Is Bob Woodward a Wuss?

It's all over the net, the flap between Bob Woodward and the White House and whether the renown journalist was threatened in an email.  There's a terrific summation at Politico, with the emails and embedded video.  Basically, here's the "threat" part:

...But I do truly believe you should rethink your comment about saying saying that Potus asking for revenues is moving the goal post. I know you may not believe this, but as a friend, I think you will regret staking out that claim.

That's a threat?  "As a friend, I think you will regret staking out that claim"? Really? Hell, as a reporter I had threats in late night phone calls, had threats in person, had a gun pointed at me.  Those are threats. 

Now let me be clear, I'm a journalism kid of the 1970s.  I'm a Woodward admirer.  "Woodstein" is why I'm here.  I'm not a partisan in this.

But here's my main point.

Seventy journalists were killed in 2012.  That's a record-breaking year.  For Woodward to call this email "a threat" while reporters are risking their lives in troubled spots around the world is, to me, too damned prissy.  

I hate that my hero appears to be a wuss.

Recorders and Processors

I was deep into a research article on how people process information and it struck me how much what they were talking about also fits some of the challenges in journalism. I'll avoid getting too PhDweebish, so here's how I'd translate what they were talking about into the roles journalists now face. 

The article drew a distinction between information recorders and information processors from a cognitive science perspective.  From a journalism perspective, think of information recorders as the basic stuff of news reporting: the taking of basic facts, interviews, and observations and then cobbling them together into a coherent but straightforward representation of what happened.  If you need a metaphor, think of it as taking flour, yeast, water, and other ingredients and baking a loaf of bread.  Information processors work at a higher level.  Some might call it a "value added" level, in which you take the work of the recorders and turn it into something similar.  We know these folks as aggregators (or if you're cynical, thieves). Or to extend the baking metaphor, they're taking the bread and making toast and jam, or a really tasty sandwich. 

As smarter people than I have long pointed out, it's become economically more challenging to be a recorder these days than a processor. Adding value, via opinion and color and snark and perspective and humor, makes the basic stuff of news much more interesting, more engaging.  Of course the recorders could do this too, and often have, but the constraints of traditional journalism have, until recently, made this difficult.

How does this affect the audience?

You read an awful lot about how journalists should do their jobs, and a lot of speculation about what it means to the audience, but damn little evidence -- hard date -- is presented to support many of the claims.  Why?  Because it's hard work, doing research.  Instead, toss in a few anecdotal interviews, a few gut feelings, maybe swipe a few Pew tables, type it all up and call it a major report on the future of the field.  As if real research was ever that simple.

Recorders out there, your job it to feed the spew.  Processors out there, you help make sense of it all in interesting (or partisan, or humorous) ways. From a theoretical standpoint, and this does get PhDweebish, I can say with some confidence that the end result in a further fragmented audience with less and less "common knowledge."  That's a problem for a democracy, or so the theorists tell us.  But that's a post for another day.

Fox News and Death Panels: A Love Story

Remember death panels?  Freshly published research in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly examines the predictors of the death panel misperception and I'm gonna point out one main result:

Fox News, you did it again.

The research, by Patrick Meirick at the University of Oklahoma, used national survey data from 2009 to establish that watching Fox News, not other media outlets, led to belief in the myth.  Hardly shocking, but here's the kicker.  It do so -- only among highly educated respondents.

Huh?  Education tends to be associated with greater political knowledge -- not belief in political myths.  Enter into the fray a little thing called motivated reasoning.  I've written in detail about this theory before, and I've used it in my own research (which, oddly best I can tell is not cited in this study ... tsk tsk). Essentially, the theory argues people believe what they want to believe, and the more they care about an outcome, the more they'll believe stuff that fits their predispositions, even if it's obviously bogus.  Biased processing run amok.

The study includes a big fat multiple regression, which makes my data-crunching heart happy, but if you're not a number nerd let me translate.  The author statistically controls for a number of factors you'd expect to lead to belief in the myth and the combo of watching Fox News and education pops out quite nicely. 

Skip to the next graph if you're not into methodological quibbles: I'd argue he fails to account for political interest, but you could counter-argue that's captured by his "follow health reform news" variable, and then I'd counter-counter-argue that no, it doesn't -- that's a global media variable, not a motivational one, and if you included political interest, education might very well disappear.  Yes, methodologists argue about stuff like this, which explains why we rarely get invited to parties.

