Thanks to all for this interesting thread. My thoughts: Applying cognitive research to news audiences and journalists often yields interesting results. Thinking about how we as journalists think, and about how our audiences think, can bring some clarity to habits such as confirmation bias or catch more nuanced forms of stereotyping. It also can drive one to distraction, as ultimately, one never knows what is in the mind of the audience and, as the Harvard-based Project Implicit shows, journalists might not be full conscious about what is happening in their own minds when reporting and writing. Concerning the last graf of the Nieman article: The author is advocating a common ingroup identity model. I call it "big umbrella journalism"; trying to report so that as many different perspectives that are fact-based and relevant are included in coverage. This is different from "getting both sides" coverage, as it seeks to put on equal footing only the perspectives that are evidence-based and observation-based, not advocacy-based. (Given that definition, Obama's birth origins don't get included, for example.) I believe when journalists work from this orientation, they are more aware of their own cognitive biases and frames. Will this operating model for news work change the hostile media effect? Journalists can only control themselves and what's in their own heads and hearts and how that translates into their work. They can't control the audience's reactions. Teaching media literacy (sourcing of news stories, validation of information, evaluation of information, etc.) in schools and universities is all the more important given all the outlets for all the varying levels of quality when it comes to information. ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Peggy Holman" <pe
...@peggyholman.com>
> To: "JTMlist" <jtmlist@googlegroups.com>
> Sent: Sunday, July 1, 2012 11:34:09 AM
> Subject: {JTM} Fwd: How do you tell when the news is biased? It
> depends on how you see yourself
> A fascinating read on bias. I wonder if anyone has insight into how
> best to deal with it?
> Peggy
> Begin forwarded message:
> > From: Bill Densmore < wpdensm
...@gmail.com >
> > Subject: How do you tell when the news is biased? It depends on how
> > you see yourself
> > Date: June 28, 2012 11:46:07 AM PDT
> > To: Peggy Holman < pe
...@opencirclecompany.com >
> >
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/NiemanJournalismLab/~3/z3RERjVWUV0/
> > How do you tell when the news is biased? It depends on how you see
> > yourself
> > June 27, 2012 10:30:22 AM
> > Jonathan Stray
> > Take a moment with the headlines from this screenshot of The New
> > York
> > Times homepage from January. Really — it’s a little experiment.
> > Click
> > the image above for a larger view if you need to.
> > Ready?
> > How did you feel about these headlines? Does it matter to you to
> > learn
> > that they actually came from Fox News on the same day? ( Screenshot
> > for proof .) This faux home page was created by Dan Schultz, the MIT
> > grad student also responsible for Truth Goggles , using his NewsJack
> > point-and-click “remixer.”
> > Knowing what you know now, do these headlines seem different to you?
> > If so, you’ve just proved that we detect and judge bias based on
> > things other than what journalists actually write.
> > This effect has been noticed before. At the University of Michigan,
> > William Youmans and Katie Brown showed the same Al Jazeera English
> > news clip to American audiences, but with a catch: Half saw the news
> > with its original Al Jazeera logo intact, and half saw the same
> > video
> > with a CNN logo instead . Viewers who saw the story with the
> > original
> > Al Jazeera logo rated Al Jazeera as more biased than before they had
> > seen the clip. But people who watched the same footage with the fake
> > CNN logo on it rated CNN as less biased than before!
> > Does this mean that we judge “bias” by brand, not content? Many
> > people
> > have tried to define what media bias is, and attempted to measure
> > it,
> > but I want to try to answer a different question here: not how we
> > can
> > decide if the news is biased, but how each of us actually does
> > decide
> > — and what it means for journalists. The hostile media effect
> > During the Lebanese civil war in 1982, Christian militias in Beirut
> > massacred thousands of Palestinian refugees while Israeli solders
> > stood by. In 1985, researchers showed television news coverage of
> > the
> > event to pro-Israeli and pro-Arab viewers. Both sides thought the
> > coverage was biased against them .
