19/6/20: Fox News, COVID19 Social Distancing and COVIDIOTS?

How influential is the U.S. mainstream media in defining public attitudes toward pandemic risk, decision-making under severe uncertainty and risks to their own health? It turns out - hugely influential.

A new paper from a group of U.S. economists, titled "The Persuasive Effect of Fox News: Non-Compliance with Social Distancing During the Covid-19 Pandemic" (authored by Andrey Simonov, Szymon Sacher, Jean-Pierre Dube, and Shirsho Biswas, May 17, 2020 https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/BFI_WP_202067.pdf) finds that:

• "The average partial effect of Fox News viewership in a zipcode implies that 1 percentage point increase in cable viewership reduces the propensity to stay at home by 8.9 percentage points compared to the pre-pandemic average." 
• "A persuasion rate of Fox News on noncompliance with stay-at-home behavior during the crisis of about 33.5% − 50% across our various social distancing metrics."
• Simple regression (OLS) analysis o"generate a positive and statistically significant effect of Fox News viewership from early March onwards."
• More robust, IV estimates. "are considerably larger and indicate a take-off in the Fox News effect in early March and a stabilization in mid March, almost immediately after the declaration of a national emergency."
• "Since the supply-side measures, such as business closures, start to happen only two weeks later after the take-off of Fox News effects, the magnitudes of the viewership effects reflect the persuasive effect of Fox News on viewers and not a feedback effect from the equilibrium response of firms, at least early on."
• "Our findings for CNN are inconclusive, with imprecise point estimates centered near zero."

21/5/18: Truth Decay and Fake News: Four Links

Some useful links on recent research  concerning the relationship between empirical/factual evidence, newsflows and policy discourse in the West:

• Excellent set of research notes on the topic of decline in quality of analytical and media discourse and use of empirical evidence (facts) in American policy discourse: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2314.html via Rand. 

• On related topic, a factsheet on fake news flows in Europe (focusing mostly on France) from the Reuters Institute: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2018-02/Measuring%20the%20reach%20of%20fake%20news%20and%20online%20distribution%20in%20Europe%20CORRECT%20FLAG.pdf. 

• 2016 report from Reuters Institute on fact-checking in Europe: http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/publications/2016/rise-fact-checking-sites-europe/#introduction and their 2017 report: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Digital%20News%20Report%202017%20web_0.pdf. 

2/2/18: Irish Media and the Property Crisis: A New Paper

A new paper covering the history of the financial crisis in Ireland, from the media complacency perspective, has been published by the New Political Economy journal. "The Irish Newspapers and the Residential Property Price Boom" by Ciarán Michael Casey (see http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13563467.2018.1426562) references my warnings about the Irish property market in 2005 comment to the Irish Times.

For completeness of the record, here is my 2004 article for Business & Finance magazine stating my, then, view on the property market in Ireland: http://trueeconomics.blogspot.com/2016/01/10116-my-2004-article-on-irish-property.html.

19/11/17: Mainstream Media & Fake News: Twin Forces Behind Voter Behavior Biases

Behavioral biases come in all shapes and forms. Many of these, however, relate to the issue of imperfect information (e.g. asymmetric information, instances of costly information gathering and processing that can distort decision-making, incomplete information, etc).

A recent Quartz article on the balance of threats/risks arising from the 'fake news' phenomenon (the distortion of facts presented, sometimes, by alternative and mainstream media alike) and another informational asymmetry, namely selectivity biases (which apply to our propensity to select information either due to its proximity to us - e.g. referencing bias, or due to its ideological value to us - e.g. confirmation bias, etc). Note: Quartz article is available here: https://qz.com/1130094/todays-biggest-threat-to-democracy-isnt-fake-news-its-selective-facts/.

