Dean Baker on the Washington Post's Political Advocacy

I enjoy Dean Baker's blog Beat the Press where he acts as a watchdog on the media. In this post, he catches the Washington Post sneaking editorial opinion into a "news" article:

The Washington Post Tells Readers that the Financial Markets Are Wrong

The people who are betting trillions of dollars in financial markets have considerable confidence in the ability of the U.S. government to pays its debts, as demonstrated by the fact that the interest rate on 10-year Treasury bonds remain extraordinarily low. However a front page Washington Post article told readers that these actors are mistaken, actually the United States is, "a nation already mired in red ink."

Most newspapers would restrict such sweeping and unsupported assertions to the editorial pages, however the Washington Post has made debt reduction a crusade. It has little concern for standard journalistic practices in pressing this agenda.

It is a tough enough job for the ordinary reader to absorb facts and understand issues well enough to fomulate an opinion. It doesn't help when the media drops its journalistic ethics and moves from "news reporting" to "editorializing" outside of the editoral pages.

I could accept this blurring of editorial opinion with honest reporting if all media did this. People could then look at the fact that media is owned by very wealthy people and recognize that these people have a political agenda and that they are using their media outlet as a political propaganda device. But the media in the US pretend to be objective (except for Fox "News" which is blatantly biased despite its claim of "fair and balanced").

Here is the "new face" of media in the US:

Barry Ritholtz takes 'The Media' to the Wood Shed

The green shoots of a new dawn, a new spring. Here is an excellent post by Barry Ritholtz on his The Big Picture blog that takes American media to task for their incompetent journalism through praise for what appears to be a new policy of actually acting as journalists!

News Flash: The Emperor Has No Clothes

Fareed Zakaria has reached the terribly obvious and long overdue conclusion that the right wing in the US is a fantasy-based denier of reality.

Whoopee.

After years of globally embarrassing foolishness, a cowed and cowardly media is belatedly showing signs of speaking Truth to Power.

For his observation that the earth is round, serious people are showering Zakaria with effusive praise. While the reality based observations are long overdue, it is embarrassing that we feel so compelled to applaud it. People seem to be forgetting: This is what media is supposed to do. The role of the press is to point out the absurdities of the powerful, afflict the comfortable, reveal what those in Power want to keep hidden.

Of course, that has taken a back seat to much more important events, such as Anthony Weiner’s junk shot, Michael Jackson’s untimely death, and an especially close American Idol final.

Bread & Circuses, anyone?

What does it say about our damaged US democracy and its wounded 4th Estate (aka corporate media) that merely making an obvious assertion is news? Is it an event when an essential element of a functional democracy actually has the bravado to tell a significant political movement that “No, the earth is not flat.”

The right wing has long embraced magical thinking. You can see it in across a continuum: It is a short hop from believing that Supply Side Tax Cuts are self funding to all other manner of nonsense. From denying Evolution to managing Health Care costs to Global Warming, it is a continuum. Making no-plan invasions of other countries is the natural progression of such magical thinking. If your beliefs are righteousness enough, then the outcome is assured by a munificent deity.

As a personal belief system, that may be fine, but as government philosophy, it makes for horrific policy decisions.

The Retreat from Empiricism has been detailed over the years, not by the mainstream media. It has been the alternative press — websites, blogs, critics outside of the mainstream — who have stated the obvious for many, many years. Somehow, the Media missed nearly all of it. It wasn’t until the Katrina disaster that the scales fell from Press’ eyes. Suddenly, in the middle of George W. Bush’ second term, the Press found their voice. Years after 9/11, after the national terror alert was manipulated for political purposes, long after the Nation was lied into a war of choice through dishonest and deceptive means at great cost in blood and treasure, did the Media found its voice.

Heckuva job there, Press corps . . .

Barry Ritholtz is a Wall Street type, but he runs a blog The Big Picture that isn't the standard Wall Street hype and he does publish the odd social commentary like the above. I find him well worth reading.

Cognitive Bias

From the British Medical Journal, an article entitled "How Cognitive Biases Affect Our Interpretation of Political Messages":

A recent study from the United States randomly allocated one of four versions of an authoritative news story about diabetes to people who had declared different political allegiances.3 Each story was identical except for how they described the cause of diabetes. One said nothing about the cause (the control), whereas the three others cited genes, individual lifestyle choices, and social determinants. They were then asked whether they agreed with two statements on the reason people get diabetes, one specifying social determinants and the other genes. Democrats were most likely to agree that social determinants were a cause, regardless of which version they read. Independents reading the version where social determinants were the cause were more likely to agree with this explanation than those who read the control story, but the social determinants version had no effect on Republicans’ views. Each group was then asked about collective actions to tackle diabetes, such as restrictions on junk food. Democrats reading the social determinants version were significantly more likely than controls to support action but Republicans were less so.

