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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Please email your paper to Bart Cammaerts, Deputy Editor b.cammaerts [at] lse.ac.uk

Series Editor: Professor Robin Mansell

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The Editorial Board is comprised of LSE academics and friends of Media@lse with a wide range of interests in information and communication technologies, the media and communications. They come from a variety of disciplinary perspectives including economics, geography, law, politics, sociology, politics and information systems, cultural, gender and development studies.

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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.

One of the cliches of weblogging advocates is that webloggers are disinterested ordinary people whereas journalists are biased and prey to PR ’spin’. Well it turns out that PR agencies are increasingly targetting bloggers as well - with some success. This NYT story about Walmart feeding bloggers stories shows bloggers doing the kind of things “MSM” journalists are often accused of - copying and pasting press releases.

You can see some of the early reaction to the story already on the blog of one of the bloggers named in the story.

And one aspect of the story the NYT didn’t concentrate on - the PR agency in question, Edelman, has written a report last year (Ironically entitled Trust ‘Media’: How Real People Are Finally Being Heard) urging just this kind of active engagement with selected bloggers.

I can’t describe it better than Robin Hamman does:

The panel, chaired by Jeremy Dear, general secretary of the NUJ, includes:

Carol Hall, Rights Manager, BBC News
John Thompson, MD, Mousetrap Media
Kyle McRae, Scoopt.com
Fiona Brownsell, CEO, Youview
Eddie Gibb, Head of External Relations, DEMOS
Bill Hagerty, Editor, British Journalism Review
Vicky Taylor, Editor, Interactivity, BBC
Jemima Kiss, News Editor, journalism.co.uk
Simon Waldman, Guardian Unlimited

You can read and participate here

The tile of Steven Berlin Johnson’s recent book - Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter - gives you a pretty good idea of what his argument is. I don’t want to re-cap his whole book - it’s a short and easy read in any case, and more nuanced and interesting than a synopsis would suggest. However if you haven’t read the reviews he suggests that while the content of TV shows and video games may disappoint, the increasing complexity of multi-stranded TV programming and the puzzle-solving that takes place in the better kind of video games are giving our brains a work-out and making us better at solving those problems. He also suggests that reality TV helps us to develop better “social intelligence” while watching it because it encourages us to analyse the relationships between participants (although those relationships tend to be cartoonishly exaggerated and manipulated).

I didn’t have great expectations of the book - I feared given its bestseller status it might be merely “pop science” posturing - but having read it (in part because I will be contributing to the Sage Encyclopedia of Children, Adolescents, and the Media) I do think the author raises some interesting points that haven’t been examined in earlier research - particularly when he talks about the increasing complexity of (at least some) television drama. That said, he is clearly and explicitly writing a polemic, so he does, I feel, underplay the importance (and potential impact) of the content of media. This was brought home to me in a passage early in the book (pp. 31-32) where he discusses playing SimCity with his nephew.

He was picking up the game’s inner logic nonetheless. After about an hour of tinkering, I was concentrating on trying to revive one particularly run-down manufacturing district. As I contemplated my options, my nephew piped up, “I think we need to lower our industrial tax rates.” He said it as naturally and as confidently as he might have said, “I think we need to shoot the bad guy.”… My nephew would be asleep in five seconds if you popped him down in an urban studies classroom, but somehow an hour of playing SimCity taught him that high tax rates in industrial areas can stifle development.

What that made me think of immediately is not “how impressive that a kid is thinking about urban development” but “how sinister that a video game can embed a particular (laissez faire capitalist) world view and pass it on to a kid who (because of the out of classroom context) may be more inclined to accept it without questioning its assumptions.

So I wouldn’t take the book as the last word in the long-running debates around media effects - but it is an interesting and useful contribution nonetheless. I would be interested if anyone could point me to discussions among media effects scholars about this book to see whether its suggestions are in fact old hat in the academic community.

For more of his arguments you can read selected pages via the Amazon link above or read an excerpt from the New York Times Magazine. The author has done the obligatory book promotion blitz so you can also hear him on Morning Edition. His work has also been the talk of the blogosphere (bloglines search) (technorati search). This may in part be thanks to his status as an Internet pioneer and friend to A-list bloggers like Cory but I suspect some of the favourable reception it has received online is because he is clearly One Of Us - a video game player, board game geek and fan of TV shows like Lost, 24 and The Sopranos. He starts his book with a description of his childhood love for APBA games - ‘fantasy baseball’ games played with dice and cards. Right away I was charmed….

It’s an idea so obvious that it’s hard to believe it hasn’t been tried before - Open Source (from Public Radio International) puts together an hour-long daily show based on ideas for shows solicited from readers of their blog and includes online interaction from those readers throughout (and after) the show. The idea attracted some coverage in the New York Times but as yet they haven’t put anything out that I am interested in. Still, it’s early days yet…

Ethan Zuckerman’s latest little project is measuring the ‘blogginess’ of newspapers - that is to say, how many links are there to a newspaper divided by its circulation? According to his figures the Christian Science Monitor ‘punches above its weight’ - its LpkC (links inward per thousand circulation) is 134.9. Next one down the list of US papers he calculated is the New York Times with 63.8. He isn’t looking at non-US papers yet but I’m guessing he won’t find many with a higher LpkC than The Guardian.

I just did the same calculation for the Guardian using figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulation (not including ‘bulks’) and it has a score of 109.7 which makes it the second bloggiest major newspaper. I had a hunch it would be high - the paper is in English, it has a strong online presence and it offers a left wing point of view that Americans won’t easily find elsewhere. Any other candidates? Both the FT and the Economist are, alas, mostly behind subscription barriers.

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Dave Pollard makes a very rough numerical comparison of bloggers with mainstream media outlets. It’s a brave effort but it’s clearly impossible to compare newspapers and blogs - not just because the texts tend to be different sizes but because they are likely to be consumed (and produced) with such different motivations and under such different circumstances.

It does hammer home though just how limited our knowledge is of the micro-detail of how blogs are consumed compared with the detailed knowledge we have of who watches what TV programmes when and how. It’s a pity more of the large weblogs don’t provide details of their traffic as boingboing does.

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I’m blogging this from the LSE itself today - I’m at an event about blogging and journalism. My comments in italics

Meta comment: The notes below may or may not turn into a ‘proper posting’ - as John Lloyd and Robin Mansell pointed out one of the problems with blogging as an alternative space for journalism is that good journalism requires time and time is money. I could spend several hours turning the comments that follow into a report on the event complete with my own thoroughly-thought-through comments but when I was a journalist that would cost you at least £200 to get. There are very few opportunities to make a reasonable income from blogging so it will always be dominated by people who have time to do it either because they have an income elsewhere and adequate spare time or because they have an axe to grind about some particular issue.

Time taken to improve this blog posting would come at the expense of my thesis and at the moment I can’t really afford it. Anyway, nobody said anything that sufficiently outraged me to make a counter-blast worth my while.

If I had spoken out at the meeting it would have been to suggest that what is needed now is some way to broaden the kinds of people who blog today. There are millions of people who might want some way to express themselves but who feel nobody would want to listen to them. Perhaps some kind of school blogging programme should be considered alongside other IT literacy items on the syllabus?

My notes on the event follow:
(more…)

Can someone tell me how showing Batman helps the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network preserve aboriginal culture? Or tell me why posters for it were up on a commuter train out of Toronto?

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I have scanned in extracts from “Too Much TV“, a picture book for kids that was apparently recommended by the Canadian government. It was published in 1984 so I guess it wouldn’t have been in time to influence my behaviour…

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