"So, to recap, 1) Cool paper. 2) Sex between blue-eyed people is not incest. 3) We have no idea when or where this mutation came from, but it is now conceivable that we could ask the question. 4) Embarrassingly bad science reporting spontaneously rises from the grave four years later and tries to eat your brain. "

"There's a special place in hell for the perpetrators of this, where I hope the gods of mathematics and reason are devising some exquisite tortures for them—perhaps in the form of endlessly reading Introduction to Statistics and doing the same problem sets over and over through eternity . . ."

"What would an objective article on waterboarding have looked like during the Bush administration? A history of the practice would have to state that the US government considered it torture for several decades and that this status was essentially unquestioned until after September 11th. It would also record that the US had hanged Japanese soldiers for waterboarding US POWs, and perhaps that as Governor of Texas, Bush had imprisoned a sheriff for waterboarding a prisoner. It would describe the experience of being waterboarded as essentially like the experience of being drowned, and record that there were often lingering psychological effects. Against that, such an article would have to report that legal memoranda had argued that waterboarding was not torture and was legal. It might also report that some people responded to the September 11th attacks by arguing that even torture should be justified as a response to terrorism.

"That article would have been objective in even the restrictive sense that the American media uses. Every claim is not only true, but unambiguous and part of the public record.

"And I don’t recall seeing anything like that during the Bush era. Individual claims might appear in an article about the waterboarding debate, but I never remember seeing a single article that would give the  full picture. 

"Journalists are sometimes criticized for treating both sides of any disagreement as equally respectable, even if the facts are squarely on one side. But we can see that it’s not just that–the media won’t even collect and report facts that aren’t in dispute, if the net effect would be to undermine the claims of one side."

"As recently as the early 1970s, the news media was one of the most respected institutions in the United States. Yet by the 1990s, this trust had all but evaporated. Why has confidence in the press declined so dramatically over the past 40 years? And has this change shaped the public's political behavior? This book examines waning public trust in the institutional news media within the context of the American political system and looks at how this lack of confidence has altered the ways people acquire political information and form electoral preferences.

Jonathan Ladd argues that in the 1950s, '60s, and early '70s, competition in American party politics and the media industry reached historic lows. When competition later intensified in both of these realms, the public's distrust of the institutional media grew, leading the public to resist the mainstream press's information about policy outcomes and turn toward alternative partisan media outlets. As a result, public beliefs and voting behavior are now increasingly shaped by partisan predispositions. Ladd contends that it is not realistic or desirable to suppress party and media competition to the levels of the mid-twentieth century; rather, in the contemporary media environment, new ways to augment the public's knowledgeability and responsiveness must be explored.

Drawing on historical evidence, experiments, and public opinion surveys, this book shows that in a world of endless news sources, citizens' trust in institutional media is more important than ever before."

I think Lithwick is, for once, too optimistic.

"And as you’ll notice, in both cases the imaginary history just happened to be one more comfortable to status quo interests. I don’t want to go all Chomsky here, but this sort of thing really can radicalize you."

Kathy G. lays down the law: "But if you focus on the high points of TNR, you miss the forest for the trees. As a journalistic institution, TNR plays a unique role in the development of policy and politics. Its circulation has always been low (and in recent years has declined drastically), but many of the people who read it are very powerful: media elites, D.C. lobbyists and activists, and policymakers in the White House and the Senate, and on Capitol Hill. If TNR supports a particular policy or idea, that carries serious weight, especially when what it supports is conservative. It enables the right to say, “Even the liberal New Republic endorses X,” and that has tremendous credibility and resonance. It doesn’t matter if 19 out of 20 articles in a given issue are liberal; the one wingnutty one out of the 20 will, by virtue of its setting, be all the more influential."

"If pant-wetting were a sport, the recent study on how memory adjusts to the constant availability of online information would have launched the damp drawers Olympics.
‘Poor memory? Blame Google’ claimed The Guardian. ‘Internet search engines cause poor memory, scientists claim’ said The Telegraph. ‘Google turning us into forgetful morons’ wibbled The Register.
If you want a good write-up of the study you couldn’t do better than checking out the post on Not Exactly Rocket Science which captures the dry undies fact that although the online availability of the information reduced memory for content, it improved memory for its location.
Conversely, when participants knew that the information was not available online, memory for content improved. In other words, the brain is adjusting memory to make information retrieval more efficient depending on the context..."

"So, although the development of even rudimentary forms of audit is a great boon to the democratic public (and probably a lot more so than yet another inconclusive study of “media bias” one way or the other), I think it needs to be taken with two caveats. The biggest villain is not the guy who gets it wrong. The people who will cost you money and reputation over the long run are first, the guy who says he’s more certain than he really is, and second, the guy who won’t admit he’s wrong when he knows he is. "

In this corner, a distinguished experimental psychologist who can actually read a paper in PNAS; in that corner, John Tierney.

"the Borat humor is taking people whose jobs are to behave a certain way under a familiar, professionalized script and then start acting like a weirdo. ... They all try to keep to their scripts while the person opposite of them acts like a buffoon,,,, instead of going “stop acting like a buffoon.” ... These right-wing videos take this and amplify a particularly interesting part of the service/professionalized economy. When so much of our economy is driven by professionals there is a lot of work done in making sure that there are layers of people between the consumer and the professional. ... You don’t want the expensive brain surgeon making sure you’ve filled out your address and contact information correctly or taking your temperature – that’s why there’s a secretary and a nurse in-between these steps at the hospital.What the right-wing videos do ... is present the front-line staff as the actual decision making professionals. ..."