According to the article: "News sources aim to cover—in the words of the editor in chief of Reuters—the “facts [we] need to make good decisions.”" But, "As readers, we also suffer from what’s called confirmation bias: We tend to seek out news organizations and social media posts that confirm our views. Selective facts occur precisely for this reason." In other words, confirmation bias is a part of our use and understanding of information. The author concludes that "Selective facts are worse than outright fake news because they’re pervasive and harder to question than clearly false statements."

So far so good. except for one thing. The article does not go in detail into why selective facts are, all of a sudden, prevalent in today's world. Why does confirmation bias (and, unmentioned by the author, proximity heuristic) matter today more than they mattered yesterday?

The answer to this, at least in part, has to be the continued polarization of the mainstream media (and, following it, non-traditional media).

Here is a PewResearch study from 2014 on ideological polarization in the mainstream media and social media: http://www.journalism.org/2014/10/21/political-polarization-media-habits/.  Two charts from this:

Not enough to drive home the point? Ok, here is from Forbes article covering the topic (source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/brettedkins/2017/06/27/u-s-media-among-most-polarized-in-the-world-study-finds/#1ee9a3242546):
"The Reuters Institute recently released its 2017 Digital News Report, analyzing surveys from 70,000 people across 36 countries and providing a comprehensive comparative analysis of modern news consumption. The report reveals several important media trends, including rising polarization in the United States. While 51% of left-leaning Americans trust the news, only 20% of conservatives say the same. Right-leaning Americans are far more likely to say they avoid the news because “I can’t rely on news to be true.""

The trend is not new. In the 1990s, plenty of research have shown that print and cable media have started drifting (polarizing) away from the 'centre-focused' news reporting as local monopolies of newspapers and TV stations started to experience challenges from competitors. You can read about this here:

• Tuning Out or Tuning Elsewhere? Partisanship, Polarization, and Media Migration from 1998 to 2006 by Barry A. Hollander (2008), Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Volume 85, Issue 1, which posits a view that polarization of the mass media has been driving moderate voters away from news and toward entertainment. Which, of course, effectively hollows out the 'centre' of media ideological spectrum. 
• "This article examines if the emergence of more partisan media has contributed to political polarization and led Americans to support more partisan policies and candidates," according to "Media and Political Polarization" published in Annual Review of Political Science Vol. 16:101-127 (May 2013) by Markus Prior.
• And economics of media polarization in "Political polarization and the electoral effects of media bias" by Dan Bernhardt, Stefan Krasa, and Mattias Polborn, published in Journal of Public Economics, Volume 92, Issues 5–6, June 2008, Pages 1092-1104

These are just three examples, but there are plenty more (hundreds, in fact) of research papers looking into twin, causally interlinked, effects of media polarization and the rise of the polarized voter preferences.

Which brings us to the Quartz's observation: "While social media and partisan news has allowed more voices to be heard, it also means we are now surrounded by more people manipulating what facts make it to our newsfeeds. We’d draw a different conclusion—or even just a more nuanced picture—if we were given all the information on an issue, not just the parts that best benefit a particular viewpoint."

It may be true, indeed, that current markets for supply of alt-news are enabling greater confirmation bias prevalence in voter attitudes. But it is at best just a fraction of the complete diagnosis. In fact, the polarized, or put differently - biased, nature of the mainstream news is at least as responsible for the evolution of these biases, as it is responsible for the growth in alt-news. That is correct: fake information is finding are more accepting audiences today, in part, because the CNN and FoxNews have decided to cultivate ideologically polarized market differentiation for their platforms in the past.

28/1/17: Trust in Core Social Institutions Has Collapsed

The latest Edelman Trust Barometer for 2017 shows comprehensive collapse in trust around the world in 4 key institutions of any society: the Government (aka, the State), the NGOs (including international organizations), the Media (predominantly, the so-called mainstream media, or established print, TV and radio networks) and the Businesses (heavily dominated by the multinational and larger private and public corporates).

Here are 8 key slides containing Edelman's own insights and my analysis of these.

