Is the Media pulling a Kerry with Romney?

[TriPolar]

In 2004 the media used a rigged video* to make Howard Dean look like a nutbag, so that John Kerry could be anointed as the ‘electable’ candidate for the Democrats. Now that Herman Cain has become the next contender to pull ahead of the media anointed ‘electable’ Romney will they do the same thing?

It was bad enough having our candidates chosen by a small percentage of the electorate in the primary system, now we have just a handful of conservative media** elites making the choices.

*Technically it was the audio that was rigged.
**Show me a major media outlet not owned by rich Wall St. types before you call it liberal.

[Sage_Rat]

@TriPolar

**Show me a major media outlet not owned by rich Wall St. types before you call it liberal.

Academic Stuff

I know it’s not the point of your thread, but fighting ignorance and all.

[TriPolar]

Ok, that study is biased. It’s comparing media outlets to members of Congress, and drawing the conclusion that the conservative media is liberal because they’re not as far right as Congress is.

[Sage_Rat]

@TriPolar

Ok, that study is biased. It’s comparing media outlets to members of Congress, and drawing the conclusion that the conservative media is liberal because they’re not as far right as Congress is.

You say “members of Congress” and then you say “Congress”. The latter does not have a single political orientation, only its members do. It compares individual news sources to individual members of Congress, and orders both of these groups relative to one another. Some news sources are to the right of some congressmen. Some news sources are to the left of other congressmen. It also includes a measure of the Average American voter. It also cites a large number of similar studies, each using alternate methodologies, but coming to the same result.

[Ibn_Warraq]

@TriPolar

In 2004 the media used a rigged video* to make Howard Dean look like a nutbag, so that John Kerry could be anointed as the ‘electable’ candidate for the Democrats. Now that Herman Cain has become the next contender to pull ahead of the media anointed ‘electable’ Romney will they do the same thing?

It was bad enough having our candidates chosen by a small percentage of the electorate in the primary system, now we have just a handful of conservative media** elites making the choices.

*Technically it was the audio that was rigged.
**Show me a major media outlet not owned by rich Wall St. types before you call it liberal.

What rigged video?

Are you talking about Dean’s “I have a scream speech”?

That wasn’t rigged.

Beyond that, his campaign had already gone down the tubes by that point.

He’d just finished a distant third if not fourth despite having easily the biggest warchest in the race(admittedly money in politics is always heavily overrated).

[TriPolar]

@Sage_Rat

You say “members of Congress” and then you say “Congress”. The latter does not have a single political orientation, only its members do. It compares individual news sources to individual members of Congress, and orders both of these groups relative to one another. Some news sources are to the right of some congressmen. Some news sources are to the left of other congressmen. It also includes a measure of the Average American voter. It also cites a large number of similar studies, each using alternate methodologies, but coming to the same result.

I’m trying to be indignant here. Don’t mellow my harsh.

@Ibn_Warraq

What rigged video?

Are you talking about Dean’s “I have a scream speech”?

That wasn’t rigged.

Beyond that, his campaign had already gone down the tubes by that point.

He’d just finished a distant third if not fourth despite having easily the biggest warchest in the race(admittedly money in politics is always heavily overrated).

The audio had the background noise filtered out. Dean was screaming above the crowd noise. He doesn’t sound batshit in the genuine audio.

[FinnAgain]

I listened to that speech live at the time and of course they filtered out background noise… if they hadn’t people would have complained that they let Dean get drowned out by background noise. But focusing on the speaker is hardly some sort of trick, as the OP implies.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

Leaving aside whether the audio was “rigged”, I think it’s far from clear that Kerry was more electable than Dean. Kerry was the safer choice, but he didn’t inspire anyone the way that Dean had, and the key to winning that election was mobilizing the Democratic base.

[PhillyGuy]

@TriPolar

Show me a major media outlet not owned by rich Wall St. types before you call it liberal.

The New York Times is owned by rich people, but aren’t most of the others broadly held joint stock companies? It used to be that only the rich held stock, but now lots of people do, if only though their pension plan.

However, the real question isn’t who owns it, but whether there is a wall between the business and news side. At most big circulation US newspapers, there is.

@TriPolar

Ok, that study is biased. It’s comparing media outlets to members of Congress, and drawing the conclusion that the conservative media is liberal because they’re not as far right as Congress is.

