It is politically very safe to dump on the News Media. Everyone does it.
I used to be daily in the public eye, as a County Commissioner. Back in the early 1980s, before the news thinned out, there was a news story or two every day in the two local newspapers, the 3 TV stations, and the 6 or so radio stations. (Now the radio stations just summarize what they read in the one remaining paper and that paper has fired nearly all its reporters.)
This meant that I participated in events live, and was the subject of the events frequently, and then that evening on the TV news or the next morning in the newspaper I would see how the event was covered. The stories seemed "off"--familiar but more or less "wrong"--every time. They fleshed out a story by filming or quoting who was instantly available to give a comment, not what "really" happened. They would balance a knowledgeable informed person with a bystander with no knowledge or understanding of the issue but who had a contrary point of view, as if the opinion of a professor of mathematics or statistics on the meaning of a 0.004 parts per billion in a water sample was "balanced" by the opinion of a 9th grader who said they were sure the water was "totally full of bad stuff and poison."
Prior to my time as a newsmaker I used to believe the news. Once I participated I realized that the news was created by young people in a terrible rush to get a story and move on to the next one and that the news was haphazard at best and frequently flat out wrong. The "news" had little credibility.
The "news" wasn't "what happened". The news was a product, manufactured by a busy and underpaid young person, trying to fill a space slot in a newspaper or a time slot on a TV news show.
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Yesterday I included a short video clip of Trump, for the purpose of demonstrating the crowd involvement. Trump was not speaking to a crowd, he was within the crowd, feeding off its mutual energy. Watch it again, this time noting that he was expressing skepticism of the news media and listen to the audience.
Why are people so open to media bashing?
One reason is easy and straightforward: they hear repeatedly from politicians that the media cannot be trusted.
A second reason is that trusted news sources tell them it cannot be trusted. Fox News constantly criticizes every other news media as being biased, and a significant number of American get their "Fair and Balanced" news from Fox. Liberal media sources routinely show how Fox covers the news, noting their bias. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart used as a primary source of humor the hypocrisy and inconsistency of politicians and news sources, and indeed Stewart's primary target was the failure of the news media.
But a third reason is the conflict between what people witness themselves and what they hear. In March of this year I posted on the mis-match between the media's hunger to show Trump rallies as a place of violence versus my observation that the Boca Raton rally was the safest place in North America, inundated by visible police presence. Yet the stories the next day were not about the overprotected venue but about--amazingly--all the fear of violence. Here is a link to my full March blog post:
Social media is giving people their own, independent supposedly-eyewitness view of things. A person with only one watch thinks he knows what time it is. A person with two or three watches doesn't know the time because the watches are inevitably a little different. Having multiple watches doesn't make a person more confident; it makes the person less confident of the time.
A citizen getting news from Facebook friends hears a different story than a person who simply gets their news from a mainstream media source. Moreover, CNN and Fox and MSNBC are likely to show very different takes on the same story. (Fox, for example, cut away from the Khan speech at the Democratic National Convention. It wasn't newsworthy, to them.)
Some guest commenters on this blog--particularly Thad Guyer--insist that the news media is biased, downplaying Trump's electoral strengths and the power of his message, plus overplaying his eccentricity and lack of discipline as a messenger. There is no question that the Breitbart.com and Fox News view of the world--plus the AM talk radio views of Limbaugh and Hannity and Alex Jones and Glenn Beck--are very different from the views of the NY Times. This difference creates the "three watches" effect.
The new news landscape of multiple very different news sources, plus widespread amateur news via social media, create an environment where people--quite reasonably--doubt everything.
And who are you going to believe? A Twitter or Instagram or Facebook feed from Trump (who has 20,000,000 followers) or somebody you see on TV? The social media and direct feeds from Trump are a primary source, direct from the horse's mouth. It may not be unbiased, but it is unfiltered, and seems directly real.
Frequent Guest Post writer Thad Guyer has a comment on one key area of supposed media bias: how they report the polls. Guyer thinks the mainstream media (i.e. the high status media of the NY Times and Washington Post) have it quite wrong. He looks at a different watch than does Real Clear Politics. Here is Guyer's take:
Discounting Media Hype, USC Polling Institute Reaffirms Trump and Clinton are Still Tied”
Media hype about Trump pushing “nuclear proliferation”, “espionage”, “assassination”, and “ISIS founder” effects narrow polling windows concurrent with 48-72 hour news cycles, but it lacks durability. Voters needed no media spin on Romney’s “47 percent” because Romney himself was clear in what he meant during the secretly recorded donor meeting. Nor do voters need media spin about Hillary’s email; the FBI director provided rich factual context for that. So too with Trump University and casino bankruptcies. Fact driven durable media coverage has durable polling effect—media proclaimed “game changing gaffes” don’t. (See Nate Silver, “The Impact of the 47 Percent”, Sept 9, 2012, http://goo.gl/lrc5VP 9/28/2012).
Just two weeks ago, the Real Clear Politics (RCP) polling average had Trump tied with Clinton, but by August 9th, RCP had Clinton +7.9 , down to +6.2 as of today. Only the University of Southern California USC/Los Angeles Times’ poll model has consistently discounted media-driven poll “surges”. USC reports that between August 4 and today there has been no change in the Clinton-Trump tie. Clinton’s lead, USC says, has remained exactly the same-- +1. (See RCP trending table, http://goo.gl/xGX4). Polls showing Clinton with leads of +8 to +13 this week led to liberal media jubilation, even to absurd claims that these polls might force Trump to “drop out”. (See for example, “Could Donald Trump Drop Out?”, NYT, Aug 4, 2016, http://goo.gl/4Y4Pcf). The NYT has attacked the August 4th USC poll as a flawed outlier. (See, “A Favorable Poll for Donald Trump Seems to Have a Problem”, Aug 8, 2016, http://goo.gl/XwN1cD).
