Mike Hollihan had running coverage of the hostage situation at Dyersburg State Community College yesterday. Nice job, Mike!

By the way, the current scoring is: Hollihan 1, GoMemphis Blogs 0 (forfeit, they didn’t show up for the event).

Glenn Reynolds unearths some good old-fashioned media manipulation. Of course, is it truly manipulation if the media outnumbers the subject (and manipulator) ten-to-one?

In a major breaking news story from the Commercial Appeal, former atheist Chuck Davis finds Jesus.

Davis says some of his old friends still don’t understand his conversion and some don’t accept it.

But Davis explained, “Jesus is like a fried peanut butter and jelly sandwich. People can tell you what it is, but you don’t know what’s it’s like until you try it.”

Virginia Postrel points out the absurdity of the FCC’s “equal time” regulations, which apparently extend to forbidding satire of the California governor’s race by Craig Kilborn’s Late Late Show on CBS. No excerpts—just go Read The Whole Thing.

She also reminds us what the War on Terror is actually about:

The fundamental conflict is over whether the systems of limited, non-theocratic, individual-rights-bsed governments that developed over centuries in the West are good or bad.

Just in case Noam Chomsky or Ramsey Clark (or, for that matter, Howard Dean) had confused the issue for you…

I know virtually nobody reads my blog, but you saw this AP reporting here six weeks ago. However, something odd struck me in the article:

President Bush and members of his administration suggested a link between the two [Saddam and 9/11] in the months before the war in Iraq. Claims of possible links have never been proven, however.

Bush et al. have suggested a direct link between the Hussein regime and al-Qaeda, most famously during Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations earlier in the year. To my knowledge, they have never suggested a direct link between Hussein and the 9/11 attacks (and I’ll gladly link to any credible source that contradicts this statement). Both myths—the mass public’s belief that “Saddam was involved in 9/11” and the leftists’ “Bush said Saddam was involved in 9/11“—seem to persist despite any evidence to support them. The former is explainable as voters using heuristics to fill in the gaps in their knowledge; the latter mostly seems to be a partisan screen connected to the “lefties are smarter than Bush” belief system.

What’s amazing is that the former belief is widely rejected by political and media elites, but the latter seems to have gained widespread acceptance, to the point the allegation can appear routinely in AP articles without supporting evidence. Yet exactly the same body of evidence underpins both beliefs, and it supports neither conclusion.

Virginia Postrel’s appearance with Tony Snow this afternoon was quite enjoyable. One thing that struck me—in addition to the fact her nail polish matched her blouse again (both were red this time)—was her noticeable (but slight) Southern accent; most Southerners who go on to non-political success in the wider world seem to lose theirs, or perhaps never had them in the first place—an interesting sociological theory worth testing.

Toilet brushes were discussed, but there were no props on-set.

Since Dan Drezner has linked to this post (thanks Dan!), perhaps I should post a more extensive reaction. I do think one thing Dan picked up on is that the non-opinion programming on Fox News tends to be more “hard news” oriented than CNN’s; granted, there's considerable fluff on the schedule (hence why it’s wise to switch to Olbermann and the like on MSNBC during primetime), but Brit Hume and Tony Snow more than compensate for it, and there isn’t as much “fairness and balancing” on those shows.

As for Virginia’s presentation, I think she did a good job, and it seemed like Tony Snow had been well-briefed beforehand, which always helps. I really don’t have too much else to say about it, except that I’m looking forward to reading the book (I have a $20 Amazon.com gift certificate that expires next month, so I’d best order it soon).

The University of Memphis football team beats Ole Miss for the first time since 1994, confounding my co-bloggers prediction, and here’s what the Memphis Commercial Appeal came up with as a headline:

Great Leap Forward

Yes, some brilliant headline writer has compared U of M’s 2-0 record (the first time they’ve been 2-0 since 1976!) with Mao Zedong’s disastrous attempt at industrialization from 1958-1960, during which some 30 million people starved to death.

Why do Virginia Postrel and Glenn Reynolds suddenly care about the two-week Memphis blackout in late July and early August? Simple: the New York Times had an op-ed about it.

(Virginia’s reaction is common. I got stares of disbelief when I told people in Ann Arbor about the Memphis power outage when the Great Northeast Blackout hit the town. “Surely we would have heard about this,” was the common refrain.)