It is indeed difficult to objectively judge the politics of a media outlet. But at least Groseclose and Milyo tried to be objective, and got past the peer review of a reasonably good economics journal. I’ll consider other better peer-reviewed content analysis studies, if you can find them. But the Groseclose and Milyo methodology seems to me clever and reasonable. It’s not biased to compare how far left or right content is compared to something else, in this case the average of congressional speeches.

[Sage_Rat]

@PhillyGuy

It’s not biased to compare how far left or right content is compared to something else, in this case the average of congressional speeches.

Point in fact, this is how triangulation works. It’s just geometry.

[TriPolar]

Does anybody care about the media selecting the presidential candidates? Other candidates can poll higher than Romney, and the media will still report that he is the front runner and most electable Republican. Ron Paul comes in second in the Iowa Faux Poll, and he’s totally ignored.

Are you a Republican? Are you going to get to vote in the primary? It’s going to be Obama vs. Other Guy, and other guy isn’t going to be anybody the media doesn’t like. They want a horserace. Are you planning to vote for Obama? The campaign promises he makes will be based on whoever Other Guy is.

[GIGObuster]

@Sage_Rat

Point in fact, this is how triangulation works. It’s just geometry.

But others are not impressed by that research.

The problems with the Groseclose/Milyo study of media bias

Others have also objected to the study’s methodology. Here are the strongest portions of two critiques that have appeared in the last several days:

Dow Jones & Co. in a letter to Romenesko responding to the study’s classification of the Wall Street Journal news pages as liberal:

"[T]he reader of this report has to travel all the way Table III on page 57 to discover that the researchers' "study" of the content of The Wall Street Journal covers exactly FOUR MONTHS in 2002, while the period examined for CBS News covers more than 12 years, and National Public Radio’s content is examined for more than 11 years. This huge analytical flaw results in an assessment based on comparative citings during vastly differing time periods, when the relative newsworthiness of various institutions could vary widely. Thus, Time magazine is “studied” for about two years, while U.S. News and World Report is examined for eight years. Indeed, the periods of time covered for the Journal, the Washington Post and the Washington Times are so brief that as to suggest that they were simply thrown into the mix as an afterthought. Yet the researchers provide those findings the same weight as all the others, without bothering to explain that in any meaningful way to the study’s readers."

Media Matters:

We leave to the reader the judgment on whether anyone could take seriously a coding scheme in which RAND is considered substantially more "liberal" than the ACLU. But this is not the only problem with Groseclose and Milyo's study; they lump together advocacy groups and think tanks that perform dramatically different functions. For instance, according to their data, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is the third most-quoted group on the list. But stories about race relations that include a quote from an NAACP representative are unlikely to be "balanced" with quotes from another group on their list. Their quotes will often be balanced by quotes from an individual, depending on the nature of the story; however, because there are no pro-racism groups of any legitimacy (or on Groseclose and Milyo's list), such stories will be coded as having a "liberal bias." On the other hand, a quote from an NRA spokesperson can and often will be balanced with one from another organization on Groseclose and Milyo's list, Handgun Control, Inc...

It is not hard to imagine perfectly balanced news stories that Groseclose and Milyo would score as biased in one direction or the other, given the study's methodology. For instance, an article that quoted a member of Congress taking one side of an issue, and then quoted a think tank scholar taking the other side, would be coded as "biased" in the direction of whichever side was represented by the think tank scholar. Since Groseclose and Milyo's measure of "bias" is restricted to citations of think tank and advocacy groups, this kind of miscategorization is inevitable.

Groseclose and Milyo's discussion of the idea of bias assumes that if a reporter quotes a source, then the opinion expressed by that source is an accurate measure of the reporter's beliefs -- an assumption that most, if not all, reporters across the ideological spectrum would find utterly ridiculous. A Pentagon reporter must often quote Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld; however, the reporter's inclusion of a Rumsfeld quotation does not indicate that Rumsfeld's opinion mirrors the personal opinion of the reporter.

...The authors also display a remarkable ignorance of previous work on the subject of media bias. In their section titled "Some Previous Studies of Media Bias," they name only three studies that address the issue at more than a theoretical level. All three studies are, to put it kindly, questionable...

