The dictionary defines a counterfactual as “a conditional statement in which the first clause is a past tense subjunctive statement expressing something contrary to fact, as in: if she had hurried, she would have caught the bus.” In the aftermath of the Tuesday’s election, some progressives are suggesting this counterfactual: If the Democrats had nominated Bernie Sanders, he would have beaten Donald Trump in the presidential election.
This counterfactual can never be proven. The main evidence in its favor comes from the results of polling during the primaries which showed Sanders doing consistently better than Hillary Clinton in a hypothetical race against Trump. The chart below shows Real Clear Politics’ average of all polls pitting Sanders against Trump from January 1 until June 6, when pollsters stopped asking the question. The overall average is Sanders, 49.6%, and Trump, 39.3%. Clinton also had a slight lead over Trump during some (but not all) of this period, but Sanders’ advantage was, on average, more than twice as large.
Not only were these poll results seldom reported by the corporate media, who were busily engaged in a “Bernie blackout,” but when they were, pundits urged readers to disregard them. (A classic example is an article by Slate‘s William Saletan entitled “Polls Say Bernie is More Electable Than Hillary. Don’t Believe Them.”) The pundits argued that Sanders had not been “vetted” as thoroughly as Clinton, and would therefore be more vulnerable to attack during the election campaign.
As Adam Johnson notes, this argument is wrong on two counts. First, Sanders’ qualifications had been thoroughly examined during the primary and throughout his long career. Secondly, whatever “vetting” Clinton had undergone had already resulted in a public evaluation that was more unfavorable than favorable, and she was still under FBI investigation. This effectively neutralized the corruption and character issues when voters compared Clinton with Trump.
But, you may say, Democratic Party could hardly have selected Sanders since Clinton received more votes in the primaries. She won it “fair and square.” (Cue the laughter.) Of course, this ignores the many obstacles the Democratic National Committee (DNC) placed in Bernie’s path. By far, the heaviest thumb they placed on the scales was the superdelegates—just under 15% of the convention delegates, nearly all of whom favored Clinton. More importantly, the corporate media, from day one, misreported the delegate totals by combining superdelegates (who were not committed) with those earned in the primaries (who were committed). This inflated Clinton’s lead by over 400 delegates. Her lead appeared insurmountable, and she was declared the winner before the primaries were over. It is reasonable to assume that this discouraged potential Sanders voters, but there is no way to tell how many votes this cost him.
It will be interesting to see whether the DNC reforms their primary selection process, or whether conservative Democrats continue to try to take the risk out of democracy.
There was much to dislike about the three presidential and one vice-presidential debates, but one objection that was near the top of everyone’s list was the narrow range of topics about which the candidates were questioned. Adam Johnson has tabulated the number of questions asked by the moderators about each of the 22 issues they brought up, along with 10 issues that were not included.
Of course, candidates could have brought up issues that were not specifically targeted by the questions. Johnson’s second chart tabulates the number of mentions of each of 33 issues.
Russia, terrorism and taxes were the moderators’ favorites, and Donald Trump’s taxes and Hillary Clinton’s emails received more attention than such issues as climate change, poverty or campaign finance. Johnson describes the framing of the issues as “center-right in nature,” and offers some examples to support his case, i.e., Elaine Quijano’s question, “Do we ask too much of police officers in this country?”
I subsequently ran across an article by Alexander Podkul and Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institute. As part of the 2016 Primaries Project, they tabulated the issue positions, taken from their campaign websites, of over 1700 Congressional primary candidates. They found that candidates in the two parties are not talking about the same issues. Here are the top five issues mentioned by Republican and Democratic hopefuls. Aside from their common focus on the Affordable Care Act, there is little overlap.
In the debates, there was one question about Obamacare. With regard to the other top Republican issues, there were four questions about taxes, three about the debt, two about immigation and one about gun control, for a total of eleven questions about Republican issues. The Democrats did not do as well. There were two questions about social security, but the framing suggested it needed to be “reformed” rather than expanded as some Democrats maintain. Since there were no questions about climate change, education or the minimum wage, the Democrats scored a total of three questions. It appears that the debate moderators (or their corporate media bosses) shared the views of Republican candidates about which issues are more important.