Let's start with the trend:

In simple terms, world-wide, both trust in Governments and trust in Media are co-trending and are now below the 50 percent public approval levels. For the media, the wide-spread scepticism over the media institutions capacity to deliver on its core trust-related objectives is now below 50 percent for the second year in a row. even at its peak, media managed to command sub-60 percent trust support from the general public, globally. This coincided with the peak for the Governments' trust ratings back in 2013. Four years in a row now, Governments enjoy trust ratings sub-50 percent and in 2017, mistrust in Governments rose, despite the evidence in favour of the on-going global economic recovery.

In 2017, compared to 2015-2016, Media experienced a wholesale collapse in trust ratings. In only three countries of all surveyed by Edelman did trust in media improve: Sweden, Turkey and the U.S. Ironically, the data covering full 2016, does not yet fully reflect the impact of the U.S. Presidential election, during which trust in media (especially the mainstream media) has suffered a series of heavy blows.

 In 2016, 12 out of 29 countries surveyed had trust in Media at 50 percent or higher. In 2017, the number fell to 5.

Similar dynamics are impacting trust in NGOs:

 Of 29 countries surveyed by Edelman, 21 had trust in NGOs in excess of 50 percent in 2017, down from 23 in 2016. Although overall levels of trust in NGOs remains much higher than that for the Media institutions, the trend is for declining trust in NGOs since 2014 and this trend remans on track in 2017 data.

As per trust in Government, changes in 2017 compared to 2015-2016 show only 7 countries with improving Government ratings our of 29 surveyed. This might sound like an improvement, unless you consider the already low levels of trust in Governments.

In 2017, as in 2016 survey, only 7 countries posted trust in Government in excess of 50 percent. This is the lowest proportion of majority trust in Government for any survey on record.

Based on Edelman analysis, the gap between 'experts' (or informed public) view of institutions and that of the wider population is growing.

 And as the above slide from Edelman presentation shows, the gap between informed and general public is substantively the same in culturally (and institutionally) different countries, e.g. the U.S., UK and France. All three countries lead the sample by the size of the differences between their informed public trust in institutions and the general public trust. All of these countries have well-established, historically stable institutions and robust checks and balances underpinning their democracies. Yet, the elites (including intellectual elites) detachment from general public is not only massive, but growing.

These trends are also present in other countries:

As Edelman researchers conclude: the public in general is now driven to reject the status quo.

All of the above suggests that political opportunism, ideological populism and rising nationalism are neither new phenomena, nor un-reflected in historical data, nor fleeting. Instead, we are witnessing organic decline in trust of the institutions that continue to sustain the status quo.

27/1/17: Some News Links

Some recent news links that reference the site or carry my comments:

Global Capital article by Jeremy Weltman looking at key country risks for 2016-2017: http://www.globalcapital.com/article/b1157nr86h8byh/country-risk-review-2016-populism-is-risky.

Il Foglio (Italian) looking at the failures of policymakers around the world to address the issues of demographics, citing one of the analysis pieces published on this blog: http://www.ilfoglio.it/list/2017/01/04/news/cona-cie-demografia-dimenticata-113573/?refresh_ce.

7/12/15: A new study on psychology of crisis response & the role of the media

This is a new study developed by an excellent young Irish psychologist - Seamus Power - at the University of Chicago. 

All Irish people, over the age of 18, are eligible to take part in this survey and all walks of life, ages, demographics etc are really needed. The survey should take under 15 minutes to complete.

Seamus is interested in your responses to a range of questions and your reactions to a randomly assigned media article covering the topics relating to policy responses to the recent crisis.

I can't really stress enough how important this topic is for Ireland and for social sciences, so please, take a few minutes to complete it. We need data-based evidence and Seamus will be sharing his findings with all of us.

Study link here: http://ssd.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bKESEHr6IXjkXGt .

