Caught in the stone age - Australia too

I'd wept a couple months ago seeing the gap between the US and NZ widening.

Josh Gans is on sabbatical at Harvard and is having the same experience:

In Australia, TV is dictated at the behest of four networks and one cable provider. There is nothing reliable on the internet and paid for services like iTunes are crippled. In contrast, in the US, I subscribe to a single provider, Comcast, for all television, internet and phone requirements at the home. The television comes over a DVR that runs Tivo and so can be programmed from anywhere. But who cares about programming? They actually have an ‘On demand’ service that has all of the main programs you may have missed. And, of course, all of this is in real 1080i HD. And you can use the same service to watch and pay for new release movies so we don’t even own a DVD (that technology lasted less than a decade in our household).

But wait, there’s more. Not satisfied with that and you can watch much of the stuff online anyway. Hulu is a well designed service that really works. Of course, you can’t skip through ads but who cares. There is just one per break and they tell you how long it will last! And add to that that I face no download caps and you have all you want. (Oh yes, if you think I am stuck with US programming and that is a minus — not from my perspective but others might think so — then think again. I got to see Doctor Who the day it aired in the UK.)

Finally, the phone on top of this costs pretty much nothing. I can call anywhere in the US and Canada for the cost of a local call — which turns out to be $0 per minute. The voice mail is accessible online so I don’t have to be at home to pick up. In any case, I use Google Voice which calls all my phones and so I don’t really have to be worried about receiving calls at home. In any case, if I’m watching TV and there is a call it will tell me who is calling on the TV. Now that is a benefit of an integrated communications service.

Australia puts up with continual crap on this front. None of the technology here is monopolised and non-transferable to Australia. I fear we will get a shiny new NBN with none of this and wonder why consumers don’t want to pay much to use it. It is like strapping a jet engine on to a horse buggy. Our persistent lagging on this suggests that we need government review to understand what is holding Australia back. At the moment, I don’t want to come home.

I still say it's mostly a problem of fixed costs. Getting the rights to air each separate item in the Hulu library outside of the US? Fixed cost. Getting the rights to distribute movies outside the US (for Netflix)? Fixed cost. Population in NZ isn't high enough to justify it; apparently it isn't for Australia either.

Measuring media bias in Oz

Andrew Leigh and Josh Gans versus Andrew Norton on measuring media slant in Australia.

Leigh and Gans bring Groseclose and Milyo's method to Oz, but use public intellectuals rather than think tanks due to the paucity of the latter. Recall that the original Groseclose and Milyo method didn't benchmark to partisanship but rather to ideology: the US has ADA scores for representatives, so each representative is rank-ordered from liberal to conservative and an imputed ideological score is then given to each think tank. Robustness checks in Leigh and Gans include expert coding of front-page newspaper articles, both political and overall, and coding of newspaper editorials.

Norton says the ranking of intellectuals lacks face validity: that their left-right positions don't correspond to casual observation; moreover, public intellectuals tend to be ideological rather than party partisan so the method may not work.

I certainly don't know enough about Australian public intellectuals to know whether there's a lack of face validity in Leigh and Gans's ordering, nor do I know whether the public intellectuals tend to be party hacks or ideological hacks. But I'm pretty sure that Groseclose and Milyo were able to drop negative or reverse mentions from their analysis (things like a National MP saying, "Even Brian Easton agrees with X", for example) while Leigh and Gans weren't able to given their initial dataset. On first thought, so long as both sides tend to do this with equal frequency, it might just add noise to their estimates rather than much bias. On the other hand, I can imagine those reverse mentions happening a lot more for the tails of the distribution, which would greatly narrow the measured range of public intellectuals' opinions and could lead to a centrist-bias in the results. Leigh and Gans say that folks don't much cite public intellectuals for the purpose of bashing them (a truly negative mention), but I can imagine a fair number of the "Even prominent Labour supporter X agrees..." mentions. In the end, their robustness checks mostly give them the same answers: most papers are largely centrist in Australia - so I'm less worried.

One thing that they can't control for over their period is whether slight evidence of slant in favour of the Coalition government reflected incumbency bias or pro-Coalition sentiment. Presumably they'll be able to test for that in a replication after the next election.

Cool that Leigh and Gans have taken this on. I've told my classes that a New Zealand replication of Groseclose and Milyo is likely impossible given:

1. Party line voting makes ADA scores impossible, so we can't benchmark against median voter ideology.
2. A paucity of think tanks makes the mapping impossible.

Folks could argue that media concentration in New Zealand makes it tougher, but even if Fairfax owns a lot of outlets, partisan or ideological market segmentation could well be profit-maximizing, so I tended not to worry so much about that one.

Measuring partisan slant rather than ideological slant seems possible using Gans and Leigh's method. Congrats guys.