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Columbia slams media for exaggerating Fake News threat and for giving preferential coverage to Trump

Discussion in 'BBS Hangout: Debate & Discussion' started by Invisible Fan, Dec 11, 2017.

  1. Invisible Fan

    Invisible Fan Contributing Member

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    Quoting the middle part which is the meat of it without the hard numbers of their NYT cross section

    CJR-Don’t blame the election on fake news. Blame it on the media.
    ...
    We agree that fake news and misinformation are real problems that deserve serious attention. We also agree that social media and other online technologies have contributed to deep-seated problems in democratic discourse such as increasing polarization and erosion of support for traditional sources of authority. Nonetheless, we believe that the volume of reporting around fake news, and the role of tech companies in disseminating those falsehoods, is both disproportionate to its likely influence in the outcome of the election and diverts attention from the culpability of the mainstream media itself.

    To begin with, the breathlessly repeated numbers on fake news are not as large as they have been made to seem when comparedto the volume of information to which online users are exposed. For example, a New York Times story reported that Facebook identified more than 3,000 ads purchased by fake accounts traced to Russian sources, which generated over $100,000 in advertising revenue. But Facebook’s advertising revenue in the fourth quarter of 2016 was $8.8 billion, or $96 million per day. All together, the fake ads accounted for roughly 0.1 percent of Facebook’s daily advertising revenue. The 2016 BuzzFeed report that received so much attention claimed that the top 20 fake news stories on Facebook “generated 8,711,000 shares, reactions, and comments” between August 1 and Election Day. Again, this sounds like a large number until it’s put into perspective: Facebook had well over 1.5 billion active monthly users in 2016. If each user took only a single action per day on average (likely an underestimate), then throughout those 100 days prior to the election, the 20 stories in BuzzFeed’s study would have accounted for only 0.006 percent of user actions.

    Even recent claims that the “real” numbers were much higher than initially reported do not change the basic imbalance. For example, an October 3 New York Times story reported that “Russian agents…disseminated inflammatory posts that reached 126 million users on Facebook, published more than 131,000 messages on Twitter and uploaded over 1,000 videos to Google’s YouTube service.” Big numbers indeed, but several paragraphs later the authors concede that over the same period Facebook users were exposed to 11 trillion posts—roughly 87,000 for every fake exposure—while on Twitter the Russian-linked election tweets represented less than 0.75 percent of all election-related tweets. On YouTube, meanwhile, the total number of views of fake Russian videos was around 309,000—compared to the five billion YouTube videos that are watched every day.

    In addition, given what is known about the impact of online information on opinions, even the high-end estimates of fake news penetration would be unlikely to have had a meaningful impact on voter behavior. For example, a recent study by two economists, Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow, estimates that “the average US adult read and remembered on the order of one or perhaps several fake news articles during the election period, with higher exposure to pro-Trump articles than pro-Clinton articles.” In turn, they estimate that “if one fake news article were about as persuasive as one TV campaign ad, the fake news in our database would have changed vote shares by an amount on the order of hundredths of a percentage point.” As the authors acknowledge, fake news stories could have been more influential than this back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests for a number of reasons (e.g., they only considered a subset of all such stories; the fake stories may have been concentrated on specific segments of the population, who in turn could have had a disproportionate impact on the election outcome; fake news stories could have exerted more influence over readers’ opinions than campaign ads). Nevertheless, their influence would have had to be much larger—roughly 30 times as large—to account for Trump’s margin of victory in the key states on which the election outcome depended.

    It seems incredible that only five out of 150 front-page articles that The New York Times ran over the last, most critical months of the election, attempted to compare the candidate’s policies, while only 10 described the policies of either candidate in any detail.

    ...

    As troubling as the spread of fake news on social media may be, it was unlikely to have had much impact either on the election outcome or on the more general state of politics in 2016. A potentially more serious threat is what a team of Harvard and MIT researchers refer to as “a network of mutually reinforcing hyper-partisan sites that revive what Richard Hofstadter called ‘the paranoid style in American politics,’ combining decontextualized truths, repeated falsehoods, and leaps of logic to create a fundamentally misleading view of the world.” Unlike the fake news numbers highlighted in much of the post-election coverage, engagement with sites like Breitbart News, InfoWars, and The Daily Caller are substantial—especially in the realm of social media.

    Nevertheless, a longer and more detailed report by the same researchers shows that by any reasonable metric—including Facebook or Twitter shares, but also referrals from other media sites, number of published stories, etc.—the media ecosystem remains dominated by conventional (and mostly left-of-center) sources such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, HuffPost, CNN, and Politico.

    Given the attention these very same news outlets have lavished, post-election, on fake news shared via social media, it may come as a surprise that they themselves dominated social media traffic. While it may have been the case that the 20 most-shared fake news stories narrowly outperformed the 20 most-shared “real news” stories, the overall volume of stories produced by major newsrooms vastly outnumbers fake news. According to the same report, “The Washington Post produced more than 50,000 stories over the 18-month period, while The New York Times, CNN, and Huffington Post each published more than 30,000 stories.” Presumably not all of these stories were about the election, but each such story was also likely reported by many news outlets simultaneously. A rough estimate of thousands of election-related stories published by the mainstream media is therefore not unreasonable.