Tabulation the number of mentions of each issue yields a similar result. There were 241 mentions of the five Republican issues and 90 mentions of the Democratic issues. (The 45 mentions of Obamacare account for half of the comments about Democratic issues.) Unfortunately, Johnson does not tabulate mentions of the minimum wage, but even if we assume that it was referred to all ten times that poverty came up for discussion, that would still bring the Democratic issue mentions up to only 100.
Of course, these mentions were largely triggered by the debate questions. However, Secretary Clinton could have raised some of the Democrats’ issues more often than she did. Thus a second interpretation of these data is that the Democratic candidate approaches the upcoming election from a more Republican point of view than their Congressional candidates.
Suppose you were completing an online survey and encountered the following warning:
The next section of the survey asks for your honest opinions about some controversial political issues. While we make every attempt to ensure your opinions are kept confidential, it is important to keep in mind that the National Security Agency does monitor the online activities of individual citizens, and these actions are beyond the study’s control.
That statement is absolutely true, but how often do we think about it? And if we do think about it, will it make any difference in our responses to the survey?
Social psychologists have been studying conformity for 80 years. Conformity refers to a change in a person’s attitude or behavior due to real or imagined pressure from another person or group. In the 1940s, using a perceptual task, Solomon Asch demonstrated how many people conform to the incorrect judgments of others. His research was followed a series of studies documenting many factors that affect the conformity rate, i.e., we conform more if we think the other group members are experts, if we like them, etc.
In the Asch conformity experiments, participants were asked which line, A, B or C, is equal to the line at the left.
There are two main reasons for conformity. People use other group members as sources of information and sometimes conclude that the others are right and they are wrong. In other words, they privately accept to group’s judgment. Social psychologists call this informational social influence. In other cases, people privately believe their own judgment is correct, but they conform to gain the approval (or avoid the disapproval) of other group members. In this case, there is public compliance without private acceptance. This is called normative social influence. One way to disentangle these two forces is to do an experiment in which some participants respond publicly, while others think they are responding privately. Conformity will usually be greater in the public condition, and the difference between the two conditions represents normative social influence. However, conformity also will be greater than zero in the private condition, and this represents informational social influence.
The spiral of silence theory of German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann described the consequences of conformity for society. Due to fear of social isolation, people who think they hold minority positions will tend to remain silent in social situations, while people who think they are in the majority will be confident and vocal. Over time, the perceived consensus will drift toward the majority position, as everyone overestimates the percentage of people who hold that view. For example, if atheists are reluctant to reveal their beliefs to survey researchers, the public will underestimate the number of atheists and atheists will feel more marginalized. In extreme cases, there is evidence of pluralistic ignorance, in which the majority privately rejects a position, but mistakenly assumes that others accept it, and therefore go along with it.
A recent study by Elizabeth Stoycheff of Wayne State University measures normative social influence on the internet. It contrasts a condition in which participants are reminded that they are under surveillance with one in which they are not. The 255 participants are a representative sample of Americans recruited through Survey Systems International in January 2015. They are told they are participating in a study of attitudes toward the ongoing American bombing of Iraq and Syria. After answering questions about their political attitudes, personality traits and media use, half of them were given the above message reminding them of the possibility of government surveillance. They other half didn’t receive the message. Next they encountered a Facebook post which passed along, without comment, a fictitious, neutral ABC News article about American bombing of ISIS targets in Iraq.
The measure of self-censorship was they average of their responses to four questions: their likelihood of sharing the post, liking the post, commenting on the post, or writing a new post on the same topic. They were asked whether they approved of U. S. airstrikes in Iraq, and to estimate the average American’s attitude toward the airstrikes. The difference between these two measures determined what the author called their climate of opinion—how much they thought their attitude deviated from the majority viewpoint. Participants were also asked whether they thought government surveillance of the internet was justified.
