entertainment from six to five.

If the deal is approved, Comcast stands to control 38% of the cable TV market. However, Comcast is promising to divest itself of three million subscribers in order to bring their share below 30%. Even so, it will have a near monopoly in 19 of the largest 20 metropolitan areas. More than half of cable users are “triple play” customers, purchasing television, telephone and internet service as a bundle. The new Comcast would control 40% of the internet market with 32 million customers, compared to 16 million for AT&T and 9 million for Verizon.

The new company is expected to generate $1.5 billion in cost savings through “efficiencies,” that is, largely through layoffs. (“All of our operators are busy right now . . .“) The FCC reports that, in the last two decades, cable TV rates have increased at four times the rate of inflation (6% per year vs. 1.5%). Both Comcast and Time-Warner are regularly voted by consumers as among the most hated corporations in America due to their high fees and poor customer service. It seems likely that both of those problems will get worse under the new Comcast.

Opposition to the merger, at least as portrayed by the corporate media, has focused on the potential for cable and broadband rate increases. But Comcast and Time Warner already have monopolies in almost all the areas they service. This has allowed Comcast to argue that the merger will not reduce competition, since the two companies “do not currently compete to serve customers in any zip code in America.” But this is just a smokescreen. The real incentive for this merger is the unprecedented market power it would give the new Comcast over both the price and content of television programs.

• Since Comcast already owns the NBC family of channels, as well as cable networks like Bravo and USA, they don't have to pay them for content. It benefits them to keep competitors off the cable lineup.
• A bigger Comcast will give them more leverage to negotiate lower rates for networks they don't own. Other cable networks may have to merge in order to negotiate successfully with them, which could lead to further undesirable consolidation among existing networks.
• A more subtle form of discrimination against competitors or disfavored networks is to give them poorer channel locations. The most desirable locations are low numbers and locations proximate to other channels that appeal to the same audience. It is also desirable for networks to be bundled for pricing purposes with other more popular networks. Comcast has already been accused these types of discrimination, i.e., their dispute with Bloomberg News.
• The combination of Comcast's market power and its desire to promote its own product poses a formidable challenge to future startup networks, thus discouraging innovation. 
• More importantly, Comcast will be free to exclude or make life difficult for any networks whose programming they find objectionable. Both Al Gore's now-defunct Current TV and al Jazeera America have had difficulty finding appropriate cable niches. Liberals should be grateful that MSNBC was already grandfathered into the cable TV lineup before it switched to more progressive programming.

One of the biggest threats to the future of the cable TV giants is so-called “cord cutters”—people who have dropped their cable TV service and are purchasing films and TV from online streaming services like Hulu and Netflix. But the new Comcast's dominance over broadband access will help to defeat that strategy, by allowing them to raise their internet only service to only a few dollars per month less than their internet-plus-TV package.

There is little reason to expect any serious opposition to the merger from either the FCC or the Justice Department, as indicated by their assent to Comcast's purchase of NBC Universal, and more recently, the Justice Department's approval of American Airlines' purchase of US Airways. Last year, Comcast was the seventh-largest lobbyist in the country, spending an estimated $18.8 million. Of the 97 Congresspeople who signed a letter endorsing the NBC purchase, 91 of them received contributions from Comcast during the previous election cycle. Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, who received $30 million in salary and other compensation in 2012, is a golfing partner of President Obama. Last year, Roberts entertained Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder at his Martha's Vineyard estate. Comcast's chief lobbyist David L. Cohen is a major Democratic Party fund-raiser.

Economist Paul Krugman asks the question: When and why did we stop worrying about monopoly power? The when, he says, was during the Reagan era. The reasons given for allowing concentration included encouraging innovation and competing in the international marketplace. But oligopolies can discourage innovation by tacitly agreeing not to compete with one another, and Americans can't purchase cable services from foreign companies. In the last few decades, the argument that near-monopolies charge higher prices and provide poorer service has proven to be no match for the power of lobbying and campaign contributions in a political system that can best be characterized as legalized bribery.

John Nichols reminds us that the original purpose of the freedom of the press clause in the First Amendment was to have a diversity of viewpoints in order to encourage dissent and debate.  It's hard to see how this merger serves the public interest.

Part 2 will discuss the implications of the Comcast-Time Warner merger for the internet.

