Learning History -- the Glenn Beck Way

If you spend any time watching Glenn Beck's show on Fox, you know this -- he's not a historian, but he plays one on TV.  Kinda.

Americans tend to disappoint when it comes to most kinds of knowledge (history, geography, math, politics, etc.) but we're pretty damn good when it comes to identifying the judges on American Idol, so it's good to know our priorities are right.

Beck is a fascinating guy.  He's even had a New York Times magazine cover article about him, so you know he ranks.  He's not all that educated, but he's got the TV show and the glasses down on his nose and the whole professorial thing going for him -- if he doesn't break into tears.  So the question for me is, when it comes to what people know, are folks actually learning history from Glenn Beck?  Some have criticized Beck's take on history or some of the historians he's promoted on his Fox program.  That's an important topic, whether he relies too heavily on what some call a "master revisionist." 

But a lot of what Beck talks about, outside the wacky conspiracy theories, is straightforward history that many of us haven't talked about or thought about since high school civics class.  Founding Fathers stuff.  Set aside he's occasionally off the reservation in how he (or guests) interpret those bygone days and let's wonder -- since we don't have data -- whether any actual learning about history may be taking place among viewers of his Fox News program.

I'm guessing ... yes.  Good learning, such as names and dates and stuff like that, and bad learning as well as people buy into the crazier of the interpretations offered on the show. 

So what we have here is a Win-Lose situation.  Winning, in that people are exposed to history, and lose, in that people are exposed to some of the weirder versions of history.  All in all, I think the end result is a good one.  But as I said, we have no actual data on this.  No one, as far as I know, has surveyed only Beck viewers to see how much they know about history before and after the programs.  And of course it gets all mixed up in the Tea Party's creative interpretation of history and the founding of the nation and what's constitutional.  Given Beck is a patron saint of the movement, it'd be hard to disentangle what people knew before or after viewing his program.

Hard News Still Matters?

A report out this week argues that hard news is a bigger draw for online newspapers than celebrity fluff.  That's good news, if true.

Newspaper websites get more ad revenue from articles about serious stuff like the Gulf oil spill than from traffic bait like stories on celebrity scandals, according to an analysis by Perfect Market, a company that aims to help publishers become more visible and profitable on the web. 

In the good news/bad news take:

• The "hard news audience," while small, heads to newspaper websites.
• Newspapers don't have to pander because (1) it's embarrassing and (2) it apparently doesn't work.  Those infatuated with celebs are probably getting it at TMZ.
• Hard news kinda still matters.  CNN, for example, is always behind Fox, except when the miners in Chile were being pulled out.  On important hard news stories, people still go more to credible sources.
• But ... is the core hard news audience large enough, and willing to spend enough, for real news?

One telling graph from the story:

Lindsay Lohan's trouble with the law, Mel Gibson's rants and celebrity divorces didn't compare with any of those, according to Perfect Market, which said it considered more than 15 million news articles from 21 news sites that use its technology, including the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune. Its analysis factored both the amount of traffic that articles got and the ad revenue for those articles for every thousand page views.

Not all "Journalisms" Are in Crisis

The title above I shamelessly borrow from a research paper (abstract here, full pdf here) that argues while traditional news approaches are in crisis, "there are many other emergent forms of journalism that simultaneously succeeded during this period, and which continue to flourish."

Here's a key point:

Whereas journalism used to be largely homogenous, thinking about journalism in the plural presents a much greater challenge to those who wish to maintain control over what the public sees and understands about politics.

This is a qualitative analysis of news. It argues that thinking of "journalisms" will help us better understand the role news plays and how people make use of news.  Or, as the author says, "I propose we now think about journalism not in the singular, but a range of journalisms which operate in different ways, fulfil different requirements, and appeal to different niche audience groups."

It's a point well made.

Science Literacy

Everyone (I think) agrees that's important for people to have some degree of science literacy, and there's been plenty of survey results that suggest Americans don't know as much about science -- or, let's face it, any other topic, like history or health -- than they should.  Here's a really good essay by Matt Nisbet that explores this question, in particular whether science knowledge plays a role in how resistant people are to new or emerging scientific techniques or findings.  What's interesting is something I'd never considered before -- how scientists and social scientists differ on whether science knowledge really plays a role in this resistance.

