Which came first - media bias or readership bias?

The Left love to tell us how newspaper bias, driven by the ego and political views of their owners, are affecting the politics and voting of their readership, with particular scorn poured on The Sun and Daily Mail. The right have their targets as well, normally the BBC, but The Guardian is often reviled, but probably not to the same extent the Left hate Murdoch's Sun.

An interesting study has been carried out in the USA and reported in last week's Economist* which provides an answer, and not the one the Left will want to hear, but sadly it can't be used to quieten the Right. I am not going to post the whole thing here, just the conclusion:

First, they measured whether a newspaper’s circulation responded to the match between its slant and its readers’ views. Not surprisingly, they found that more “Republican” newspapers had relatively higher circulations in more “Republican” zip codes. But their calculations of the degree to which circulation responded to political beliefs also allowed them to do something more interesting: to calculate what degree of slant would be most profitable for each newspaper in their sample to adopt, given the political make-up of the market it covered. They compared this profit-maximising slant to their measure of the actual slant of each newspaper’s coverage.

They found a striking congruence between the two. Newspapers tended, on average, to locate themselves neither to the right nor to the left of the level of slant that Mr Gentzkow and Mr Shapiro reckon would maximise their profits. And for good commercial reasons: their model showed that even a minor deviation from this “ideal” level of slant would hurt profits through a sizeable loss of circulation.

Showing that newspapers have a political slant that is economically rational does not necessarily answer the question of whether ownership or demand determines bias. Here, the academics are helped by the fact that large media companies may own several newspapers, often in markets that are politically very different. This allowed them to test whether the slants of newspapers with the same owner were more strongly correlated than those of two newspapers picked at random. They found that this was not so: owners exerted a negligible influence on slant. Readers’ political views explained about a fifth of measured slant, while ownership explained virtually none.

Assuming we can translate this to UK, and I don't see why not, it looks like they have sorted out the chicken and egg conundrum of newspaper bias in this country. It would be nice to think that it will at least put an end to the hard left's bleating about Murdoch being the root cause of the country's ills, but I doubt it.

But what of the Right's claims about BBC bias**? Sadly this study can't be used either way as the BBC does not need to respond to a market, any market, so it cannot be measured and will remain open to the Right's allegations.

*Unfortunately it behind a subscription wall

** FWIW I reckon that at worst the BBC is guilty of group think by people who have never felt the cold wind of competition and so don't really understand markets, rather than any conspiracy.

Conflicts of interest / duty

The Fat Bigot has written a good piece about why Mandelson doesn't have a conflict of interst and what he has is a conflict between personal interst and duty.

Details continue to be revealed about Lord Mandelson's dealings with Russia's aluminium bigwig. The coverage on television, in newspapers and on the radio is littered with the expression "conflict of interests". This phrase irritates me enormously because it is fundamentally inaccurate, indeed it is so inaccurate that it serves to play down the seriousness of the situation yet those who use it think it does the opposite. Let me explain.

Assume you are Billy Biggins, the EU Trade Commissioner, and you have to give advice and take decisions about levels of EU import duty on aluminium. Your decisions should be made only after all appropriate enquiries have been conducted and you have considered all relevant submissions made to you. The requirement to approach your job in that way has nothing to do with you personally, it goes with the job. Exactly the same obligations fall on every commissioner in every field. Those obligations arise out of the fact that you are under a duty to give impartial and properly considered advice and a duty to reach decisions only after considering all relevant circumstances. That is your duty to your employers.

He is right, personal interest should not an issue, the problem is that people like Mandelson seem to think that if something is in their personal interest it must therefore be in the interests of the rest of us.

More lazy soundbite reporting, a bit like the "shot to kill" reporting I have commented on before.

The dumbing down of the MSM continues apace

Having a quick break from writing presentations I had a look at the beeb's news pages to see if anything new had happened and was appalled by this headline :

The 'tapas seven'
The central witnesses in the Madeleine McCann case ..

FFS, this is not some story created for sub editors to have a bit of fun trying to see who can come up with most eye catching pun, its a real story about about a missing girl and distraught parents.

Is there no story that the MSM can't reduce to the banal? Are we all so dumb now that we can't read serious news without some weak pun to attract us?

It wouldn't be so bad, although still unacceptable, if it was some commercial organisation needing click through to generate revenues.

Daily Mail distorts DNA story

I don't read the DM, I don't like its style and political stance and so only catch these stories second hand, hence the delay.

On of the reasons I started reading blogs was to get a different perspective on what is really happening. Like most people I found the MSM sensationalist at best and downright liars at worst. One of my favourites is The Magistrates Blog, which is where I picked up this story:

Financial adviser arrested and forced to give DNA sample after spraying neighbour with garden hose A man was given a police caution for spraying a neighbour with his garden hose in a row over gardening. Bob Cornwall was questioned for three hours and had his fingerprints and a DNA sample taken after he squirted water at John Tait. The 42-year-old financial adviser was washing his car with his five-year-old son Reece when Mr Tait complained that he had dumped some branches in his garden.

Bob Cornwall was taken to a police station for three hours after spraying his neighbour with a garden hose Mr Cornwall said: "He was angry, red-faced and shouting. I told him initially to go away and stop shouting but then he started calling me names in front of my son so I flicked the hose at him. "Because I was cleaning my car the setting was only on a light spray so he was hardly drenched.