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Stuart Hall (1932-2014)

Who Care What THEY Think?

The Job Killers, Part 1

Stuart Hall (1932-2014)

One of my academic heroes, media theorist Stuart Hall died Monday at the age of 82. He was diabetic and had been ill for some time. Hall was born in Jamaica, came to England in 1951 as a Rhodes scholar, and stayed on as the leader of the Cultural Studies movement. From 1964-1979, he was the director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University. He taught at the Open University from 1979 until his retirement in 1997. He was the founding editor of the New Left Review.

© iniva.org

Generally speaking, cultural studies is about how people are taught to categorize one another by nationality, class, gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. Hall was one of the first scholars to take popular culture seriously. We do not perceive the world directly, but through the lens of media representations. A lot of what seems to us to be “common sense” is actually the opinions and perspectives of our culture transmitted through the media. The “common sense” viewpoint is usually motivated by social class interests that attempt to manipulate our consciousness for ideological reasons. Cultures conceal their ideologies, however, behind a veil of “nature,” claiming that their own cultural practices are “natural” and everyone else's is “unnatural.” (“Of course” Santa Claus is a White man.)

Hall originated the encoding-decoding model. This model proposes that the mass media audience is not passive, but actively participates in understanding and interpreting the text. Messages are constructed (encoded) by media producers and interpreted (decoded) by audiences. Since every media text is polysemic, or many-layered, there is considerable variability in how a message can be decoded. Hall divides readings of a text into three broad categories. Think, for example, of a television commercial.

1. The preferred, dominant or hegemonic reading is one in which the audience fully accepts the producer's message. The reader accepts the dominant ideology and “buys” the product.
2. An oppositional or resistant reading is one in which the reader uses an alternative frame of reference to decode the message in a totally contrary way. The reader challenges the dominant ideology, for example, by thinking that all advertisements are lies.
3. A negotiated reading is a mixture of acceptance and rejection of the preferred meaning that was encoded in the text.

A key concept in Hall's theory is representation. The media do not reflect the real world, they represent (or “re-present”) it. Prior to Hall, the older view was that media representations can be compared to reality, and any discrepancy between the two constitutes media bias. But Hall questioned whether politically-charged events have any reality independent of the media. What is the “true meaning” of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians? Both sides watch the same newscast and see it as biased against them. Hall would argue that there is no fixed meaning of the conflict, and no way of reaching consensus on what would be an unbiased representation.

Hall's theory was that the true meaning of an object or event is determined largely by how it is representated, or as he says, the representations are constitutive of the event. Media practices serve to define reality for us. The mass media are owned and controlled by a small number of giant corporations. The people who direct these corporations attempt to fix meaning for their own ends and interests. Collectively, our representations of the external world constitute ideology—the set of beliefs and values by which people make sense of the world they live in. The dominant ideology is the version of events used by the ruling class to maintain or improve their social position, which is, of course, the representation of the world presented by the corporate media.

Examples are easy to find. What the media define as realistic public policy is actually only a small segment of what is possible, a segment defined by the space between our center-right political party (called “Democrats”) and our far right party (“Republicans.”) Social class differences, when discussed at all, are presented as justified by the superior abilities and effort of the rich. Social problems such as crime and poverty are seen as caused by personal defects of the individual, rather than by situations or structural arrangements. Personal problems are “solved” through purchase of a consumer product, as when loneliness is cured by mouthwash. Entertainment is used as a distraction from depressing life circumstances. A person with no personal power can still get satisfaction by watching the Steelers beat the crap out of their opponent on a Sunday afternoon.

Not surprisingly, Hall was particularly interested in how Black people are represented in the media, and wrote about the culural, political and economic interests that are served by creating irrational fear of young Black men, i.e., the “prison-industrial complex.” Although people can always talk back to the media, Hall saw media representations as a highly effective way of controlling thoughts and behavior, often leading to a false consciousness in which people vote in ways that are contrary to their self-interest.

Representation and the Media is a 55-min. video about Hall's theories that is available in four parts on You Tube. However, poor picture quality makes it difficult to watch. Here is a trailer for a more recent video about Hall, not available on the internet.

You might be interested in this brief 2012 interview segment in which he was asked to evaluate Obama's presidency.