There would be evidence of self-censorship if those participants who were reminded of surveillance were more likely to speak out when they thought the climate of opinion was friendly and less likely to speak when they thought it was hostile. Although some secondary sources have implied that this is what Stoycheff found, the actual results are more complicated than that. She divided people into three groups depending on their attitude toward surveillance: Those who thought it was justified, those who merely tolerated it, and those who thought it was unjustified. The results are shown below.
Those who thought surveillance was unjustified showed no evidence of self-censorship. They were slightly less likely to speak when under surveillance, but their likelihood of speaking was unaffected by the climate of opinion. Those who believe that government spying on citizens is unacceptable apparently refuse to be silenced even when they know the opinion climate is hostile to their views and they are reminded that they are under surveillance. Stoycheff reports that these people are also higher in political interest than the other participants.
However, those who tolerated surveillance, and especially those who thought it was justified (“because [they] have nothing to hide,”] showed evidence of self-censorship. They were more likely to speak out when they thought they were in the majority, and less likely to speak out when they thought they were in the minority. They conform in two ways. First, they acquiesce to government spying, and secondly, they censor their opinions by telling other people only what they think they want to hear.
Conformists cheat the group or society by withholding whatever information or good judgment they possess. But as Stoycheff notes, “Democracy thrives on a diversity of ideas, and self-censorship starves it.” Better outcomes will come to a group or society that creates incentives for people to reveal dissenting information. The First Amendment is an important safeguard when conformity is demanded by the government, but freedom of speech may not be sufficient if people decide that they have nothing to say.
Last night, there was a panel discussion entitled “A Conversation on Privacy” at the University of Arizona, featuring Noam Chomsky, Glenn Greenwald and (live from an undisclosed location) Edward Snowden. The discussion was moderated by Nuala O’Connor of the Center for Democracy and Technology. The video is about two hours long. Although it starts off slowly, your patience will be amply rewarded by the end.
No, this isn’t a lobby card from Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. It’s actually an image from the poster advertising the panel discussion.
The discussion was broadcast via Livestream, which I was unable to insert directly into the blog. To watch it, click on the link below. If you’re familiar with the participants, you can skip the introductions. The discussions starts about 11 minutes into the video.
Regular readers of this blog will know of my interest in the political decisions—often referred to as Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy”—that have resulted in an association between racism and membership in the Republican party. During their political campaigns, Republicans (and sometimes Democrats) use “dog whistle politics”—racially coded appeals that automatically activate the negative stereotypes of their increasingly prejudiced audience.
There is now a fairly extensive literature in social psychology demonstrating that white people respond more negatively to images of dark-skinned African-Americans than those with lighter skin. For example, one experiment found that participants assigned more negative traits and fewer positive traits to dark-skinned blacks than to light-skinned blacks. Another study showed that, among blacks convicted of murder, those with darker skins were more likely to receive the death penalty.
There are persistent rumors that Barack Obama’s skin tone has been manipulated in campaign advertisements. For example, in 2008, Hillary Clinton’s campaign was accused of doctoring images of Obama to make him appear blacker, although it’s not clear whether this was deliberate. A new set of studies by Solomon Messig and his colleagues analyzes images of Obama from the 2008 presidential campaign against John McCain.
Working from a complete library of television commercials aired by both candidates, the researchers electronically measured the brightness of the faces in all 534 still images, 259 of Obama and 275 of McCain. The advertisements were independently coded for content by judges who were unaware of the purpose of the study. The researchers looked at whether each image appeared in an attack ad, and whether the ad tried to associate the candidate with criminal activity. Two differences emerged. Obama’s skin tone was darker in commercials linking him with criminal activity—see example below—than in all other images of Obama.
In fact, 86% of the photos in these ads were among the darkest 25% of all Obama photos. Secondly, in attack ads produced by the McCain campaign, images of Obama grew darker toward the end of the campaign, even as their own images of McCain grew lighter.