The USC/LA Times “tracking” poll is the work of USC’s Center for Economic and Social Research in “applied political science”. (See, http://cesrusc.org/election/). It is designed “in a way that mutes the impact of bounces and temporary shifts in candidate support”, some of which may be caused by media hype in concurrent news cycles. (See, “Why the USC/L.A. Times tracking poll differs from other surveys”, Aug 9, 2016, http://goo.gl/j6izjr). USC rejects models (1) based on random cold calls to unvetted respondents, and (2) that give no weight to respondents “who say they don’t know or are undecided”. Instead, USC randomly selected 5,000 participants, and following application of demographic and voting history filters, “tracks” 3,200 of them in 5 to 7 day survey cycles.
There is strong evidence that the media’s political hype drives its own sensational polls. The Urban Institute's chief methodologist, Rob Santos, past president and vice president respectively of the American Statistical Association and American Association for Public Opinion Research, says some polling results in forced errors because “the media and candidate campaigns have pressured pollsters to provide results cheaper and faster”. (See, “Why the Polls Get it Wrong”, LA Times, Mar 27, 2016, http://goo.gl/jRjrFt). Sensational poll surveys specifically trying to measure the effects of Trump “espionage”, “assassination”, etc. are churned out fast and furiously for whomever is paying for them. These polls feel really good. But as James Warren of the Poynter Institute, an organization promoting journalistic ethics and higher standards for media “fact checkers”, warns us: Don’t “[f]orget that Trump was written off for months as a joke or that the campaign was seen heading south at multiple times”. (See, Vanity Fair, August 4, 2016, http://goo.gl/GVLd1a).
Question: So what happened after the NYT and other media challenged USC’s August 4th findings that Clinton is only +1? Answer: USC ran the survey again and on August 12th again concluded that she is only +1.
Frequent Guest Post writer Thad Guyer has a comment on one key area of supposed media bias: how they report the polls. Guyer thinks the mainstream media (i.e. the high status media of the NY Times and Washington Post) have it quite wrong. He looks at a different watch than does Real Clear Politics. Here is Guyer's take:
Discounting Media Hype, USC Polling Institute Reaffirms Trump and Clinton are Still Tied”
Media hype about Trump pushing “nuclear proliferation”, “espionage”, “assassination”, and “ISIS founder” effects narrow polling windows concurrent with 48-72 hour news cycles, but it lacks durability. Voters needed no media spin on Romney’s “47 percent” because Romney himself was clear in what he meant during the secretly recorded donor meeting. Nor do voters need media spin about Hillary’s email; the FBI director provided rich factual context for that. So too with Trump University and casino bankruptcies. Fact driven durable media coverage has durable polling effect—media proclaimed “game changing gaffes” don’t. (See Nate Silver, “The Impact of the 47 Percent”, Sept 9, 2012, http://goo.gl/lrc5VP 9/28/2012).
Just two weeks ago, the Real Clear Politics (RCP) polling average had Trump tied with Clinton, but by August 9th, RCP had Clinton +7.9 , down to +6.2 as of today. Only the University of Southern California USC/Los Angeles Times’ poll model has consistently discounted media-driven poll “surges”. USC reports that between August 4 and today there has been no change in the Clinton-Trump tie. Clinton’s lead, USC says, has remained exactly the same-- +1. (See RCP trending table, http://goo.gl/xGX4). Polls showing Clinton with leads of +8 to +13 this week led to liberal media jubilation, even to absurd claims that these polls might force Trump to “drop out”. (See for example, “Could Donald Trump Drop Out?”, NYT, Aug 4, 2016, http://goo.gl/4Y4Pcf). The NYT has attacked the August 4th USC poll as a flawed outlier. (See, “A Favorable Poll for Donald Trump Seems to Have a Problem”, Aug 8, 2016, http://goo.gl/XwN1cD).
The USC/LA Times “tracking” poll is the work of USC’s Center for Economic and Social Research in “applied political science”. (See, http://cesrusc.org/election/). It is designed “in a way that mutes the impact of bounces and temporary shifts in candidate support”, some of which may be caused by media hype in concurrent news cycles. (See, “Why the USC/L.A. Times tracking poll differs from other surveys”, Aug 9, 2016, http://goo.gl/j6izjr). USC rejects models (1) based on random cold calls to unvetted respondents, and (2) that give no weight to respondents “who say they don’t know or are undecided”. Instead, USC randomly selected 5,000 participants, and following application of demographic and voting history filters, “tracks” 3,200 of them in 5 to 7 day survey cycles.
There is strong evidence that the media’s political hype drives its own sensational polls. The Urban Institute's chief methodologist, Rob Santos, past president and vice president respectively of the American Statistical Association and American Association for Public Opinion Research, says some polling results in forced errors because “the media and candidate campaigns have pressured pollsters to provide results cheaper and faster”. (See, “Why the Polls Get it Wrong”, LA Times, Mar 27, 2016, http://goo.gl/jRjrFt). Sensational poll surveys specifically trying to measure the effects of Trump “espionage”, “assassination”, etc. are churned out fast and furiously for whomever is paying for them. These polls feel really good. But as James Warren of the Poynter Institute, an organization promoting journalistic ethics and higher standards for media “fact checkers”, warns us: Don’t “[f]orget that Trump was written off for months as a joke or that the campaign was seen heading south at multiple times”. (See, Vanity Fair, August 4, 2016, http://goo.gl/GVLd1a).
Question: So what happened after the NYT and other media challenged USC’s August 4th findings that Clinton is only +1? Answer: USC ran the survey again and on August 12th again concluded that she is only +1.
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