Killing the Messenger

At least 68 journalists have died this year trying to tell people what's happening in a dangerous world, according to this new report.  Hopefully the number won't climb any higher by the end of the year.  This beats the previous record of 67, recorded a couple of years ago.  Sad news, especially the single instance from the Philippines when 29 journalists were among a large group of people murdered, which happened in a part of the Philippines I didn't visit when there several years ago.

CNN ... 4th Place?

According to this NYTimes article:

CNN will finish 2009 behind MSNBC in prime-time ratings, the first time CNN has ever trailed a competitor other than the Fox News Channel over a full calendar year.

Wow.

You create a whole market niche -- the 24-hour cable news channel -- only to watch all these upstart partisan guys come in and clean your clock.  What's it all mean?  Partisan sells, and partisan hackery sells best (how else to explain Glenn Beck?).  The fragmentation of the news audience is in some ways good -- more competition should theoretically result in better news production -- but mostly bad, because in the race to the lowest common denominator, television news has never gone out of business by being bad.  Just look at local television news, which is basically tabloid journalism.  A fragmented audience means, to borrow a title from a very good book, a lack of common knowledge, a lack of shared experience, a lack of basic understanding of the events of the day not colored by partisan hackery.

Wireless Only

Doesn't really fit what I typically blog about, but this topic comes up quite often when I teach public opinion. The proportion of folks in the U.S. who are "wireless only" without a landline phone continues to rise, as can be seen by the accompanying graphic.

For an excellent report, go to this article in pollster. The federal report is here.

And yes, there is a what people know angle.  Much of our knowledge about people's opinions derive from good public opinion surveys, but they're becoming more challenging to conduct as folks shift away from landline phones to cell phones or other mobile devices.  Many worry that our understanding of what people think about key issues will suffer as a result, though so far that doesn't seem to be the case, at least according to some recent work by Pew.

I Never Listen to Celine

This New York Times story gets to the heart of methodology.

American men have a naughty little secret. Sometimes, they like to relax with a little Céline Dion. Professed classical music fans have one, too: as it turns out, they don’t tune into classical radio nearly as much as they claim.

Turns out, new measures of listening -- away from surveys and more to boxes that measure actual audience behavior -- finds out something we've always known.

People lie.

Okay, not so much lie as fib.  My dad always told me people lie about three things: did you go to church, did you vote, and what gas mileage does your car get.  My corollary on gas mileage is, the higher the cost of gas, the more SUV owners lie about their mileage.  When gas was $4 a gallon in the U.S., people with fat rolling boxes lied through their teeth about their mileage.

Back to radio listening, or to be honest, any media consumption habits.

As someone who got tenure thanks to research on talk radio, I found the next part interesting.

Talk radio, a largely conservative format, turns out to have fewer fans than previously thought. Talk radio’s market share declined 2.6 percent in the study of areas where the meters were used.

There's a lot more here to examine, but the basic methodological point is simple: self-reported behaviors in surveys are often the best measure we have, but they're blunt instruments at best, with lots of random (and non-random) error.  We often answer in ways that make us feel good about ourselves, which has classical music fans a bit worried since the new numbers show fewer listeners to this genre of music than we thought.

There's even a race card.  You knew there had to be.

The makeup and size of Arbitron’s sample is an issue for some Hispanic and urban broadcasters, who say metered readings undercount minority audiences and hurt their stations disproportionately. Mr. Adams of Arbitron said the company was responding to concerns by adding more panelists who had cellphones rather than landlines, and investing in in-person coaching to make sure all panel members use the devices correctly.

In other words, the new (better) system finds fewer viewers and listeners of "ethnic" programming, which includes everything from AM radio to BET programs.  It's fascinating stuff, proof that methodology can have real-world implications.

Oh, and I never listen to Celine. Ever. Measure it any way ya want, buckos, and it ain't gonna happen.

Late-Night Comedies and Political Knowledge

Late-night comedy programs do lead to greater knowledge, according to a fascinating study published in Communication Research, but the analysis finds this knowledge comes from easy questions with few response alternatives and mostly among inattentive viewers.

Wow.

This may be one of the better stabs at understanding how late-night comedy programs affect learning that I've seen, and its discussion of political knowledge research is excellent.  Now that I'm done gushing, let's get to the details.  Using item response theory and some slick computational tricks to analyze 2004 election data, they looked at exposure to a general measure that includes most all late-night shows (Letterman, Stewart, et al., see below).  Table 1 breaks down the item-by-item results, which for the statistically challenged will be something of, um, a challenge. 

If you work carefully through the results, and read the conclusions, you get to a few main points:

• Fewer response alternatives (meaning fewer choices among possible answers) often equals an easier question, or at least less item difficulty.
• Watching late-night comedies does lead to slightly more knowledge.
• But -- on the point above -- this is mostly on easy questions.  This is perhaps more of a TV effect than anything else, some incidental learning. 
• And "this increase is especially pronounced among the viewers who do not pay close attention to public affairs."  That's important too, because it fits some of what we are beginning to understand about television news, which seems to inform only the less informed.

A must-read for anyone interested in the effects of late-night programming.


Weaknesses?  Every study has them.  The biggest for me?  It's easy to quibble with their catch-all independent variable.  Letterman ain't Leno ain't Stewart ain't Colbert, so a single item probably fails to capture significant differences.  This is a secondary analysis, so the authors worked with what they had available, but it's certainly a question that deserves further study.

Science Writing

Newspaper science writing is "going out of existence," according to one report, and that's bad news because soon what people know about science will come from such brainiac experts as Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck.  If you haven't felt fear before, you should now.

Several mainstream news organizations in recent years have let go of their science reporters and done away with their science sections altogether. The science section of The New York Times, which is one of the few left in the country, features more health-related stories and fewer hard-science stories than it used to, said [Natalie] Angier, a Pulitzer Prize winner.

In a nation that struggles with basic science knowledge, that means what people know about science will only get worse. For those who drank the Kool-Aid and think the new world of blogs and various online sources will make things better -- pfffft.  It won't.  Not for most everyday people.  Instead we'll have pseudo-science ruling the day, and we'll all be worse off for it.

Yeah, the public likes science, but affect (emotion) and knowledge are very different bowls of red syrupy sugary drink.  After all, only 47 percent of Americans know electrons are smaller than atoms.  Yup, I'm reeeaaal optimistic, as science writing disappears.

What People Want for the Holidays -- Sleep

Okay, this falls in that fuzzy category of surveys conducted by groups who want the results to prompt you to buy stuff.  That said, let's go with the release anyway.  Warning: bad PR writing alert:

The kids may be sleeping soundly this season with “visions of sugar plums in their heads,” but almost half of the nation’s moms and dads (44%) say they are worried about being able to afford the holidays this year, with one in six Americans (17%) expecting to lose sleep due to holiday-induced stress.

Of course this is a PR release, not a news lede, otherwise it would never be written in quite this way.  So folks are losing sleep?  What can they do?  According to the SleepBetter.org Holiday Slumber Index (I'm not making this up), parents are the most susceptible to sleep changes.

Ya think?

Okay, gotta stop picking on this PR release, because it's not that terrible.  When it comes to survey results, it's often wise to look at not only the methodology but also who sponsored it, and this group on its site gives you hints on sleeping, does a quiz so you can learn your sleep style, and wants to sell ya stuff to make you sleep better.  That's okay.  They're up front with it on their web site and their name makes it obvious what they're about.

By the way, it's the holidays but I'm sleeping fine.  That's thanks to a little friend named Knob Creek.  A little bourbon and I can sleep on a rock.