The authors did two followup studies to determine whether darker images of Obama activated more negative reactions to black people than lighter images of Obama. They wanted to show that darkening the skin of a familiar black man, whom they refer to as “counterstereotypical,” would have the same effect as the darker faces of the unknown persons used in previous studies. In one experiment, participants viewed one of the Obama images below and completed a stereotype activation task in which they were asked to fill in the blanks of incomplete words such as “L A _ _” and “_ _ O R.” The darker image of Obama on the right elicited more stereotypical completions—“lazy” and “poor,” in these cases—than the lighter image.
The second study was more complicated, involving subliminal priming, but it too found that a variety of darker images of Obama yield more negative reactions than lighter images of Obama.
It’s not clear from these studies what the McCain campaign actually did in 2008. Did they deliberately darken some images of Obama, or did they merely select darker images? If the latter, did they select images because of their darkness, or were they merely trying to choose images than made him “look bad,” without thinking about why. The fact that these darker images appeared in ads attempting to link Obama with criminality, however, suggests that whatever they did was not accidental.
These campaign ads appeared on television seven years ago. The pace of social psychological research—including the publication lag—is often quite slow. The two followup studies probably accounted for most of the delay. Although they allowed the authors to tie up some loose ends, it could be argued that they were unnecessary, since they largely replicated previous studies. The delay was unfortunate, since the analysis of the ads didn’t appear in print until Obama was no longer running for office and the corporate media could treat it as old news. Sometimes postponing the release of information is almost as effective as completely suppressing it.
Of course, there will be other black candidates and many more opportunities for dog whistle politics.
What role does Fox News play in the recent wave of anti-Muslim attitudes in this country? Fox has a long history of race baiting. This Bill O’Reilly segment, called “The Muslim Invasion,” predates both the Paris and San Bernadino attacks.
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has released an analysis by Sean McElwee and Jason McDaniel of survey data collected by the American National Election Studies (ANES) in 2012. A national sample of respondents was asked, “How well does the word ‘violent’ describe most Muslims?” The chart below shows the averages for white Democrats and Republicans who do or do not watch Fox News regularly, while statistically controlling for age, income, education, religiosity and geographical region.
The lower the dot, the more violent Muslims are perceived as being. While you might have guessed that Republicans are more likely to see most Muslims as violent than Democrats, watching Fox News is actually a stronger indicator of bias against Muslims than party affiliation. In fact, if they watch Fox News regularly, Democrats don’t differ significantly from Republicans in their tendency to describe Muslims as violent.
The ANES survey also found Fox News viewing to be a significant predictor of responses to five of ten items measuring prejudice against African-Americans. For example, one item read, “If blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites.” Researchers found strong effects of both party affiliation and Fox viewership.
Agree that blacks should be able to overcome prejudice without any special favors, just as “Irish, Italian, Jewish and other minorites” have done.
Disagree that generations of slavery and discrimination have made it more difficult for blacks to get ahead.
Disagree that over the past few years, blacks have gotten less than they deserve.
Agree that blacks have too much political influence in this country.
All of these items were intended to measure modern or symbolic racism, sometimes also called racial resentment, which refers to racism revealed in subtle, indirect ways which allow the respondent to deny being prejudiced. Fox viewers did not differ from non-Fox viewers on indicators of old-fashioned racism, such as labeling blacks as “lazy” or “unintelligent.”
These are correlational studies, since people decide for themselves whether to watch Fox News. Correlation does not imply causation. Does watching Fox News lead to greater prejudice, do people who were already prejudiced prefer Fox News, or is some third variable causing some people to both be more prejudiced and to watch Fox News? (Note, however, that some of the more likely third variables, such as age, education and region, are statistically controlled in the ANES analysis.)
Two arguments can be offered in support of the claim that Fox News is causally responsible for at least some of these differences in prejudice.
The mass media are more likely to directly influence attitudes toward current events than to change long-standing beliefs. The “try” question above is probably a long-standing belief. But a 2010 study found that Fox News viewers were also 31% more likely to believe that President Obama was not born in the United States, a view that was heavily promoted by Fox at the time. Fox viewership was also associated with false rumors about the “Ground Zero mosque” in 2010.