    In just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election.

    What did all these stories talk about? The research team investigated this question, counting sentences that appeared in mainstream media sources and classifying each as detailing one of several Clinton- or Trump-related issues. In particular, they classified each sentence as describing either a scandal (e.g., Clinton’s emails, Trump’s taxes) or a policy issue (Clinton and jobs, Trump and immigration). They found roughly four times as many Clinton-related sentences that described scandals as opposed to policies, whereas Trump-related sentences were one-and-a-half times as likely to be about policy as scandal. Given the sheer number of scandals in which Trump was implicated—sexual assault; the Trump Foundation; Trump University; redlining in his real-estate developments; insulting a Gold Star family; numerous instances of racist, misogynist, and otherwise offensive speech—it is striking that the media devoted more attention to his policies than to his personal failings. Even more striking, the various Clinton-related email scandals—her use of a private email server while secretary of state, as well as the DNC and John Podesta hacks—accounted for more sentences than all of Trump’s scandals combined (65,000 vs. 40,000) and more than twice as many as were devoted to all of her policy positions.

    To reiterate, these 65,000 sentences were written not by Russian hackers, but overwhelmingly by professional journalists employed at mainstream news organizations, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. To the extent that voters mistrusted Hillary Clinton, or considered her conduct as secretary of state to have been negligent or even potentially criminal, or were generally unaware of what her policies contained or how they may have differed from Donald Trump’s, these numbers suggest their views were influenced more by mainstream news sources than by fake news.


    [​IMG]
    More- https://www.cjr.org/analysis/fake-news-media-election-trump.php
     
    JuanValdez, B-Bob and FranchiseBlade like this.
  2. CometsWin

    CometsWin Breaker Breaker One Nine

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    it was shocking to me the level of coverage Trump received in relation to other candidates. For-profit news is destroying the basis for a free press, an informed public.
     
  3. No Worries

    No Worries Contributing Member

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    News orgs are profit seeking enterprises. Trump coverage boosted viewership and ad dollars. Who is really surprised by the results?
     
    FranchiseBlade likes this.
  4. FranchiseBlade

    FranchiseBlade Contributing Member
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    For all news agencies, they put the money bias ahead of the political bias. Political bias probably ranks anywhere between 4 - 7 depending on the network.
     
  5. B-Bob

    B-Bob "94-year-old self-described dreamer"

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    Fantastic piece. When the history of our doom is written, the profit-driven media will be a main character, mos def.
     
  6. JuanValdez

    JuanValdez Contributing Member

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    Good article. I have 2 observations.

    1. They are using a real definition of fake news. So, the partisan bubbles created by Breitbart or whomever are not being counted.

    2. I don't find Trump's domination of policy sentences to be surprising. For one, Clinton was the business-as-usual candidate. So even if she had a definite policy view and even if that view differed from that of the Obama era, the difference would be modest enough or wonkish enough to not be compelling journalism. So it is not surprising that journalists didn't use a lot of ink to talk about Clinton's policies. By contrast, Trump's policy statements were as scandalous as his scandals, at least to the ears of liberal journalists and to everyone content with the staus quo or with civil rights. Building a wall to keep the Mexican rapists out is scandalous. Banning people because of their religion is scandalous. Throwing our support of NATO into doubt is scandalous. So, even if the sentences counted are 'about policy' in a study, they were written about because they were outrageous. Maybe you can call that the natural advantage of being the Change Candidate. Maybe you can say Trump did a masterful job playing the media. But, I wouldn't understand it to mean that the mainstream media has done something aberrant or biased.
     
  7. Amiga

    Amiga I get vaunted sacred revelations from social media
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    Trump is right, the dang bias media
     
    REEKO_HTOWN likes this.
  8. pgabriel

    pgabriel Educated Negro

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    So the guy accused of rape when all the allegations went away after the election got preferential treatment?

    The media damn near guaranteed at least one verified accusation
     
  9. pgabriel

    pgabriel Educated Negro

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    Number of articles doesn't matter. Every story is important in a Presidential election.


    Nobody missed Trump's secret recording or him supposedly being a rapist

    Im sure tons of people heard the secret recording and didn't read Hilary's emails
     
  10. pgabriel

    pgabriel Educated Negro

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    At some point the media and Democrats will admit Trump knew the electoral college better than them.

    Period

    That's why he won as well as Hilary was never going to overcome some swing voters
     
  11. Invisible Fan

    Invisible Fan Contributing Member

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    It wasn't a recording. His wife wrote about it in her book.

    How much faker could that be?
     
  12. pgabriel

    pgabriel Educated Negro

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    His ex wife says she didn't mean it criminally

    I guess you can't refute my point.

    Not one voter missed a Trump"scandal/"
     
  13. Invisible Fan

    Invisible Fan Contributing Member

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    People inherently know Koppel is right. So what now?
     
    No Worries likes this.

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