31/5/2014: Twitter: Promoting Isolation, Ideological Segregation and All Things Good to Your Political Engagement

A very interesting study looking at comparatives of media and news use via twitter (social media) and traditional media (print, radio and TV). The paper, titled "Are Social Media more Social than Media? Measuring Ideological Homophily and Segregation on Twitter" (May 2014_ by YOSH HALBERSTAM and BRIAN KNIGHT is available here: http://bfi.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/research/Twitter_may232014.pdf

Some highlights:

Per authors, "Social media represent a rapidly growing source of information for citizens around the world. In this paper, we measure the degree of ideological homophily and segregation on social media."

The reason this is salient is that there has been a "tremendous rise in social media during the past decade, with 60 percent of American adults and over 20 percent of worldwide population currently using social networking sites (Rainie et al., 2012)…. Indeed, this phenomenal growth in social media engagement in the U.S. and around the world has transformed the nature of political discourse. Two thirds of American social media users—or 39 percent of all American adults—have engaged in some form of civic or political activity using social media, and 22 percent of registered U.S. voters used social media to let others know how they voted in the 2012 elections."

Per authors, "Three key features of social media distinguish it from other forms of media and social interactions." These are:

• "…social media allow users to not only consume information but also to produce information." It is worth noting that social media can also reproduce information produced on social media, as well as that produced by traditional media.
• "…the information to which users are exposed depends upon self-chosen links among users." In other words, social media produced and distributed information can be self-selection biased. The extent of this selection is more limited in the case of traditional media, where individual biases of consumers can be reinforced by selecting specific programmes/channels/publications, but beyond that, the content received by consumers is the one selected for them by someone else - journalists, editors.
• "…information on social media travels more rapidly and broadly than in other forms of social interactions. …[social media network model] leads to a substantially broader reach and more rapid spread of information than other forms of social interactions."

As authors put it: "Given these three distinguishing features, the rapid growth of social media has the potential to effect a structural change in the way individuals engage with one another and the degree to which such communications are segregated along ideological lines."


To examine this possibility, the authors construct "a network of links between politically-engaged Twitter users. For this purpose, we selected Twitter users who followed at least one Twitter account associated with a candidate for the U.S. House during the 2012 election period. Among this population of over 2.2 million users, we identify roughly 90 million links, which form the network." Based on political party followed, users were assigned ideological identifiers.

Two key findings of the paper are as follows:

1. "…we find that the network we constructed shares important features with face-to-face interactions. Most importantly, both settings tend to exhibit a significant degree of homophily, with links more likely to develop between individuals with similar ideological preferences." In other words, we do show strong selection biases in networks we form. Doh!..
2. "…when computing the degree of ideological segregation and comparing it to ideological segregation in other settings, we find that Twitter is much more segregated than traditional media, such as television and radio, and is more in-line with ideological segregation in face-to-face interactions, such as among friends and co-workers." Worse: we not only form biased networks, we also create selection-biased interactions and generate selection-biased chains and flows of content. Doh! Redux...

Conclusion: "Taken together, our results suggest that social media may be a force for increasing isolation and ideological segregation in society."

Wait… so we act on the social media base to create networks that are closer to friends networks… and this leads to… isolation?.. Well, my eye, I would have thought this would be the opposite…

But top conclusion makes sense:  "The issue of ideological segregation is important when providing such information. Exposure to diverse viewpoints in a society helps to ensure that information is disseminated with little friction across a large number of people. When a community is polarized and is divided into factions, by contrast, information may spread unevenly and may miss intended targets. Our results suggest that social media are highly segregated along ideological lines and thus emphasize these potential problems associated with the flow of information in segregated networks."

The problem, of course is: Can the selection bias be ameliorated? Can people be 'incentivised' to engage with ideological opposites? In my view - yes. This can be achieved most likely by educating people about systems of thought, logic, structures of knowledge, information. The thing is: in social networks, such education is both more feasible (volume of information delivered and speed are both higher) and probably more productive (because there is inherent trust in one's own network that is stronger than in detached media networks. Peers generate stronger bonds than preachers...

The paper has some fascinating data illustration of media biases, though - worth looking at in the appendix.