Two studies examined the effects of the spread of Fox News into new television markets. They both measured conservatism generally, rather than racial attitudes, but conservatism and prejudice are strongly related. In one study, the introduction of Fox into the area significantly increased the Republican vote share between 1996 and 2000, compared to other locations. Another study found that Congressional representatives—both Democrats and Republicans—became more conservative in their voting patterns following the startup of Fox News in their districts.
Both of these studies are quasi-experiments. They are not true experiments because Fox News does not randomly choose locations in which to broadcast. However, in order to explain away these data, you would have to assume not that Fox chooses more conservative locations, but rather that Fox happens to choose locations that are on the verge of a conservative shift. This is unlikely, though not impossible.
I cringe whenever I walk into a public building and find Fox News playing in the lobby or waiting room, especially when it’s a location, such as an airport or hospital, that is subsidized by government funds.
On Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) held a public hearing in downtown Pittsburgh on their proposed rules to limit methane emissions from oil and gas drilling. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas—84 times more potent than CO2—and a major contributor to heart and lung diseases. This was only one of three such hearings—the other two were in Denver and Dallas—so it was a pretty big deal. It’s also symbolically important since it was held in Pennsylvania, whose state government is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the natural gas industry, and in Pittsburgh, the epicenter of the fossil fuel companies’ latest “sacrifice zone.”
Two days later, an email from PennFuture, a statewide environmental nonprofit, stated that those who testified in favor of the new rules outnumbered opponents by 92-2! This was a surprise to me since I had read a newspaper account of the hearing (in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) and had no idea the distribution of presenters was so one-sided.
If you’ve read this blog before, you know that false balancing is one of my pet peeves. False balancing occurs when the media, following the journalistic norm of presenting both sides of an issue, give the false impression that there is an equal amount of evidence—or as in this case, there are an equal number of citizens—supporting each side. The classic example is news coverage of global warming, which for many years implicitly suggested that an approximately equal number of scientific experts believed or questioned that the climate was changing.
I located four articles about the hearings in the Post-Gazette, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the Observer-Reporter (Washington County) and StateImpact PA. The Harrisburg Patriot-News had an article about methane leakage that day, but did not cover the hearing. I found no coverage in the national media.
The Tribune-Review led with a headline implying balance: “EPA officials hear from supporters, opponents of methane emissions rules.” Two opponents of the EPA rules, Matthew Todd, senior policy advisor for the American Petroleum Institute, and Eric Cowden, outreach director of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, were quoted at length, but with no indication that they were only two opponents present. Three supporters of the rules were quoted by name. The article correctly stated that about 100 speakers testified and said that representatives of a dozen environmental groups spoke. In all, there were 180 words of coverage of testimony by opponents of the EPA rules and 188 words of coverage of supporters.
The headline of the Observer-Reporter read “EPA hears pros, cons of its proposed methane reduction rules,” again implying balance. They noted that the were 100 speakers and that “environmental and oil and gas industry groups provided widely diverse views.” But their coverage was unbalanced. There were 366 words summarizing Mr. Todd and Mr. Cowden’s testimony, and 155 words about the presentations of two environmental group representatives.
“EPA hears comments on proposed methane rule for oil and gas” was the headline of the StateImpact PA article. The article contained quite a bit of neutral exposition, including an explanation of the rules by David Cozzie of the EPA, who may have been the moderator. They then devoted 170 words to comments by Mr. Todd and Mr. Cowden and 260 words to comments by three supporters of the rules, two of whom were representatives of PA’s Department of Enviromental Protection.
The Post-Gazette‘s article on their website differs from the one in the paper. That may be the case with some of the other articles as well, but this was my only chance to make a comparison. The headline in the newspaper reads “EPA rules find support at hearing.” Reporter Don Hopey compared the number of supporters and opponents and noted in the first paragraph that “most of the 100 or so who testified” supported the EPA rules. He devoted 86 words to the testimony of two supporters and 86 words to a summary of Mr. Cowden’s testimony. The word count in the website article was supporters, 153, and opponents, 92. It had a neutral headline and didn’t indicate which side had the greater number of speakers.