> > This effect — where both sides feel that a neutral story is biased
> > against them — has been replicated so many times, in so many
> > different
> > cultural settings, with so many types of media and stories, that it
> > has its own name: hostile media effect . The same story can make
> > everyone on all sides think the media is attacking them.
> > Like a lot of experimental psychological research, the hostile media
> > effect suggests we’re not as smart as we think we are. We might like
> > to think of ourselves as impartial judges of credibility and
> > fairness,
> > but the evidence says otherwise. Liberals and conservatives can (and
> > often do) believe the same news report is biased against both their
> > views; they aren’t both right.
> > But why does this happen? Specifically, why does it happen for some
> > stories and topics and not others? Discussion of climate change
> > often
> > provokes charges of bias, but discussion of other hugely significant
> > science stories, such as the claimed link between vaccination and
> > autism , usually produces a much smaller outcry. You see bias when
> > you
> > see yourself as part of a group
> > Communications researcher Scott Reid has proposed that we can
> > explain
> > the hostile media effect through the psychological theory of
> > self-categorization . This is a theory about personal identity and
> > group identity, and it says that we “self-stereotype,” placing
> > conceptual labels on ourselves just as we might make assumptions
> > about
> > other people. We all have multiple identities of this kind: gender,
> > age, political preferences, race, nationality, subculture, and so
> > on.
> > To test this, he performed a series of recently published
> > experiments
> > with American students. In the first, he used a survey to ask people
> > whether they thought the media was biased, as well as their personal
> > political orientations, both on a numerical scale from liberal to
> > conservative. The catch was different groups got different cover
> > pages
> > with different sets of instructions. The first set of instructions
> > was
> > neutral:
> > > The purpose of this questionnaire is to get your views of the news
> > > media in general.
> > The second set of instructions was designed to play up feelings of
> > partisanship:
> > > In recent times the differences between Republicans and Democrats
> > > have
> > > become highly polarized. Many of the issues discussed in the media
> > > are
> > > seen very differently by Republicans and Democrats. In this
> > > context,
> > > it is important to gauge people’s views of the media.
> > The third set of instructions was also designed to reinforce an
> > identity, but in this case an identity that might be common to both
> > liberals and conservatives — that of being an “American” versus the
> > rest of the world.
> > > With increasing globalization, it has become apparent that the
> > > media
> > > differs across countries and cultures. Al Jazeera has become the
> > > voice
> > > for much of the Arab world, both within the United States and in
> > > the
> > > Middle East. Given these changes, it is important to gauge
> > > people’s
> > > views of the news media in the United States.
> > And, oddly enough, the same survey gave different results, depending
> > on the instructions:
> > Each of the lines on this graph shows how people’s perception of
> > bias
> > varied with their political orientation. The downward slope means
> > that
> > the more conservative someone was — the farther to the right on the
> > “political position” scale — the more they perceived the media as
> > hostile to Republicans, just as expected.
> > The surprising thing is that the strength of this perception
> > depended
> > on the framing each group had been given. When people were prompted
> > to
> > think about Republicans and Democrats, they perceived more media
> > bias
> > against their views, as indicated by the steep dashed line. When
> > they
> > were instructed to think about America vs. the world, they perceived
> > slightly less bias then the neutral condition, as indicated by the
> > shallow dotted line. Our perception of bias changes depending on the
> > self-identity we currently have in mind.
> > This self-categorization explanation also predicts that people who
> > are
> > more partisan perceive greater bias, even when the news is in their
> > favor. In Reid’s second experiment, people read an article about
> > polling numbers for the 2008 presidential primaries, containing
> > language like “among Republicans, former New York mayor Rudy
> > Giuliani
> > maintained a 14-point lead over Arizona Sen. John McCain for the
> > Republican presidential nomination,” and similar statements about
> > the
> > Democratic candidates. This time, the source of the information was
> > manipulated: One group saw the poll attributed to the “Economic
> > Policy
> > Institute, a Democrat think tank and polling agency,” while the
> > other
> > was told it came from the “American Enterprise Institute, a
> > Republican
> > think tank and polling agency.”
> > In this purely factual scenario — dry-as-toast poll numbers,
...