I find the above relevant because just last night I saw a poll on the US TV channel MSNBC that said that most Americans call themselves “conservatives” but 87% think that taxes should be raised on millionaires, 77% thought public servants should have the right to collective bargaining, etc. In other words, by wide margins they take “liberal” views that are left of even most of the Democratic party representatives in Congress. But they keep electing Republicans and Democrats are terrified of taking populist or liberal stands on political issues.

Wow... believe one thing but vote another way. And not even notice the dissonance between what you believe and the messages you show loyalty to. That sums up the Tea Party and a lot of other political "activists" in the US. It is tragic because it means their politics ends up disappointing them and they can't figure out what went wrong! Tragic.

Learn more about cognitive biases at Wikipedia.

Liberal "Bias" in the Media

If you read the press or listen to politicians in the US, you constantly hear about "liberal" bias in the press. But ThinkProgress has this post on its web site that lets you see how "fair and balanced" means you get to see Republicans sell their swill while the Democrats get to stand by and watch:

Two weeks ago, the Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen noted that the lineup for the Sunday shows were stacked with Republicans and didn’t feature a single Democratic guest. Last Sunday also tilted heavily toward GOP voices. This Sunday the trend continues. Three Sunday shows — Fox, CBS, and NBC — locked out Democratic voices as featured guests:

Fox News Sunday: Gov. Mitch Daniels (R-IN), former Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AR)
CBS Face the Nation: Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ)
NBC Meet the Press: Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI), Sen. John McCain (R-AZ)
CNN State of the Union: Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL), Gov. Dan Malloy (D-CT), Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND)
ABC This Week: Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ), Gov. Nikki Haley (R-SC), Gov. Deval Patrick (D-MA), Gov. John Hickenlooper (D-CO)

ABC’s This Week, which featured two Democratic voices, did so as part of a balanced four-person panel.

As ThinkProgress noted this week, NBC’s Meet the Press had originally failed to feature a voice from labor to respond to Scott Walker’s appearance. After pressure from progressives, Meet the Press gave workers a limited presence, adding AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka as part of a five-person panel.

While every other Sunday show had a featured guest on to respond to the current political upheaval in Libya, Fox did not. Host Chris Wallace did not ask Mitch Daniels or Mike Huckabee — his two featured guests — a single question about Libya.

No wonder Americans are so docile. Not only do they fail to hear the whole story, they are told that what they hear is "biased" against what they in fact are hearing. Confusing!

Science & Truth

There is an excellent article by Jonah Lehrer entitled "The Truth Wears Off" in the New Yorker magazine. Here's a key bit:

Jonathan Schooler was a young graduate student at the University of Washington in the nineteen-eighties when he discovered a surprising new fact about language and memory. At the time, it was widely believed that the act of describing our memories improved them. But, in a series of clever experiments, Schooler demonstrated that subjects shown a face and asked to describe it were much less likely to recognize the face when shown it later than those who had simply looked at it. Schooler called the phenomenon “verbal overshadowing.”

The study turned him into an academic star. Since its initial publication, in 1990, it has been cited more than four hundred times. Before long, Schooler had extended the model to a variety of other tasks, such as remembering the taste of a wine, identifying the best strawberry jam, and solving difficult creative puzzles. In each instance, asking people to put their perceptions into words led to dramatic decreases in performance.

But while Schooler was publishing these results in highly reputable journals, a secret worry gnawed at him: it was proving difficult to replicate his earlier findings. “I’d often still see an effect, but the effect just wouldn’t be as strong,” he told me. “It was as if verbal overshadowing, my big new idea, was getting weaker.” At first, he assumed that he’d made an error in experimental design or a statistical miscalculation. But he couldn’t find anything wrong with his research. He then concluded that his initial batch of research subjects must have been unusually susceptible to verbal overshadowing. (John Davis, similarly, has speculated that part of the drop-off in the effectiveness of antipsychotics can be attributed to using subjects who suffer from milder forms of psychosis which are less likely to show dramatic improvement.) “It wasn’t a very satisfying explanation,” Schooler says. “One of my mentors told me that my real mistake was trying to replicate my work. He told me doing that was just setting myself up for disappointment.”

Schooler tried to put the problem out of his mind; his colleagues assured him that such things happened all the time. Over the next few years, he found new research questions, got married and had kids. But his replication problem kept on getting worse. His first attempt at replicating the 1990 study, in 1995, resulted in an effect that was thirty per cent smaller. The next year, the size of the effect shrank another thirty per cent. When other labs repeated Schooler’s experiments, they got a similar spread of data, with a distinct downward trend. “This was profoundly frustrating,” he says. “It was as if nature gave me this great result and then tried to take it back.” In private, Schooler began referring to the problem as “cosmic habituation,” by analogy to the decrease in response that occurs when individuals habituate to particular stimuli. “Habituation is why you don’t notice the stuff that’s always there,” Schooler says. “It’s an inevitable process of adjustment, a ratcheting down of excitement. I started joking that it was like the cosmos was habituating to my ideas. I took it very personally.”