The overall average was 200 words by or about opponents of the rules and 172 words by or about supporters. The only opponents quoted by name, of course, were the two energy industry employees. If you read all four articles, you might deduce that they were the only opponents present. The four articles quoted various different supporters by name. Some were representatives of environmental groups and others were identified as private citizens with no organizational affiliation given. However, only the Post-Gazette article indicated that supporters were in the majority, and none of them stated how large that majority was. I would argue that the lopsided distribution of opponents and supporters was the most newsworthy item and should have been the lead of any article about the hearing.
I will grant that turning out 92 people to testify at a hearing on a Tuesday morning is not a great accomplishment, and only shows that the environmentalists were better organized and more highly motivated. It gives no indication of the distribution of public opinion in the area, where it’s likely that few citizens realize the importance of methane leakage. I also acknowledge that the oil and gas industries could have turned out just as many people friendly to their position if they had been willing to spend the time and effort. However, public opinion is less important for them. Their success depends primarily on the amount of money they spend on campaign contributions and lobbying. Of course, it also helps that they have the news media in their pockets.
Blogs are supposed to have colorful images, right? (Credit: Dreamstime)
A new study by Taylor Kohut and colleagues at Western University in London, Ontario seems to be more definitive than previous studies. The data come from the General Social Survey (GSS), a large-scale interview survey of American public opinion conducted by the National Science Foundation. Participants were 10,946 men and 14,101 women interviewed between 1975 and 2010. Pornography consumption was measured by a question asking participants whether they had seen an X-rated film in the past year. (Twenty-three percent said they had.) Attitudes toward women were measured using five questions or sets of questions.
Feminist identification. “Do you think of yourself as a feminist or not?”
Women holding positions of power. Three questions measuring attitude toward women holding political power, i.e., “If your party nominated a woman for president, would you vote for her if she were qualified for the job?”
Working outside the home. Five questions, i.e., “All in all, family life suffers when the woman has a full-time job.”
Abortion. Three questions measuring whether a legal abortion should be available in cases of rape, pregnancy of an unmarried woman, or an unwanted child for any reason.
Traditional family. Ten items measuring support for a family in which “women take the main responsibility for care of the home and children, while men take the main responsibility for supporting the family financially.”
There are good reasons to believe that this is a strong study. It has a large sample that is representative of the American adult population. In addition, these questions are embedded in a much longer survey, making it unlikely that participants were sensitized to the purpose of the analysis.
The data were analyzed by separately comparing men and women who had or had not watched pornography. Pornography consumption had no effect on self-identification as a feminist, or on attitudes toward the traditional family. However, contrary to predictions from feminist theory, both men and women who had viewed pornography in the past year had more positive attitudes toward women holding positions of power, were more supportive of women working outside the home, and had less negative attitudes toward abortion. While these differences were not large, they were statistically significant due to the large sample size.
The data fail to support the hypothesis that pornography encourages subordination of women. However, the authors carefully avoid claiming that the results show that pornography encourages liberal or feminist attitudes toward women’s equality. This is a correlational study, and correlation does not imply causation. A positive correlation between pornography consumption and liberal sexual attitudes could mean that watching pornography causes feminist attitudes (implausible), or that people with liberal sexual attitudes are more likely to watch pornography (much more likely), or a that some third variable, such as a non-religious upbringing, causes both.
A recent experiment done in Denmark by Gert Martin Hald and colleagues appears to contradict the Kohut study. The Danish study had two parts—a survey and an experiment. The participants, 200 young adult Danes, were asked about their prior pornography consumption and given scales measuring attitudes toward women and hostile sexism. Among the men (but not the women), the greater the pornography consumption, the less egalitarian their attitudes toward women were and higher they were in hostile sexism.