Of course, Signifying Nothing readers knew about it at the time, even though half of SN (Brock) was offline due to the power outage and the other half (i.e. me) was 750 miles away.

Bill Keller, instead of revoking Paul Krugman’s op-ed privileges (my preferred strategy for fixing the New York Times), has instead apparently decided to “sex up” the newspaper. At least, that’s what Eric Muller, guesting at The Volokh Conspiracy, thinks.

However, there is no evidence of Andrew Gilligan’s involvement in the move.

Meanwhile, Matthew Stinson is quite unimpressed with the behavior of Madonna, Britney Spears and Christina “Xtina” Aguilera at the VMA, describing Madonna as having “reached the grungy anti-MILF stage of her life-cycle.” Ouch.

InstaPundit passes on word from The Guardian that Andrew “008” Gilligan, the reporter at the center of the David Kelly scandal in Britain, has been removed from his day-to-day reporting duties to prepare for his likely grilling by the inquiry investigating Kelly’s death. Quoth The Guardian:

BBC executives denied that Gilligan’s departure from day-to-day reporting on the Radio 4 Today programme was linked to revelations last week that he sent emails to two MPs on the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee suggesting questions they could ask Kelly that would be ‘devastating’ for the Government. ...

Gilligan sent his emails to a Liberal Democrat and a Conservative on the committee. The messages came to light when the Liberal Democrats forwarded their copy to the inquiry.

In related news, I have a very nice bridge over the Thames I’d be willing to sell you.

Nevertheless, government ministers have apparently decided to start making nice with the BBC by planning to continue to exempt it from government oversight:

Critics have long urged the Government to bring the BBC under the ambit of the new communications watchdog, Ofcom, which is to regulate all other broadcasters.

But following extensive lobbying from the commercial sector, the Government rejected this suggestion on the grounds that the BBC needs to remain independent of any government.

Of course, if Ofcom is going to regulate the behavior of other broadcasters, doesn’t it seem rather silly that the tax-financed BBC will be less regulated—and hence less subject to political meddling—than broadcasters who don’t receive their funds via the government treasury?

Walter Cronkite’s first column has been online for two weeks, but apparently it took this Eric Burns piece for FoxNews.com for it to garner much publicity. The “bombshell”: Cronkite concedes most journalists are liberals. Why?

I believe that most of us reporters are liberal, but not because we consciously have chosen that particular color in the political spectrum. More likely it is because most of us served our journalistic apprenticeships as reporters covering the seamier side of our cities – the crimes, the tenement fires, the homeless and the hungry, the underclothed and undereducated.

We reached our intellectual adulthood with daily close-ups of the inequality in a nation that was founded on the commitment to equality for all. So we are inclined to side with the powerless rather than the powerful.

Perhaps we should just call it the Footnote Four justification for media bias.

Speaking of media bias, if you want to see some testable, positivist political theory, try this blog post on for size. Ah, if only I had a research grant…

The ever-popular Agonist Watch is back with a vengeance, complete with a $500 reward for identifying its author and responding to a backlog of mail and blog posts.

One common refrain, particularly from the left of late*, is that our press isn’t adversarial enough when dealing with politicians; they look to the British press, and in particular the BBC (as that is the only example sizeable numbers of Americans have been exposed to), as an exemplar of the adversarial style they want to see emulated.

Those who advocate this style, however, may want to consider Jeff Jarvis’s damning collection of links that suggest that the Beeb’s quest for sensationalism and ratings—if not an ideological bias—led it to claim that the Blair government had “sexed up” reports on Iraq’s weapons capabilities before the war. At the center of the controversy is a dead weapons inspector, David Kelly, and one of the BBC’s wartime correspondents in Baghdad, Andrew Gilligan, whose performance in a pathetic cloak-and-dagger display I belittled during the war. Now, some portions of the American media are hardly better—the reliance on barely-sourced, anonymous information from deep background has become a staple of reporting in “flagship” newspapers like the Washington Post and New York Times, perhaps due to every reporter thinking he’s going to become a star like Bob Woodward—but outside the most partisan papers (the occasional crusades of the Raines-era NYT, the Washington Times and the New York Post spring to mind), no American outlets have matched the Beeb’s propensity for grinding its ideological axe.