...

The most likely explanation for the decline is an obvious one: regression to the mean. As the experiment is repeated, that is, an early statistical fluke gets cancelled out. The extrasensory powers of Schooler’s subjects didn’t decline—they were simply an illusion that vanished over time. And yet Schooler has noticed that many of the data sets that end up declining seem statistically solid—that is, they contain enough data that any regression to the mean shouldn’t be dramatic. “These are the results that pass all the tests,” he says. “The odds of them being random are typically quite remote, like one in a million. This means that the decline effect should almost never happen. But it happens all the time! Hell, it’s happened to me multiple times.” And this is why Schooler believes that the decline effect deserves more attention: its ubiquity seems to violate the laws of statistics. “Whenever I start talking about this, scientists get very nervous,” he says. “But I still want to know what happened to my results. Like most scientists, I assumed that it would get easier to document my effect over time. I’d get better at doing the experiments, at zeroing in on the conditions that produce verbal overshadowing. So why did the opposite happen? I’m convinced that we can use the tools of science to figure this out. First, though, we have to admit that we’ve got a problem.”

This is fascinating stuff. It doesn't show that "science fails". It shows that scientists are merely human and subject to cognitive bias as well as other pressures (career, grants, etc. that push them to find "positive" results). The article goes into good depth to explain the problem. It doesn't offer any solution. But it makes clear that science has a problem and is less secure than the average person would think. But science remains the only effective technique we have for understanding the world. It just means that are tools are less effective than we had hoped.

This is a revolution in just the same way as going from classical physics (solid objects, precise locations, observer is irrelevant to the measurement) to quantum physics where the world is much more complex and entertwined and "iffy". Quantum physics has to give up classical causality and precise measurements, but it has very solid results using a statistical approach.

For me the above is fun to consider. Yet again the world is even more complex than we thought. It is a far more interesting place than our simple theories would first lead us to believe. Humans get demoted again. This time from precise scientists to an issue in interpreting results. Now scientists need to be much more careful in their experiments to ensure that they themselves don't screw up their own experiement by their unconscious biases or the other subtle pressures which could affect their measurements.

Those Evil Men and Their Sexism

Here is a posting by Vaughan Bell at the Mind Hacks blog site. Read and weep. It is hard core evidence that men are sexist pigs to the bone, even the blind SOBs are soaked in sexism:

The study, currently in press for the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, was devised by researcher led by psychologist Johan Karremans who tested the idea by using adjustable mannequins.

The blind stood before them; they were told to touch the women, to focus their hands on the waists and hips. The breasts on both figures were the same, in case the men reached too high. The men extended their arms; they ran their hands over the region. Then they scored the attractiveness of the bodies. Karremans had a hunch, he told me, that their ratings wouldn’t match those of the sighted men he used as controls, half of them blindfolded so that they, too, would be judging by feel. It seemed likely, he said, that visual culture would play an overwhelming part in creating the outlines of lust. And though the blind had almost surely grown up hearing attractiveness described, perhaps even in terms of hourglass shapes, it was improbable, he writes in his forthcoming journal paper, that they had heard descriptions amounting to, “The more hourglass shaped, the more attractive,” which would be necessary to favor the curvier mannequin over the figure that was only somewhat less so.

But, with some statistically insignificant variation, the scores of the blind matched those of the sighted. Both groups preferred the more pronounced sweep from waist to hip.

Yep... we are a hopeless breed. Those feminists of the early 1970s tried to put us out of our misery. They did convince some psychologists that these sexist attitudes are culturally learned. They even did "sex assignment surgery" in their belief that you could raise a boy as a girl -- and vice versa -- successfully. They caused a number of suicides by persisting in this "scientific" myth. The above is interesting because it shows that a belief that males learn to admire sexy women from their culture around them is just as doomed. Look, we are hard wired. That's how nature works. You can tone it down, but you can't cut it out unless you are fanatic who ignores facts.

I'm all for civil behaviour and learning more respect for each other, but keep the fanatics away who think they can turn night to day or ignore scientific reality. Sadly the nature/nurture controversy, the eugenics movement, the sex vs gender identify controversy are all littered by the tragedies caused by fanatics who refused to acknowledge basic facts.

Dean Baker on a Double Standard

The US media has a double standard for dealing with Democrats and Republicans. Here's Dean Baker's take on this in his blog Beat The Press:

If the Post applied the same standard to the statements from Democrats as it does to Republicans, it would do a he said, she said, where it reported Democrats complaining that the invasion had not removed Saddam Hussein as president of Iraq, while the Republicans would be insisting that he had been removed, tried, and executed.

That is the only thing that one can conclude after reading the Post report on the Labor Day statement of House Minority Leader John Boehner complain that the stimulus bill has not created any jobs. Estimates of job gains from economists range from 500,000 to 1,000,000. If Mr. Boehner is unaware of this fact, then this level of ignorance of a person in an important position would be an appropriate topic for a news story.