The second part was an experiment. Participants were randomly assigned to watch either 30 minutes of nonviolent pornography or a control film. Attitudes were measured after the film, and it was found that, for both men and women, pornography watching led to greater hostile sexism. However, this only occurred for those participants who were low in the personality trait of agreeableness, described as a tendency to be suspicious and antagonistic toward others. Highly agreeable (friendly and cooperative) people did not show any effect.
Are these results inconsistent with the Kohut study? Maybe, but maybe they can be reconciled. The American and Danish surveys found opposite results. But as Kohut points out, the participants in the Hald study differed from theirs in important ways. They were Danes rather than Americans. They were young adults with an average age of 25, while the American sample had an average age of 45. Most importantly, they had agreed to watch a pornographic film. Only about 70% of those contacted agreed to participate. Thus, the Danish sample is younger and presumably more liberal in their sexual attitudes. To put it differently, the more inclusive American sample includes older people who are more likely to have conservative sexual attitudes and probably don’t watch pornography.
What about the results of the Hald experiment? Suppose it’s true, as Kohut found, that in a representative sample of people of all ages, those with more liberal sexual attitudes are more likely to watch pornography. Suppose it’s also true, as Hald found, that pornography’s content undermines those egalitarian attitudes, at least among some audience members, making them more sexist than they would have otherwise been. Nevertheless, they might still be more liberal than those who don’t watch pornography at all.
This is admittedly highly speculative. Disentangling these possibilities will require a longitudinal study in which both pornography consumption and sexual attitudes are measured among a representative sample of adults over a period of several years.
On Sunday, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published an editorial headlined “Murder on the Rise.” It states that the homicide rate is up this year “in more than 30 major American cities”—but not including Pittsburgh. It repeats the “theory” that this change is due to the “Ferguson effect,” which argues that police, facing criticism from African-American activists, have been “less aggressive in patrolling problem neighborhoods.” It concludes that a return to the “bad old days” of high homicide rates is unacceptable and that law enforcement and the Justice Department “must bring their resources to bear to figure this out.”
The statistics they cite come from an August 31 New York Times article whose authors, Monica Davey and Mitch Smith, surveyed an unspecified number of cities and reported that at least 35 of them have seen increases in “murder, violent crimes, or both.” The article is accompanied by a chart showing increases in the homicide rate of between 4% and 76% in ten cities. But not all cities have seen more killing. They mention three cities where murders have not increased.
There are several problems with the Times article. First of all, their statistic has neither a numerator nor a denominator. Since they lump murder together with other violent crimes, the authors don’t specify exactly how many cities reported increases in murders. More importantly, they fail to report how many cities they surveyed—a critical point, since if the actual homicide rate is unchanged, half of cities can be expected to show increases just by chance. Finally, they give no summary statistic indicating whether the overall homicide rate in the cities surveyed is up or down, by what percentage, and whether the change is statistically significant. This is important since homicide rates in many cities fluctuate quite a bit from year to year, and the number of violent crimes was unusually low in 2014.
The authors had to conduct their own survey because there are no up-to-date, authoritative data on homicides in the nation’s cities. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, which provide city-level crime data, do not come out until the following year. This lack of hard data allows people to claim that the crime rate is either increasing or decreasing, whichever their ideology leads them to prefer, based on incomplete samples.
Even if the homicide rate has increased significantly, there is nothing to connect it to the protests following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, one year ago. To their credit, the Times mentions the research of criminologist Richard Rosenfeld, who found that homicides in the St. Louis area peaked before Michael Brown was shot, and who states that there is no evidence of a “Ferguson effect.” Unfortunately, this finding is buried deep in the article and is surrounded by stories about specific murders and theories which lack empirical support.
A man holds his grandson at a rally protesting the death of Walter Scott in Charleston, NC. (Photo: AP/David Goldman)
Three days later, the Washington Post got into the act in an article about the shooting death of Illinois police officer Charles Gliniewicz. Although there is no evidence that race or anti-police sentiment played a role in his death, Jim Pasco, executive director of the national Fraternal Order of Police and several other law enforcement sources hold the Black Lives Matter movement responsible for what they imply is an increase in the killing of police officers. One of them blames the “dangerous national rhetoric that is out there today.” One Black activist who disputes these claims is also quoted.
