Public Trust in the News

Interesting report out, sponsored by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, that looks at the public trust in journalism. Summary here, full report here.

Those studied do not think journalists are dishonest so much as they find the product of journalism dishonest in that it's either confusing or fails to ring true when it describes the world in which they live. People could find more "useful, reliable, or amusing information elsewhere" (to quote the executive summary).

In place of individual medium loyalties (newspaper, TV news, etc.), people instead describe a "crowded media environment" that ranges from the silly to the serious. The three concepts of useful, reliable, and amusing show up in comments by real people, in one form or another. People, confronted with all this information, aren't sure who to believe. Adding my own here, I suspect that's one of the reasons we find people who claim to help it all make sense, from Jon Stewart to Rush Limbaugh, are quite successful today. They'll make sense of it all for you, even if one might quibble with the way, the fairness, of the sense they make.

There's a bit of political knowledge aspects here if you read carefully. Many people were confused in the U.S. presidential election. They simply don't know the backstory and often news accounts are written (or produced) with that assumption in mind. I've seen this myself as my teenage son struggles with a printed news story. The inverted pyramid simply confuses him because he's not starting with the prior knowledge necessary to make sense of a summary lede, which focuses on the latest information on top. Political knowledge suffers. People get frustrated. They look elsewhere for "sense making," often places where sense and sensible are not necessarily the same thing (i.e., Sean Hannity). And yet, and yet.

There's a lot here to digest and what I see reminds me of some other recent work. More on this report later, I hope.

Cognitive Flexibility and the News

I've been reading a chapter from a new book entitled Internet Newspapers: The Making of a Mainstream Media that has some lessons about how people learn from news stories. The chapter, "The Web News Story and Cognitive Flexibility" by Lowrey and Choi, is a bit complicated but essentially it tests a linear format of news telling against a general non-linear story and one that is informed by cognitive flexibility theory.

Lemme steal from the method section to describe this version.

"The CFT news report contained five brief news stories, each approximately 200 to 250 words in length, and included brief "perspective" paragraphs (each between 30 to 100 words) that could be linked from the main story." In other words, flexible learning. This idea and theory comes apparently from education and the idea is that it will improve learning by giving people multiple ways of getting into a piece of writing and by allowing them to shift among bits and pieces.

Did it work? Sorta kinda, but it all really depends on prior knowledge. No surprise there. Prior knowledge (or schematic structure, or awareness, or a host of other labels we put on the concept of what people know prior to exposure to some stimuli) always makes a big difference. And it does here too.

People "liked" the CFT version better, but no difference was seen in credibility. Most of all, a series of interaction effects are seen with prior knowledge. The authors argue those with higher prior knowledge "take control of the reading experience." The CFT has no magical power. It was no better and no worse in recognition of information. So people may like it a bit more, but they apparently don't learn any more from it.

Full disclosure: author Wilson Lowrey received his PhD from UGA, where I teach.

What Canadian Youth Know

Stumbled across this editorial about Canada's youth and what they know. The graph that caught my eye follows:

Teenagers have received a bad rap for their political knowledge when actually they probably know more than their parents. Bonin and other youth have access to the Internet and in addition with expansion of airlines, are able to travel to other cultures. Nowadays, youth are able to go beyond only dreaming of far away places and can actually access information immediately online (italics added).

Mostly, young people don't so much know stuff as they are now better equipped to find stuff out. In other words, ask them a political question and the response might be: "I don't know, but I know how to find out."

Whether that's a form of knowledge is a matter of some debate and academic inquiry. Is knowing how to find out a piece of information the same as actually knowing it? I don't think so, not at least in that piece of information's utility. In other words, merely knowing how to find a piece of information does me little good in processing the news, of gleaning some useful information from what I read or hear on TV. Whether Google is changing the way we think, that's a topic covered quite nicely in an Atlantic piece some months ago (that it's making us stupid) and again recently (it's making us smarter). But all in all, knowing how to looking something up (online or otherwise) helps us little in making sense of the world as a story flits across the screen.

It's a topic I'd love to examine further, if my hunch is right that young people indeed take this approach. I'm just not quite sure how to attack the research question.

A Freakonomic Look at Safety

Interesting blog today at the NYTimes site by the Freakonomics guy who turns his attention to perceived risk and accidents. What people know is often so screwed up by perception, in this case a single rail accident that gets so much attention compared to the huge number of small car accidents that do not, thus making people think rail might be more dangerous than it really is.

Nothing new here, if you've read the risk perception research, and yet interesting nonetheless.

Brief Hiatus

I am traveling for the next few days and probably will not feed the blog during that time, though I am taking my laptop so it's possible I might slip something in, if time allows. I know this deeply disappoints my ones of readers, but such is life in summertime.

Iran vs America -- Political Knowledge

Funny The Daily Show bit that compares what Iranians know about American politics versus what Americans know about Iranian politics. Thanks to Nick Browning for pointing it out to me.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Jason Jones: Behind the Veil - Ayatollah You So
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Jason Jones in Iran

The Junk Drawer and Knowledge

I'm convinced every home has a junk drawer, and I always figured someone out there somewhere must study the contents of these drawers. In my mind I see an Indiana Jones bravely working layer by layer, sifting through paper clips and old receipts and broken pencils, recording the presence of stamps and scissors and that cheap broken camera no one will get around to actually throwing away.

Seriously, people do study this stuff.

And I also found today people who study clutter in the home as an analogy for home computing. Here's one example, the abstract at least.

Our brains work pretty much the same way. Oh the clutter -- the stuff you can never quite find when you need it (co-worker names, wedding anniversaries, etc.) and the stuff you can always find but never need (the names of all the members of Grand Funk Railroad, the phone number of an old girlfriend). We toss information in the drawer, be it social or political, and hope we can root it out when it's needed.

Is it any wonder, then, we tend to do a lousy job answering telephone surveys that ask such vital political knowledge questions such as, "who is Nancy Pelosi?"

For many folks, the answer is: "Who cares?"

So we cram these bits and pieces of info gleaned from the news or from casual conversations into our junk drawer of a brain. Some if it is organized, but we often don't understand how it's organized. Everyone knows how a smell will set off memories. Luckily we don't have scratch-and-sniff politicians, but that might help on these survey questions.

Now don't get me wrong. Anyone who has read this blog knows that I believe political knowledge is important, that is helps people organize their political world and that it makes them more likely to efficiently participate in the political process. And I've published a lot of research on political knowledge, and what I haven't published I've read by others much smarter than me. But the junk drawer analogy, at least today, works for me. Tomorrow I'll probably have another.