Although the authors seem completely unaware of it, in reality there have been dozens of rigorous quantitative studies on media bias and hundreds of studies that address the issue in some way. One place the authors might have looked had they chosen to conduct an actual literature review would have been a 2000 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Communication (the flagship journal of the International Communication Association, the premier association of media scholars). The abstract of the study, titled "Media bias in presidential elections: a meta-analysis," reads as follows:

A meta-analysis considered 59 quantitative studies containing data concerned with partisan media bias in presidential election campaigns since 1948. Types of bias considered were gatekeeping bias, which is the preference for selecting stories from one party or the other; coverage bias, which considers the relative amounts of coverage each party receives; and statement bias, which focuses on the favorability of coverage toward one party or the other. On the whole, no significant biases were found for the newspaper industry. Biases in newsmagazines were virtually zero as well. However, meta-analysis of studies of television network news showed small, measurable, but probably insubstantial coverage and statement biases.

** Standard scholarly practice dictates the assembly of a literature review as part of any published study, and meta-analyses, as they gather together the findings of multiple studies, are particularly critical to literature reviews. That Groseclose and Milyo overlooked not only the Journal of Communication meta-analysis, but also the 59 studies it surveyed, raises questions about the seriousness with which they conducted this study.**

Indeed, they seem to be unaware that an academic discipline of media studies even exists. Their bibliography includes works by right-wing media critics such as Media Research Center founder and president L. Brent Bozell III and Accuracy in Media founder Reed Irvine (now deceased), as well as an article from the right-wing website WorldNetDaily. But Groseclose and Milyo failed to cite a single entry from any of the dozens of respected scholarly journals of communication and media studies in which media bias is a relatively frequent topic of inquiry -- nothing from Journal of Communication, Communication Research, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Political Communication, or any other media studies journal

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[Farmer_Jane]

@Ibn_Warraq

What rigged video?

Are you talking about Dean’s “I have a scream speech”?

That wasn’t rigged.

Beyond that, his campaign had already gone down the tubes by that point.

He’d just finished a distant third if not fourth despite having easily the biggest warchest in the race(admittedly money in politics is always heavily overrated).

I was in Iowa. No one thought it weird until CNN’s take on it later.

I think by ‘rigged’, the OP meant ‘faulty journalism/creating something that isn’t there/not telling the whole story’.

[Marley23]

@TriPolar

The audio had the background noise filtered out. Dean was screaming above the crowd noise. He doesn’t sound batshit in the genuine audio.

“The media” did not remove the noise to sink Dean’s candidacy. That’s what the cameras picked up, and the unpopular truth is that Dean was already finished - he’d come into Iowa as the favorite, then bombed because his campaign was not as well organized as the campaigns of Kerry and Edwards, who both beat him. The press and the public pay a lot of attention to the more flashy elements of the campaign, like the speeches, and those things matter - but when it comes down to it in a close race, the campaigns need to have strong operations to get people off their asses so they actually go vote. Kerry and Edwards built better operations in Iowa than Dean did, so he lost and his perceived momentum was killed. It was already over.

So your thread is proceeding from a couple of errors and faulty assumptions. From where I sit, most of the press finds Mitt Romney really boring. They’re not trying to throw the race for him. They’re more interested in candidates with more personality, and that’s part of the reason fringe candidates like Trump and Bachmann and Huntsman have gotten so much face time despite there being little or no evidence they can compete for the nomination. Cain has never won an election, some of his proposals are spotty, he gets distracted by irrelevant issues, and he seems to be way behind Romney at raising money and courting insiders, and you think the media is what’s going to sink his campaign? He’s made a run in the polls lately, but unless they keep moving the election dates up, Iowa and New Hampshire are still a few months away.

[Justin_Bailey]

@TriPolar

Does anybody care about the media selecting the presidential candidates? Other candidates can poll higher than Romney, and the media will still report that he is the front runner and most electable Republican. Ron Paul comes in second in the Iowa Faux Poll, and he’s totally ignored.

Romney is the frontrunner. He’s the frontrunner until someone else takes it away from him. Have any of these knuckleheads dethroned him in any meaningful way? No.

And citing the Dean Scream as a time when the media sunk a candidate is just an idiotic argument. I was a Dean supporter before the Scream and I still supported him after. But it didn’t matter as I was in the minority. Dean was an also-ran in every primary vote.