"Much of what we're discussing is [that] academia has, to some extent by its own actions, been cleaved away from public life. I hesitate to speak on television about the Civil War, because there are people who've made this the work of their life--actual experts--who should be speaking on this. But I also recoil at the notion of a host looking at me and saying, "John Brown--good guy or bad, guy? Go." I imagine the experts who I admire feel the same way.
As in all things, I don't write this to offer a definitive answer here. My sense is that the reluctance among people like me--and people smarter than me--to engage is as problematic as the form itself."

"And that, children, is how ideology does its work in the world, even when nobody involved thinks that what they’re doing is ideological. Or, perhaps, especially when nobody involved imagines such a thing."

"Obviously, this data I’ve cited is perhaps open to some criticisms or alternate interpretations. But Flanagan doesn’t dispute it, doesn’t cite alternate data, and doesn’t even seem to be aware of the possibility of discussing social trends in terms of evidence rather than assertion."

Now this is what I call an epic take-down.

"Contrarianism generally lines up with the "perversity" column in Albert Hirschman's typology "The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy". ... Experts come up with solutions to the problems the societies face. Those solutions often entail discomfiting established interest groups [and] ... almost always entail some degree of perverse counterreaction .... It can be very interesting to focus on those counterreactions.... But [overwhelmingly], the counterreactions aren't as big as the first-order effects of the solutions. The minimum wage may price a few people out of the labour market, but it mostly raises low-income people's wages. Raising marginal income taxes does slightly lower rich people's incentives to generate income, but it mostly raises government revenue.... And as journalism has come increasingly to focus on contrarianism, it has become less and less adept at actually describing the world." This from the Economist!!!

How can this appear in the Washington Post? (But I'm glad it did.)

In which David Frum is called on a public falsehood, admits that he's lying, and proclaims his intention to continue to keep on repeating the lie.

Roger Eugene Ailes

When I wrote about Chris Anderson's idiotic piece back in the spring, I didn't say anything about the quote from Norvig, because it sounded very strange and not at all like Norvig. And, indeed, he now says "That's a silly statement, I didn't say it, and I disagree with it." Ah, Wired!

"Such systems solve no problem the user has, and offer no service we want."

Tim Burke on the NY Times pretending that its readers are clueless about popular culture. Good, as usual. But this bit bugs me: "Of course, there is always more to say about the content of expressive culture. Cowboy-and-indian or zombie, any theme or story or genre, has deeper roots, deeper meanings" --- why assume this? I won't toot my own horn, but I will refer, again, to S. Lieberson's brilliant book on fashions, especially fashions in names. The content of the zombie apocalypse mythology might be as irrelevant to its success as their sounds and associations have been to the rise of "Madison" and "Abigail".

Breaking up newspapers, and making actual reporting into non-profit enterprises. (This reminds me that I should read Zellig Harris's book on non-profit market economies.)

Aaronsw says: because the supply is so much greater than the supply of print venues. But what if online ads are much less effective, so they're not complete substitutes for each other? Presumably (haven't done the math) there should remain a price difference, but be some print advertising left. OTOH, I don't know how anyone tells that ads work at all.

Winter was always one of my favorite times in Santa Fe, so this is somewhat fun to see, but some of the advice is ... strange. (I mean, I like Blue Corn Cafe more than most of my friends, but even if you want a cheapish place with good beer within walking distance of the Plaza, there are many better.)

Yes. (Also, a good description of why "bloggers rambling over the phone" is not worth watching. [Sorry, HF.])

Henry Farrell attempts to _explain_ why oh why we don't have a better press corps.

I am glad to see that (i) I am not the only person to have thought of this pun, (ii) I don't have to embarrass myself by actually making it.

"people think it takes years of study at an Ivy, and then more years at a J-school, to learn how to use a phone and structure a story. I learned the basics of journalism during a three month internship, at an alt-weekly... when I was 19"

Mark continues his lonely crusade to pound some sense and decency into science journalists writing about research on sex differences.

Brad, tricked into appearing with Grover Norquist, loses his temper with the entire establishment.

Aaron explains one reason why we don't, in fact, have a better press corps: the threat of being sued for things like "breach of loyalty" [!]

The McClatchy (formerly Knight-Ridder) news service on actually being journalists

Some good points, but surprisingly bad history (Chinese printing didn't take off, "The Web began as a means of communication among physicists in 1981"!) from a professional historian. Not material to the mostly-sound recommendations.

Ezra Klein on why American political coverage is so awful.

I think Steve misses a possible (and valuable) role for professional journalists: as interface specialists between various specialized sub-communities and the broader public; ones, moreover, who are not agents of their subjects (unlike PR flacks).

Query for the reader: can you find anything in this story which explains _why_ the go'vt settled? This would seem like an important fact...

Hooray for Katha Pollitt!

On McCain's - flip-flops. The story at the very beginning is very cute.

Brad's _sentiment_ (John M. Ford's "Say what you mean; bear witness; iterate") is right, but his _mechanism_ is frustratingly vague.

The phrase you are looking for is "fundamental attribution error"