Of Blogs, Twitter, YouTube...

Here's an interesting content analysis that finds not only do blogs, Twitter, and YouTube differ from the mainstream media, they differ from one another.  Only once in 29 weeks studied did the three "social media" outlets agree on the top story.

Bloggers gravitate toward stories (often political) that elicit emotion. Twitter is squarely focused on technology. YouTube, while its top story was often seemingly random, has social media's most international mix of stories.

 The full report is here. And even more detailed one about blogs is here.

Blogs were most like the mainstream media, followed by Twitter and then YouTube.  Keep in mind these are broad categories, such as "health and medicine" or "politics/government," not specific stuff like Dancing with American Idol or similar crud, so there's plenty of room for agreement -- and, apparently, disagreement.  Blogs focus more than the mainstream media on such topics as science and technology, while the evil MSM spends more time on health, medicine, and the economy.

Twitter, or rather those who use the site, is crazy about tech.  Forty-three percent of tweets were about technology, suggested a lot of geeks talking to a lot of geeks.  Apparently no one on Twitter worries about the economy (1 percent).

The American public is mad as hell -- at both political parties, at least that's the news from a new CNN poll.

But the survey also indicates the public continues to blame the GOP more than the Democrats for the country's current economic woes even though the Democrats have controlled both the White House and Congress for a year and a half.

Which I find interesting given Obama's having to wrestle with a major environmental disaster, a sputtering economy, an indeterminate pair of wars, and the frothing at the mouth by TV and radio talkmeisters of the Beck-Hannity-Limbaugh persuasion who continue to pound the administration.


You can read a full pdf of the report here, but it's rather slim.

Local television news has struggled during these tough economic times, more than most people probably realize.  Given that for many people, local TV is the only news they consume -- and given the relative lack of quality found in such "news" -- it bears examining.  Today I came across two interesting pieces:

1.  Fox affiliates, those local stations tied to Fox, are supposedly downplaying their affiliation to the conservative cable network.  That makes sense given the socio-economic breakdown of the local TV audience, which doesn't exactly match that of Fox News.  Smart move. 

2.  TV station profits seem to be increasing, according to this report.  That's good news given that, as mentioned above, many people rely on TV to get an admittedly thin version of what's happening locally.  No idea if this means my college's own station, WNEG, is also actually making money.  One can only hope.  But local TV stations need to remain profitable and providing at least some news to folks who don't read, don't use the Internet, and generally don't pay all that much attention to news in the first place.

Getting it Right, Getting it Wrong in Science Literacy

Here's an interesting post about who is getting it right and who is getting it wrong when discussing science literacy.  Well worth your time if you're into what people know about science.  I'd comment more but, c'mon, it's summer.

Sober Media II

I blogged a couple of days ago about this new, interesting study in Public Opinion Quarterly that created a dichotomy between sensationalist media and sober media.  That earlier posting focused on the methodological validity of that dichotomy, particularly as measured in the POQ study.  Today, the results.

The dependent variables centered on attitudes about state and federal courts and a major aspect of this is not only the sensationalist/sober dichotomy but how it interacted with political sophistication to predict attitudes about the courts.  Sophistication here was measured by a set of interest and knowledge questions pertaining to the courts.  To review, sober media were considered newspapers and network television news, while sensationalist media were considered talk radio and cable news. The authors subtracted one from the other to create a scale.

Figure 2 in the study is fascinating.  Imagine the x-axis as a measure of sophistication, the further right you go, the higher it is.  The y-axis, the dependent variable, is diffuse support of the courts.  For those who prefer high sensational media, greater sophistication leads to a decrease in support.  For those who prefer high sober media, greater sophistication leads to greater support.  It's a classic X interaction.

Essentially, the use of sensational media moderates the impact of political sophistication, which by itself leads to greater support of the courts.

In other words, media bad.  Only certain media ... cable news and talk radio, at least when used more than other more sober media, like newspapers and network TV news.  And this holds even when statistically controlling for party identification, age, sex, race, education, and trust in government.

We're starting to see a picture now of television news -- when it's good for folks, such as those low in interest or education, and when it's not so good.  Also becoming clearer is our understanding of how a fragmenting media marketplace with non-mainstream news sources are impacting what people think or know about their political world.  Unfortunately, the picture -- as it becomes clearer -- also becomes less attractive.

See the first link above, to the previous blog post, for details about the study.

Sensationalist and Sober Media

Sober media?

The latest issue of Public Opinion Quarterly includes a fascinating study of how the media influences attitudes about the American court system.  All well and good, but the fascinating part comes not from the relationship between news and attitudes about the courts, but the methodological approach taken by the authors in discriminating between sensationalist and sober media.

Stay with me.  It's worth the ride.

The authors write: "Our theoretical claim is where an individual receives information about the courts will shape the way they think about the courts."

Yup, can't argue with that.  The fragmenting of the news media has led to a number of potential differences between folks who, for example, get their news from Glenn Beck versus those who get their news from The Economist.  According to the authors, sensationalist media deconstruct court rulings in such a fashion as to result in less "diffuse" and "specific" support (these are terms described elswhere in the paper). 

Sober media, according to the authors, "focus on the legalistic nature of court processes" and will reinforce views "above the political fray."

This is important and I couldn't agree more, other than to be bitter about not thinking of it first.  Where it all begins to unravel comes from -- as is often the case -- in the methodological details.

In measuring "differential media exposure," as they call it, they distinguish between sensationalist media (political talk radio and cable news) and sober media (newspapers and network news).  They measure exposure to each and use a simple formula, shown below:

Differential Media Exposure =
(talk radio + cable news) - (newspaper + network news)

While I buy that the majority of talk radio tends to fit here, I'm not certain cable news is so easily collapsed into a sensationalist category.  And there's little evidence provided by the authors, or in any content analyses I'm aware of, to immediately support such a conclusion.  It feels right in my atheoretical gut, but so does a good dark beer.

But what they've done here is broken some interesting new ground, a fancy way of saying the rest of us can now use this formula to justify our own analyses.  And one study will build upon another, but what we don't really know -- other than in our own respective atheoretical guts -- is whether this sober to sensational media dichotomy is sound and sober, or a wee bit tipsy.

Tomorrow, a bit more about the results.

Article Details
Christopher D. Johnston and Brandon L. Bartels (2010), "Sensationalism and Sobriety: Differential Media Exposure and Attitudes Toward American Courts, Public Opinion Quarterly, 74, 260-285. 

Jon Stewart and Diminishing Returns

Watching Jon Stewart has diminishing returns.  Yeah, you can insert a joke here if you like.  Seems too easy, so I'm gonna move on.

There's a new study out, though, that finds watching Jon Stewart's The Daily Show leads to greater attentiveness to the news, but the more you watch, the less of an effect it has.  The International Journal of Public Opinion Research article also notes that one-out-of-five viewers have little interest in politics -- fascinating given the content of the program.

A major point gets to the crux of the argument between those who believe enertainment news programs either fail to inform, or actually do inform, some people.  This article falls on the "inform" side, suggesting that many with no interest are exposed to some news and information, thus leading to greater attentiveness and, I suppose by default, greater knowledge.