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Motivated Reasoning

The Job Killers, Part 1

Breathing While Black

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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Herding Cats

You've all heard that trying to get liberals united behind a common goal is like herding cats, or that when liberals go into battle, they form a circular firing squad. A new study appears to support these clichés, and attributes the problem to a liberal personality trait, the need for uniqueness.

The false consensus effect is a cognitive error in which we believe that more people agree with our attitudes than is actually the case. For example, both those who favor and those who oppose the legalization of marijuana might think that theirs is the majority view. One explanation for false consensus is that we tend to associate with others who share our views and are therefore exposed to a biased sample of opinions. The opposite of false consensus is a false uniqueness effect in which people incorrectly believe that most others disagree with them. However, most studies of the general population find false consensus rather than false uniqueness.

In the study by Chadly Stern and others, 292 participants recruited over the internet were asked their opinions on 41 topics, 22 non-political and 19 political. They were asked to classify themselves as liberal, moderate or conservative. Then they were asked to estimate the percentage of people participating in the study “who share your political beliefs” who agreed with them on each item. A true measure of false consensus or uniqueness was obtained by comparing the participants' estimates to the actual beliefs of the study participants in their political in-group.

It was found that all three groups were inaccurate. Both moderates and conservatives showed the usual false consensus effect, but liberals showed false uniqueness. They underestimated the percentage of fellow liberals who agreed with them. In a second study, 287 participants were this time asked to estimate the percentage of people who shared their political beliefs in the American population who agreed with them on each item. The same results were obtained.

The authors proposed an explanation for the false uniqueness effect among liberals: That they are higher on a personality trait called need for uniqueness, defined as a strong dispositional desire to feel unique. The authors used 11 items from this 34-item Need for Uniqueness Scale, but I'm not sure which ones. Liberals are indeed higher than moderates and conservatives in need for uniqueness. An analysis showed that the relationship between political ideology and overestimation of consensus was mediated by need for uniqueness, meaning that the correlation between ideology and overestimation was significantly reduced when the effect of their common relationship to need for uniqueness was statistically removed.

I have some concerns about this study. For example, I'm not sure how participants interpreted the phrase “people who share your political beliefs.” It would have been better if the instructions had specifically referred to fellow liberals, moderates or conservatives. There are good reasons to expect liberals to underestimate the percentage of people in the general population who agree with them. As Justin Lewis has demonstrated, the corporate media tend to exclude progressive opinions from public debate, leading liberals to feel outside the political mainstream. For example, the media continually identify support for modest cuts in Social Security and Medicare as the centrist political position when their own polls show that the public is overwhelmingly opposed to such cuts. If the participants in the Stern study were confused about the group whose attitudes they were estimating, this could partially explain the results. Liberals have been marginalized by the corporate media.

I am also unimpressed with the attempt to explain liberals' behavior as resulting from a need for uniqueness. In my opinion, the words “need” and “uniqueness” are both overstatements. The items in the scale largely reflect the respondent's willingness to engage in nonconforming behavior. All the data in this study are correlational, not causal. The apparent "need" for uniqueness could be as much a result of the illusion of uniqueness as its cause. In any case, the relationship between ideology and overestimation of consensus appears to still be statistically significant after the effect of need for uniqueness is removed, so it's not a complete explanation for the phenomenon.

In the article, the authors contrast the Occupy Movement to the Tea Party. They note that the Tea Party became a potent political force, while they claim the Occupy Movement broke down due to internal bickering, presumably a result of their individual needs to feel unique. This ignores a far more important reason for the Tea Party's greater success. They received behind-the-scenes financial and logistical support from wealthy conservatives and were welcomed into the Republican Party. The Occupy Movement, on the other hand, received almost no outside support, and was shunned by the Democrats, who chose to side instead with their wealthy political donors, mostly members of the 1%.  To attribute the failure of the Occupy Movement to the personalities of its members is politically naive. One of my pet peeves is the tendency for psychologists—even social psychologists, who should know better—to attribute behavior primarily to personal motives and overlook situational forces that are much more likely explanations for the behavior.

Regardless of why liberals underestimate their political strength, it is important that they examine public opinion polls directly, rather than trusting the corporate media to interpret them. (See, for example, my recent post on the public's “surprising” views on climate change.)

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Who Cares What They Think

Deja Vu

Our understanding of what has already happened in Syria is grounded in facts, informed by conscience, and guided by common sense.