If you dig into the table, you'll see other media variables basically play no role in this screwy belief.  Only reading newspapers is statistically significant, and it's in the opposite direction of watching Fox News.  In other words, newspaper reading reduced your likelihood to believe in the death panel myth, and it did so regardless of education level.  Whew.  Newspapers still rule.

When Amateur (Catholics) Write Poll Stories

Hi.  My name's Barry and I'm a Catholic.

Wanted to get that out of the way before I criticize how this poll story is written.  I'm not even a recovering Catholic, but a go-to-Mass-every-Sunday Catholic, yet I can't let this poll story posted today on a Catholic site go untouched.

Okay, my religious butt covered, it's time for a little beat down of a fairly simple story from both a journalism and a public opinion perspective.

* The lede sucks.  It's too long and it starts with the wrong info (According to ...).  As I tell my reporting students, start with the WHAT.  If it's a poll, lead with the results.  And talk about vague.  This is your lede, that "many Americans have very strong feelings about illegal immigrants and immigration reform."  Zzzzzzzzz.

* Learn the language of polling if you're gonna write a poll story. The third graph is terrible. "The precision of the Reuters/Ipsos online poll is measured using a credibility interval. In this survey, the poll has a credibility interval of plus or minus 2.9 percentage points."  You mean margin of error.  People get that.  And you're not measuring credibility with this, but precision.  Yeah, it matters.


* The last two graphs, what the hell are they doing in the story?  Even if I sympathize with the point of view here, they don't belong.  To quote Steve Smith, an unknown and unimportant presidential candidate from four years ago, is ridiculous.

When Corrections Fail

An emerging group of studies examine why people cling to misconceptions and myths and whether fact checking can correct these beliefs.

In the latest study I came across, in Medical Health, the authors ran an experiment to see whether correcting Sarah Palin's infamous "death panel" myth would work.  The answer?  Not for everyone.  Here's the key graph:

The correction reduced belief in death panels and strong opposition to the reform bill among those who view Palin unfavorably and those who view her favorably but have low political knowledge. However, it backfired among politically knowledgeable Palin supporters, who were more likely to believe in death panels and to strongly oppose reform if they received the correction.

Why would more knowledgeable Palin supporters ignore the correction and cling to the myth, especially as less knowledgeable supporters became more accurate?  I can't read the entire study, just the abstract, but I suspect the more knowledgeable supporters were also the more partisan ones.  Simply put, it's harder to change those minds and, indeed, it's likely the correction attempt (as other research has ironically found) actually pushed people to believe Palin even more than they originally did.  And this is scary.

Of Food Banks and Surveys

I often point out surveys sponsored by special interest groups that happen to find people don't know enough about, coincidentally, that special interest's, um, interest.  Beware such self-serving polls, even if they're for a good cause, like this one out of Texas by food banks that finds 1-out-of-2 north Texans know someone who has used a food bank.

Again, good cause. It even has a pdf with more graphical display of data. I'm surprised that 80 percent of respondents say they've contributed in some way to a food bank.  That seems high, but if true -- all the better.

Now, to methodology.  They report:

There were more than 1,600 respondents to the survey, which was conducted in January 2013. The survey was conducted via an opt-in email targeting more than 60,000 North Texans, as well as via Facebook. 

You can't tell a lot from this, other than it's a hefty sample size.  What I'm concerned about, obviously, is how well these 60,000 folks represent the population as a whole.  It's unclear where the 60,000 names came from.  If from the food bank's own list, or lists they have access to, then you have to worry about the generalizability of the results.  There simply isn't enough methodological information to make a judgment -- and when that happens, you're spidey sense should go off.

Bad Surveys

A brief story gets into some rather inane comments by North Carolina's governor about higher education.  No surprise there.  The crux of the five-graph piece, though, is its reporting of a survey of faculty, who generally disagree with Gov. Pat McCrory.  Yeah, his comments are kinda dumb, but I'm more interested here in the survey.  Below, the methodology:

The online poll was conducted Feb. 6-7 and drew 172 faculty responses. The margin of error was plus or minus 6.8 percentage points.

Releasing a survey of a mere 172 respondents is a bad idea, and it's impossible to say whether these 172 souls were randomly drawn or whether this is a SLOP.  If the latter, it's even more useless.

Keep in mind, the results make sense.  I'd expect faculty to disagree with McCrory on the issue.  But there's a difference between getting what you expect and doing it right (and still getting what you expect).

Read more here: http://projects.newsobserver.com/node/26949#storylink=cpy

 

Ok