Media watch

Radley Balko fisks the Washington Post's coverage of the DC cop who pulled a gun on folks having a snowball fight. Long story short: the Post was more than happy to reprint without question the Assistant Police Chief's assertions that the gun was never drawn despite one of their reporters having been on the scene at the fight and despite youtube video clearly showing the cop having pulled his gun. Bloggers and the City Paper get it right; Washington Post fails.

For all the "and then the adults took over" anti-new media sneer in Fisher's post (and hey, Fisher did write all of this in a blog post—so maybe he has a point!), the link for his "on the blogs" condescension actually goes the City Paper, which got the story right from the outset. The City Paper called Newsham, too. But instead of running with Newsham's denials as fact, that paper's reporters also viewed the video evidence posted around the web and talked to eyewitnesses—including the Post's own staffer, whom Zapotosky ignored.

Instead of turning his nose up at new media and social networking, Fisher should be asking himself whether, if it weren't for Twitter, YouTube, blogs, and alternative weeklies like the City Paper, the Post would have ever gotten this story right. Or whether the Post would have eventually given credence to Baylor's accusers had this happened not on a busy U-Street intersection teeming with wired gentrifiers, but in D.C.'s poorer, blacker Southeast quadrant, where confrontations with the police are more common yet less covered, and where corroborating video would be less likely. More to the point, if what Zapotosky did was "real journalism," how many other police misconduct stories might the Post have gotten wrong all this time because it merely deferred to MPDC flacks like Newsham?

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.