                                                                                 John Kerry, 8/26/13

Here are the Secretary of State's remarks:

Mr. Kerry is obviously preparing Americans for an illegal U.S.-led military intervention in Syria by claiming that the Syrian regime is guilty of atrocities. The corporate media have fallen into line and are beating the drums of war. This may be a tough sell, since a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted last week (August 19-23) found that 60% of Americans oppose intervention in Syria while only 9% support it. Of course, past experience shows that the easiest way to increase support for war is to go to war.

In his statement, Mr. Kerry emphasized that the evidence that chemical weapons have been used is “undeniable” and that this action was a “moral atrocity.” His factual claim is almost certainly true, and his moral judgment is shared by almost everyone, but none of this proves that Syrian President Bashar Assad knowingly carried out the chemical attack. His invitation to Americans to watch videos of the dead victims is a transparent encouragement to be swayed by our emotional responses and ignore the lack of evidence that the Syrian government is responsible.

To what extent is our understanding of what happened in Syria “grounded in facts?” So far, Kerry has provided few facts. Although United Nations representatives are investigating the incident, Kerry explicitly stated that this investigation will only determine whether chemical weapons were used, not who used them. Having defined the U. N. fact-finding mission as irrelevant, he seems to be saying that we will intervene regardless of the contents of their report, and maybe before it is released. Meanwhile, our government is showing disturbing signs of confirmatory bias, behaving as if it were a prosecutor gathering evidence in support of its initial hypothesis, rather than exploring all possible hypotheses.

What “facts” have been presented? Kerry said, “We know that the Syrian regime maintains custody of these weapons. We know that the Syrian regime has the capacity to do this with rockets.” This proves absolutely nothing, since the same can be said about the Syrian opposition, which includes some defectors from the Syrian military, and several other Middle Eastern governments and political groups.

Kerry's other argument is that President Assad has delayed U. N. inspections—which, remember, are irrelevant anyway—and is either destroying evidence or allowing it to dissipate. This argument assumes that Assad's only reason for not wanting foreign investigators inside his country is concealment of evidence. As a thought experiment, imagine how Americans might respond if a committee of representatives of enemy nations demanded entry to the D. C. suburbs to investigate our government's activities.

Kerry promises that he will release evidence of Syria's guilt at some unspecified future time. He didn't say whether this will occur before military action is debated in Congress or the U. N. Security Council—if in fact it is debated by either of those bodies. One commentator referred to this speech as Kerry's “Colin Powell moment,” but it seems that the lesson Kerry has taken from Powell's experience is not to be specific about details that later can be proven false. The central point is that, so far, no one has publicly presented any evidence of who was responsible for the attack.

To what extent is our understanding of what happened in Syria “informed by conscience?” There is no doubt that using poison gas is a terrible actrocity, but I'm not sure that the rest of the world is impressed by moral lectures from a country that saturated Vietnam with Agent Orange (also a chemical weapon), that poisoned Iraq with white phosphorous and depleted uranium. A country that stands by while the Egyptian military we fund and support mows down over a thousand protesters in the streets. It might be a useful exercise to discuss whether it is more heinous to murder women and children with poison gas than to burn them alive in drone attacks. Of course, there is very little news footage of the aftermath of drone attacks, and what there is is usually censored in this country by the corporate media.

To what extent is our understanding of what happened in Syria “guided by common sense?” In fact, Kerry seems to be assuming we have checked our common sense at the door. For months, it has been reported that the Syrian government is winning the war and that the insurgency is collapsing. If so, what sense does it make for Assad to risk foreign intervention by using chemical weapons that are unnecessary for him to succeed anyway?  It seems obvious that the insurgents have much more to gain by encouraging foreign governments to become more involved. (Syria's lack of motivation for the attack is so obvious that even the New York Times published an article filled with speculation about why Assad was behaving so irrationally, but, of course, never questioning the premise that Syria is responsible for the incident.)

Kerry may be appealing to a different kind of “common sense”—the knowledge that if you repeatedly tell Americans that some foreign leader is a brutal dictator, they will believe him to be capable of anything. The easiest way to mobilize support for war is to create a negative image of the intended enemy and accuse him of terrible atrocities. And so the recent past repeats itself in the Middle East.

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A Stroll Down Memory Lane