OK, so it looks like we have a neighbour dispute, the worst kind of dispute, and the police were called in, questioned Mr Cornwall and took his DNA and they are being pilloried by the DM, why?

As The Magistrate says:

..the action described in the story would certainly amount to Common
Assault. If it is reported to the police they have a duty to act, and so they
did. Neighbour disputes are not all trivial, and have even resulted in murder
before now

That sounds a bit different doesn't it? And you can bet that if the police hadn't done anything and it had led serious assault and even murder the DM would have been all over the police for not responding, they can't win.

But it gets worse:

But that isn't the worst of it. When I read the report (online: I wouldn't pay
for the damn thing) I rang an acquaintance to ask him to add a comment pointing
out that the police had acted properly, which he did. It was not published:
conclusive proof that the Mail did not want to spoil a good 'how dare they'
story with the inconvenient truth.

Now that, if true, is disgusting and the DM and MSM should be ashamed. But that's not the worst of it, hey wouldn't get my money anyway so I'm sure they don't care about my opinion.

But the real point is the one The Magistrate finishes with:

What annoys me about this is that many people, like those whose comments
were published, will have accepted the story with its suggestions of police bias
and inefficiency.

It all too easy to fall for the police have better things to do line when it offends the DM and its readership, but we never get the full story, do we?

American primaries and the MSM

Blimey, today's result with Hilary wining in New Hampshire has got the MSM in to a bit of a lather. It seems like they can't cope when the result doesn't reflect "The Polls". Guido sums it up well.

How Did We All Get This So Wrong? in the Speccie sums up the pundits this morning. All the pundit talk of double digit leads for Obama have come to naught, there was even talk of Hillary pulling out of the race yesterday.

The beeb, especially Radio 4 this morning, was full of "the American people have voted for.." or The people of New Hampshire have voted for.." it was the same after Iowa. All this shows is that the MSM are completely ignorant of what is going on with the Primaries and how they work, which is different in just about every State.

But before looking at the result its worth understanding the general purpose of the Primary. The idea is for the Party to select its best candidate to fight the election, in this case the US presidential election. Furthermore, as a federal country each State has a proportion of the final say, with the larger States having the largest say, as you would expect. As part of the process the candidates put themselves up for scrutiny by the party faithful (well in most cases but bare with me). This exposes them to the type of scrutiny they will get in the main election and in theory knocks out the weakest candidates, leaving their strongest candidate.

How each state carries out its Primary, and when, is up to that State and there are many ways it can be done, but from here I have listed the main ones:

Closed. Voters may vote in a party's primary only if they are registered members of that party. Independents cannot participate. Note that due to the appropriation of the term "independent" by some political parties, the term "non-partisan" is often used to refer to those who are not affiliated with a political party.

Semi-closed. As in closed primaries, registered party members can vote only in their own party's primary. Semi-closed systems, however, allow unaffiliated voters to participate as well. Depending on the state, independents either make their choice of party primary privately, inside the voting booth, or publicly, by registering with any party on Election Day.

Open. A registered voter may vote in any party primary regardless of his or her own party affiliation. When voters do not pre-register with a party before the primary, it is called a pick-a-party primary because the voter can select which party's primary he or she wishes to vote in on election day. Because of the open nature of this system, a practice known as "raiding" may occur. "Raiding" consists of voters of one party crossing over and voting in the primary of another party. Although no cases can be shown where this has happened successfully, the theory is that opposing party members vote for the weakest candidate of the opposite party in order to give their own party the advantage in the general election.

Semi-open. All voters may vote in any single primary, but must publicly declare which primary they will vote in before entering the voting booth. Typically this declaration is accomplished by requesting a ballot. In many states with semi-open primaries, election officials record each voter's choice of party and provide the parties access to the information

There is one other piece of information you need to understand before we look at the first two results and that is a Caucus which was used in Iowa:

Caucus A caucus is most generally defined as a meeting of supporters or members of a political party or movement. The exact definition varies among many different countries.

So now lets look at the results so far and see why the MSM and polls can be so wrong.

Iowa is a Caucus, which means people had to turn out to public meetings and cast their vote by standing around with other like minded people. It should also be remembered that the weather wasn't exactly temperate either so only the most dedicated will turn out. So who turns out to these meeting do you think? The party faithful, of course. What's more, whilst these may be organised by the State they people mill around so are open to the persuasion by the most vocal and to peer pressure.

So how do we think this type of vote may pan out? My guess is that it tends to favour those closest to the opinions of the core party members and workers who, like in this country, tend to be towards the extremes of public opinion.

Next New Hampshire. This is a Semi-Open primary and therefore open to all sorts of raiding (as described in the Open description above). Again it appeals to party members but anyone can turn up. So lets just look at raiding again - you look at the opposing party's nominees and think "if we are too win it would be much better if X was their nominee as the people don't like him/her" and go and vote for them. This is particularly the case if you would rather your own worst nominee was President rather than the other Party's best person.

Now I am not saying this definitely happened, especially in New Hampshire, but it certainly capable of happening. Lets face it we get similar negative voting here where Labour voters go for LibDems rather than let a Tory in.

Furthermore, given that its party members who are most likely to vote in Primaries we also have to be very suspicious of polls that sample the general population.

Anyway, I'm no political scientist and this is only a lay man's guide, but if I can see the flaws in believing polls why dont the MSM?