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.”

The National Endowment for the Arts just published an interesting new study and review of the literature on literacy in the US but it retains a rather exclusive definition of reading (it’s fiction, poetry and drama, in book form) - so web surfing and magazine reading don’t count. It suggests that regular leisure readers are better employed and more skilled at reading (well duh!) I don’t know how they disentangled number of books in the home and leisure reading from social class though - I read somewhere that number of books in the home actually works reasonably well as a proxy for social class.

I would have thought that the increasing amount of leisure web browsing and online writing young people are doing would be beneficial to reading skills. Well, the report is 98 pages long so maybe I’ve missed the part where they tackle this…

I presume that it is only consistent with my having done a first degree in English and being a PhD student now that do a fair amount of leisure reading myself…

Here is a set of handy book-related links I have collected.

We invite contributions to the Media@lse Electronic Working Papers series.

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We look forward to receiving a paper from you.

This clip from the television version of one of my favourite radio programmes, This American Life illustrates dramatically how the existence of the media can affect everyday behaviour.

David Brake

I have just learned that those with valid university email addresses (not just US ones, UK ones seem to work too!) can get free access to the New York Times’ TimesSelect service (which allows you to read the columnists which are normally password protected and lets you look at articles from their online archives). Handy! Thanks Kathleen and Chuck…

Wikipedia in English has a couple of things working for it. English is the international language of science and a first or second language for most of those already connected to the Internet. The population of people from whom the core editing population is likely drawn - literate people in developed countries with good Internet access and enough time after their basic needs are met to devote to a volunteer project - are also largely English speakers. But it turns out according to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales (speaking at TED), only about 1/3 of accesses to Wikipedia are to the English language part.

When I heard him say this I immediately wondered (given the fact he admits that 600-1,000 people make up the ‘core’ of wikipedia’s editors) how many people are primary contributors in other languages? It turns out in the case of Swahili at least the answer appears to be just four, and only one of them is African (living in America).

When contributor numbers are low and when the big English language volunteer community at Wikipedia can’t keep an eye on things (because they can’t read the language) what is to prevent individuals or groups with an axe to grind exploiting the Wikipedia brand? Has anyone looked to see whether the entries on the causes of AIDS written in small African languages are consistent with current science or lean towards crackpot theories? What does the Chinese language version of Wikipedia say about the ‘June 4th incident’ at Tiananmen Square and is its ‘neutral point of view’ account significantly different from that of the English language version of the same event? I just checked on this and a Google translation of the Chinese language account seems to tone down the casualty figures, saying something like “specific figures are not known, there are hundreds of thousands of view” while the English version says “Estimates of civilian deaths vary: 23 (Communist Party of China), 400–800 (Central Intelligence Agency), 2600 (Chinese Red Cross). Injuries are generally held to have numbered from 7,000 to 10,000″.

This is of particular concern given that it recently emerged that selected Wikipedia articles will be installed on the $100 laptops being produced by the One Laptop Per Child Consortium. Is there a danger that articles in non-English languages (selected by whom?) may not be produced to the standards held by the English-language Wikipedia and yet may be seen by impressionable children as the infallible wisdom of the Internet handed down in their magic boxes?

But I’d like to end on a cheerful note. If the students who receive these laptops are very lucky their teachers could use Wikipedia articles as a way to introduce critical media literacy. They might be told that these Wikipedia articles are written by ordinary people like them and can be edited by them. It would be pleasing to think that the dearth of Internet content aimed at developing countries could be tackled, at least in part, by those nations’ schoolchildren.

David Brake

Nicholas Carr hits the nail on the head with this recent posting about how new economic forces unleashed by the web threaten good journalism.

The web unbundles the [old media content] bundle - each story becomes a separate entity that lives or dies, economically, on its own. It’s naked in the marketplace, its commercial existence meticulously measured, click by click.

And worse:

investigative journalism is really expensive for newspapers. You’ve got to assign talented reporters to a long-term reporting effort that may or may not even end in a story. And you’ve got to pay their salaries and benefits during that whole time. And their expenses. God forbid the story requires original reporting in some distant place like Africa.

On the other hand, if you could get some cheap freelancer to hack together a story on new developments in high-definition televisions, that could really be a bonanza. Manufacturers, retailers and programmers bid a lot for clickthroughs on HDTV-related ads. And the readers attracted to a story on developments in HDTV are likely to be considering some kind of purchase - and thus in the mood to click. Ka-ching, ka-ching.

I think pandora’s box is open and the classified ads funding model for newspaper journalism will slowly but surely die. And heaven knows newspapers were not doing enough investigative journalism even before all this started happening. But this does not bode well for the future…

Update: The New Yorker points out that US newspapers are actually thriving economically… at the moment. But from what little I know I don’t think the same could be said for the national broadsheet UK dailies for example.