[Sage_Rat]

@GIGObuster

But others are not impressed by that research.

Indeed, they seem to be unaware that an academic discipline of media studies even exists. Their bibliography includes works by right-wing media critics such as Media Research Center founder and president L. Brent Bozell III and Accuracy in Media founder Reed Irvine (now deceased), as well as an article from the right-wing website WorldNetDaily. But Groseclose and Milyo failed to cite a single entry from any of the dozens of respected scholarly journals of communication and media studies in which media bias is a relatively frequent topic of inquiry – nothing from Journal of Communication, Communication Research, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Political Communication, or any other media studies journal

Are any of those peer reviewed?

[GIGObuster]

@Sage_Rat

Are any of those peer reviewed?

What do you think an scholarly journal is?

[TriPolar]

@Marley23

“The media” did not remove the noise to sink Dean’s candidacy. That’s what the cameras picked up, and the unpopular truth is that Dean was already finished - he’d come into Iowa as the favorite, then bombed because his campaign was not as well organized as the campaigns of Kerry and Edwards, who both beat him. The press and the public pay a lot of attention to the more flashy elements of the campaign, like the speeches, and those things matter - but when it comes down to it in a close race, the campaigns need to have strong operations to get people off their asses so they actually go vote. Kerry and Edwards built better operations in Iowa than Dean did, so he lost and his perceived momentum was killed. It was already over.

So your thread is proceeding from a couple of errors and faulty assumptions. From where I sit, most of the press finds Mitt Romney really boring. They’re not trying to throw the race for him. They’re more interested in candidates with more personality, and that’s part of the reason fringe candidates like Trump and Bachmann and Huntsman have gotten so much face time despite there being little or no evidence they can compete for the nomination. Cain has never won an election, some of his proposals are spotty, he gets distracted by irrelevant issues, and he seems to be way behind Romney at raising money and courting insiders, and you think the media is what’s going to sink his campaign? He’s made a run in the polls lately, but unless they keep moving the election dates up, Iowa and New Hampshire are still a few months away.

Cameras don’t pick up sounds, microphones do. And that microphone was filtering out the crowd noise, which means it removed it. And that camera was owned by the media.

So your response is proceeding from a couple of errors and faulty assumptions.

You’re right that the media finds Romney boring, but they see him as a guy willing to spend a fortune on campaign ads. Just like Rick Perry who was the guy they said was going to beat Romney, until Perry wasn’t satisfied to have people think he was an idiot, and took the conventional route to remove all doubt.

And isn’t it a coincidence that Dean got torpedoed too. It couldn’t be his rejection of the traditional media in favor of the internet could it? Nah, the media never looks out for their own interests.

[Sage_Rat]

@GIGObuster

What do you think an scholarly journal is?

Depends on who’s doing the talking. I’ve seen quite a few “scholarly journals” cited by greenhouse warming deniers, and so on.

I’d be interested in seeing the studies. I can’t say that the complaints in the reviews bother me terribly,* but it’d be nice to see more than one paper on the subject.

• It’s quite likely that as economists, they only searched Economics journals for other studies. And it’s quite likely that the materials they used were just the ones they could get their hands on at their library, not any sort of active choosing of content and years to skew the results.

[TriPolar]

@PhillyGuy

The New York Times is owned by rich people, but aren’t most of the others broadly held joint stock companies? It used to be that only the rich held stock, but now lots of people do, if only though their pension plan.

However, the real question isn’t who owns it, but whether there is a wall between the business and news side. At most big circulation US newspapers, there is.

It is indeed difficult to objectively judge the politics of a media outlet. But at least Groseclose and Milyo tried to be objective, and got past the peer review of a reasonably good economics journal. I’ll consider other better peer-reviewed content analysis studies, if you can find them. But the Groseclose and Milyo methodology seems to me clever and reasonable. It’s not biased to compare how far left or right content is compared to something else, in this case the average of congressional speeches.

Thanks. Those are valid points. But my position is really that the media is media-biased, not right or left wing. I made the ‘conservative media’ characterization to avoid the tiresome ‘liberal media’ claim.

Maybe it’s not so bad that this is being discussed though. The heart of the problem is bias. And print media (do they still do that?) isn’t the big issue at the presidential level, it’s the TV networks.