I listened to this LSE podcast - Happiness around the world by Prof Carol Graham and I asked her whether she had any data on whether (as some media scholars suggest) the increased exposure in poor countries to media depictions of life in rich countries had any effect on happiness (by making them feel impoverished by comparison. She replied:

I have data on internet and media access for Latin America, and there I find that those with internet access are typically happier than the average, but this correlates with an overall income/education effect, even when controlling for these things. We do find, though, that those respondents with greater access to the media are more likely to think that the distribution of income in their country is unfair.

Of course, the direction of causation might be either way - perhaps people who are dissatisfied with income distribution are more likely to consume the media? But interesting nonetheless - and it’s comforting to hear that education makes you happier…

One would like to think that the internet helps the best content reach the attention of the world. Ira Glass was recently interviewed by Jesse Brown who does an internet-centric radio programme called Search Engine. There I learned several interesting things (in no particular order)

• A promo spot to reach 1.8 million radio listeners to This American Life costs advertisers $5-8000. A similar spot to reach just over a half million podcast listeners, many of which may be from overseas and therefore not of interest to a US advertiser, costs $20,000. Is this just the glamour of a new medium in action?
• TAL is America’s most listened-to podcast even though it has not done any significant amount of marketing. (I think this says something about the demographics of public radio listeners as well as about the superb quality of the programming but it is still impressive).
• It follows that even most popular podcast in America is only listened to by .1% of the US population.
• The average listening time to TAL on the radio is 48 minutes - who said that people can’t concentrate in the new media age?
• The US Federal government only covers 4-7 percent of public broadcasting’s costs

One of the intriguing things about the BBC’s recently broadcast docudrama Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution is that in order to balance the liberal perspective they invited Slavoj Zizek on as an apologist for Robespierre. It’s not often you find calls for revolution on mainstream TV programming (well OK it is on BBC2 not BBC1 but in a high profile time slot). I wasn’t convinced in the end by Slavoj’s “no omelette without eggs” argument but I was struck that the BBC seemed incapable of leaving the audience in any doubt that the revolutionary terror was a Bad Thing. Why provide the appearance of balance then have a voiceover ending which leaves the viewer with the ‘author’s message’ that the French revolutionary terror was the precursor to bloodthirsty dictators like Pol Pot and Stalin? I suppose the BBC’s explanatory blurb said it all:

during the 365 days that Robespierre sat on the Committee of Public Safety, the French Republic descended into a bloodbath … [this documentary] looks at how Robespierre’s revolutionary idealism so quickly became an excuse for tyranny.

Still the programme is well worth watching if only for the chilling reconstructions of the committee’s own deliberations, based on contemporary sources.

The BBC has been working with the (UK) Arts and Humanities Research Council on a number of research projects as a pilot project and this has been documented on the Knowledge Exchange blog. Now no fewer than 9 papers have been made available via the latest blog posting - really interesting!

The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism has just released its State of the News Media 2009 report. It features a mini-analysis of the economics of online advertising for news organizations and it doesn’t make encouraging reading. In particular:

Even before the financial credit crisis hit in September, Veronis Suhler Stevenson projected that for the two online ad categories most oriented to news, display and classified, spending would reach $16 billion by 2012. If news sites represented 20% of that, it would amount to roughly $3 billion, or less than one tenth of what newspapers alone took in during 2008.

It’s all very well for new media pundits to tell news organizations to trim their operations to sizes that can be supported by new media revenues but as a society can we really afford to lose 90% of newspaper journalists?

100,000 words summarised at a glance - click to see it full-sized.

You can find an assortment of papers delivered at Media, Communication and Humanity linked here (ordered by subject).

A US university just released a survey which indicates (among other things) that Fox News was considered the most trusted TV news organization for accurate reporting - and by a large margin (27% chose it, vs 14.6% who chose CNN). Without wishing to get into an argument about whether this reflects the facts, I find it interesting that a station which is pretty clear about having a point of view is trusted more than stations which claim (rightly or wrongly) to be “neutral”. I think that the media ethic in the UK where (among the print media at least) most publications have an overt political ‘lean’ is in some ways more healthy than the US where points of view have to appear objective. At least if a point of view is up front you can ‘correct’ for it when assessing it. But it seems from this survey that viewers may not be looking for balance.

A friend of mine, Robin Hamman who looks after the BBC’s blog trials recently brought to my attention this study of the expressed political views of BBC Facebook users which was put out by conservativehome - an independent right wing UK website - back in October and was picked up by the Daily Mail.

The study (whose figures I have updated here using the same Facebook ad tool that conservativehome used) showed that of the 11,040 BBC staff registered on the site, 1420 staff put themselves in the “liberal” or “very liberal” category, compared with just 120 who labelled themselves “conservative” or “very conservative”. 420 regard themselves as “moderate” (the rest did not specify their political views). This compares to roughly 160k liberals and 56k conservative Facebookers in London and 847k liberals vs 233k conservatives in Facebook across the UK. (For the curious - there are < 20 self-confessed liberals working for Fox News in the US on Facebook compared with 40 conservatives and an equal number of moderates).

Of course this is somewhat embarrassing for the BBC as it provides further ammunition for those who would accuse it of liberal bias. The sample is a self-selecting sample from a self-selecting sample however, therefore no more than suggestive - and of course it includes large numbers of staff not involved in politically-sensitive work.

I find it interesting to note that the information provided probably included a large number of people who specified that their profiles (including their political allegiances) should be private. The privacy does not, however, protect users from being aggregated in order to be sold to - it is Facebook's ad sales tool that enables anyone to 'mine' Facebook to find out the expressed interests, ages and - yes - political affiliations of its users, grouped by organization. As this example shows, even aggregate data can be harmful to an organization when made widely available.

I also note that it is possible to attempt to advertise to Facebook users as young as 13 - and the ad sales tool says nothing about relevant regulations.

The BBC has launched BBC Memoryshare
“A living archive of memories from 1900 to the present day.” They suggest that what is provided “may be used as a source of programme content for the BBC.”