In fact, it’s possible that the current debate relative to science can draw upon valuable research focused on why people participate in politics generally, and why people trust (or distrust) various government institutions. This research shows that knowledge, trust, efficacy, and deliberation are all closely related. Enhanced knowledge of politics leads to an increased belief among individuals that they can make a difference in politics, and also leads to increased trust in political institutions. Deliberating or discussing politics with others enhances knowledge, but also gets people involved. 

An excellent, thoughtful piece.

Personality and Political Behavior

If you remember your psychology, you know all about the Big Five personality traits.  These are those five broad organizing traits under which all other psychological predispositions and actions are thought to emerge from.  What are the Big Five?

• Openness to Experience
• Conscientiousness
• Extraversion
• Agreeableness
• Emotional Stability

We don't see a lot of studies that touch on media or political communication that make use of these big traits.  Instead, we often focus on smaller, more distinct, traits (need for cognition, as an example).  And yet, some folks take on the challenge, like this study.

The only reason I mention it is that, on Table 3, political knowledge gets tossed into the mix.  This is basically an examination of civic engagement (participation) as a function of the big personality traits.  Table 3, for example, looks at openness to experience and various political activities.  Political knowledge and internal efficacy (the belief of one's own competence in understanding politics) do a better job, it seems to me, than openness to experience when it comes to predicting participation.  The study is much broader than this, far more complex, but I'm keeping just to the bit that touches on knowledge.

I blogged the other day about this interesting study on whether a politician correcting himself or herself can influence attitudes.  See my original post for study details, but here's a bit of the results I just reread and found fascinating.

The dependent variable is belief in whether weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were in Iraq when the U.S. invaded.  The authors, using multiple regression, found no main effect for a correction embedded in a news report about WMDs.  But when they looked at (geek stats warning!) interaction terms they found some interesting stuff. 

Stay with me. It's worth it. 

The authors found a three-way interaction for correction, ideology, and how important the Iraq war was perceived.   In other words:

... the correction was effective in reducing misperceptions among conservatives who did not select Iraq as the most important issue, but its effects were null for the most strongly committed conservatives...

In other words, a correction in a news story about WMDs seemed to work for conservatives who didn't care much about Iraq -- their misperception went down -- but for those who really cared about the war, the correction led them to a greater misperception about the existence of such weapons.  I'm pushing it a bit because although the authors above called it null effect, but they also note just afterward that the result is awfully close to statistical significance.  So let's run with that.

There's a lot more to get into, but I've mined the study about as much as I plan to.  Got other stuff to write about.  For details about the study, see my previous post.

Correcting an Outrageous Comment

As someone fascinated by misperception -- when people think something is true when obviously it isn't -- I find this study to be a useful addition to the literature.  In the March issue of Political Behavior, the authors conducted experiments to test whether a politician's correction of having said something untrue had any real effect.

The answer?  This is important, so pay attention: 

Results indicate that corrections frequently fail to reduce misperceptions among the targeted ideological group. We also document several instances of a ‘‘backfire effect’’ in which corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question.

Whoa.

The authors created mock news stories about various topics and found conservatives (the focus of this study) use motivated reasoning to create even stronger misperceptions after a correction.  It's likely liberals will do the same, authors suggest, a tendency to interpret factual information to fit political predispositions.  The motivated of reasoning, in this case, is fitting the data to fit our pre-existing theories of how the world works.

Take this into the real world, outside the lab.  We often have politicians forced to "correct" themselves after saying something outrageous.  Turns out, even this correction may push people who want to believe something further into that belief.  Obama a Muslim?  Obama not American?  Suggest and correct, that's the way to fix an idea -- even an incorrect one -- in people's minds.  It's fascinating, and depressing, stuff.

I'd never thought of "corrections" in quite this way before.  There's a lot of room for further study, budding political communication scholars researchers.