Wait, Wait, Lemme Tell You ...

On the road but thought I'd pass on this link from the New York Times about the show Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me from NPR, which is of course a current events quiz show.  Otherwise, I don't expect to be posting much this week.

Losing Weight for the HolidaysThe Power of Projection

I often blog about the role projection plays in public opinion.  For the budding media scholars out there, this can range from the third-person effect to false consensus to pluralistic ignorance to, well, a bunch of others.  In other words, as the character Prince Lucifer said in a play: "Public opinion is no more than this, what people think other people think."  And we often project our own opinions on what other people think.

Yeah, fine Hollander, but what's this about losing weight?

This story by NPR explores the power of imagination and projection in reducing how many M&Ms are eaten.  It's a neat experiment.  Read about it, or listen to the audio, yourself.  Good stuff.

The lesson?  Imagine all those Christmas cookies -- before you actually bake 'em.

Juan Williams and Keith Olbermann

What did we learn from the Juan Williams (fired by NPR) and Keith Olbermann (suspended by MSNBC) controversies?

Other, that is, than both were gross overreactions?  Let me toss out a few lessons.

1. Partisanship and ideology have become fully integrated into news.  For those who thought it was always this way (it wasn't), you'll be happy to know there's no way around it now.  Congrats.  It's the New World Journalism Order, and it ain't pretty.
2. Research has long suggested that conservatives are less open to hearing an opposing viewpoint than are liberals.  I wonder whether that still holds.
3. Journalism is now being held up to even more ridicule.  Thanks NPR and MSNBC.  Good job.
4. The First Amendment is used today like a blunt instrument, even when it doesn't really apply, not unlike a surgeon choosing the wrong tool to open up a chest. 
5. Straight news is dead.  Not because it doesn't exist, not because it isn't done.  For most people, Straight News is like the Tooth Fairy.  Nice to believe in, but that's about it.

Summing Up III

I started the week summing up what we know about media and political knowledge. On Monday I did TV news, on Tuesday comedy programs such as The Daily Show.

Today I take on that poor cousin -- radio.

Yeah, radio.

I like radio. A lot. A pile of research I did on talk radio in the 1990s helped win me tenure and thus employment at UGA where I can spend my time in hero support -- meaning I teach a lot, do a lot of research, and watch the occasionally-teaching faculty get all the kudos. Anyway, radio is a favorite of mine, but it's also weird. Why? I'm working now on a study of who stuck to the belief that Barack Obama was Muslim during the 2008 campaign. I'll blog more on this study soon, but one weird effect was radio news. The people who said they listened to a lot of radio news didn't act like others who consumed mainstream news media.

Then it hit me. Talk radio. I bet, though can't prove with the data I'm using, that when asked about radio news people answered the same whether they listened to NPR or Rush Limbaugh. In fact I'm betting they answered more for talk radio than traditional newscasts.

So radio bounces a lot of ways unless you ask very specific questions to make a respondent sure you mean what you mean. The audience for talk radio has changed dramatically over the past thirty years. Once an outpost for the lonely, then for the liberal disaffected, it's now become a bastion of conservative thought. Yeah, thought is a strong word, but follow me on this romp through radioland. Exposure to talk radio is associated with some gain in political knowledge, but mostly for those who already know something about public affairs. The barely interested, they don't get a lot out of it -- which makes talk radio vastly different than traditional TV news (see Monday's post).

What about regular radio news? That audience, especially for NPR, et al., is already high enough in education and knowledge and interest that listening doesn't really translate in much gain in political knowledge. Yes they score higher, but they were probably already high in the first place.

So when we say radio, we mean a lot of different things. TV is kinda like that, though not so much as radio.