Buried in the middle of this article is a critical fact. The National Law Enforcment Officers Memorial Fund reports that 24 police officers have been killed by suspects so far this year, “the second lowest number in the past five years.” Yet according to a September 1 Rasmussen poll, 58% of likely voters believe “there is a war on police in America today,” while just 27% disagree.
Ta-Nehisi Coates criticized the Times article as an example of “false equivalence,” since the authors don’t make a clear distinction between opinions and facts. Unless they read the story carefully, readers could easily conclude that “there is as much proof for the idea that protests against police brutality caused crime to rise, as there is against it.” (The author of the Post-Gazette editorial seems to have fallen into this trap.) This same argument applies to the Post article.
Social scientists refer to this journalistic practice as false balancing. It’s found, for example, in articles about climate change which imply that scientists are evenly divided as to whether the climate is changing, and which fail to evaluate the quality of the evidence each side presents. Cautious journalists have been transformed into stenographers, faithfully reporting what everyone says but never examining whether what they say makes sense. Paul Krugman once suggested that if candidates of one party said the Earth is flat and and the other party said it’s a sphere, the newspaper headline would read “Views Differ on Shape of Planet.”
As of this writing, at least 820 people have been killed by the police so far this year. African-Americans, with 13.2% of the population, account for one-third of these deaths. For those deaths in which the victim is unarmed, the Black percentage is even higher. While it is clear that major changes in policing are needed, law enforcement is digging in its heels and fighting back with theories such as the “Ferguson effect.” By failing to make it clear that claims of a “war on police” are without empirical support, the corporate media play into the hands of those who are trying to convince the public to sacrifice the civil liberties of African-Americans in exchange for an illusory increase in public safety.
Although we are right to be concerned about the growth of campaign advertising, especially when the candidates’ resources are unequal, you could argue that the amount of free time (or space) given to candidates by the news media is more important. Statements made by and about candidates in the free media are not as likely to be discounted as advertisements. (The discounting principle states that our confidence in a particular explanation of behavior is weakened by the presence of alternative explanations. In an advertisement, our knowledge that this is a paid message intended to persuade us makes us less likely to see the message as truthful.)
Senator Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have both shown similar increases in support in the presidential polls. According to the Real Clear Politics average of all polls, support for Sanders has grown from 12.7% to 25% from July 1 to the present, while Trump has gone from 6% to 22%. Sanders’ progress might be considered more impressive, however, since he has received less free media coverage.
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) used the Nexus database to count the number of free mentions of Sanders and Trump on 13 news media sources between July 1 and August 15. In all cases, Trump received more coverage. The chart below gives the percentage of stories mentioning Sanders as a percentage of those mentioning Trump. For example, on CNN, the ratio was 33%, meaning that Sanders was mentioned one-third as often, or that Trump received three times as much coverage.
On the three outlets with the largest audience, the broadcast networks ABC, CBS and NBC, Sanders was mentioned only 16% as often as Trump, or in other words, Trump received six times as much publicity.
The country’s five major newspapers averaged 34%, very close to the overall average.
Public radio and television, which presumably have a mandate to be fair, scored only slightly above the overall average in Sanders coverage.
MSNBC, sometimes described as a “progressive” cable network, did have the highest percentage of Sanders coverage, but still mentioned Trump more often.
As Bernie Sanders continues to draw large crowds, the message of the news media seems to be that there’s “nothing to see here.” If we were to ask them why Trump receives so much more publicity than Sanders, my guess is they would claim that his flamboyant personal style makes his activities of greater public interest. However, I suspect that a more important cause is that a central theme of Sanders’ campaign is reducing economic inequality, an unwelcome message to those who own, advertise on, or perform on the news media.
In addition to discounting campaign advertising, these data suggest we should also discount some of the coverage candidates receive in the free media. However, we’re less likely to do that, since their conflicts of interest are less obvious.
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