Moreover, as Peter Mandelson (no stranger to the harsh spotlight of Fleet Street and the Beeb) points out, the British media have contributed to a decline in public discourse in that country:

The viciousness that characterises the relationship between the media and politicians is turning people off politics and corroding our democracy. Everything in Britain is conducted in an overly adversarial way, from our courts to our Parliament, our industrial relations and our select committees. It is good theatre, but does it produce good outcomes? In this case, patently not.

The pervasive cynicism of the BBC and its fellow British media almost certainly have an effect on public perceptions of democracy. As a professional cynic myself, I can’t help but believe part of that attitude was formed as a result of my political socialization at the hands of the Beeb and ITN (the only other television news provider in pre-satellite-TV Britain). A healthy skepticism about the veracity of a government’s claims is good for democracy, but the consistent and corrosive cynicism embodied in the reporting on the motives of everyone and anyone in government or the public eye by the British media seems detrimental to that country’s long-term future.

Matthew at A Fearful Symmetry has more on the blame game surrounding Kelly’s death.

If there’s a common thread in the various “Bush lied” stories about the war, it is that the initial, wildly overoptimistic reports were generally based on interviews with anonymous sources. For example, in last month’s Washington Post semi-retraction of its reporting on the events that lead to Pfc. Jessica Lynch’s capture, the paper describes its initial reports as follows:

Initial news reports, including those in The Washington Post, which cited unnamed U.S. officials with access to intelligence reports, described Lynch emptying her M-16 into Iraqi soldiers. The intelligence reports from intercepts and Iraqi informants said that Lynch fought fiercely, was stabbed and shot multiple times, and that she killed several of her assailants.

“She was fighting to the death,” one of the officials was quoted as saying. “She did not want to be taken alive.”

Now, assuming the initial reports weren’t written by Jayson Blair or someone seeking to emulate his behavior at the New York Times, these “unnamed U.S. officials” must exist. More importantly, the reporters who quoted them know who they are. A full and honest accounting of events, whether in the Post and elsewhere, ought to identify who these officials are.

The practice of the media taking information on background in important stories has become disturbingly widespread. If newspapers want their reports that rely on anonymous sources to be trusted, there must be some clear sanction for dishonesty by people speaking on background—just as there is when the source is not anonymous (namely, damage to the credibility of the source). A journalist’s responsibility to the truth, and to her readers, must outweigh any obligation of anonymity to a source who has clearly lied or deceived the public.

Why can both liberals think the media is biased toward conservatives and conservatives think the media is biased against them? (Not to mention, why do libertarians like me think the media is biased toward government action?)

Here’s a rough draft of a theory. John Zaller’s The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion makes a case for what he calls the “receive-accept-sample” (RAS) model of opinionation. In simple terms, people receive information (which may or may not be biased; it can be purely factual, or it can be partisan or distorted in some way) from a variety of sources, such as the mass media, friends, family, colleagues, etc. This information is then either accepted or rejected through a process of perceptual screening. Finally, when people are called upon to give their opinion on a particular issue, they sample from the information they have available pertaining to that issue (in Zaller’s terms, the relevant considerations).

Now, if we focus on the accept part of the RAS model, we find something interesting. People who are more politically sophisticated generally only accept the information that is consistent with their preexisting beliefs, while less sophisticated people have less developed screening mechanisms (since they care less about consistency or balance). People who complain about bias are, largely, the politically sophisticated (those who look down on Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly listeners may find this hard to accept, but compared to the average American I suspect those listeners are more politically sophisticated; they may have political beliefs that seem reactionary, but they generally know a lot more about politics and how it works than the average citizen). This probably isn’t a coincidence.

My theory is that citizens are more conscious of rejection than they are of acceptance. People who encounter information consistent with their beliefs will simply accept it and move on, while people who encounter information that is inconsistent will be more aware of that inconsistency. Thus, people who encounter more inconsistency when they encounter information from a particular source will find it to be more biased than those who encounter less inconsistency. And, they will perceive that bias as being in the direction opposite to their preexisting belief system—because, relative to them, the bias is in that direction.

Does that mean (if this theory is correct—I suspect it is, but then again, that’s because it’s my theory) that bias doesn’t exist? No. But it does mean that liberals like Eric Alterman and conservatives like Ann Coulter will only perceive bias in opposition to their own belief system.

Conceivably, one could pick a “belief system axis” and measure the bias of various information sources relative to the origin of that axis. To test this, you’d need to have a number of raters from various positions within that belief system axis (which you could locate using standard measures of ideological belief) and then have them give some measure of the bias of the information sources. Then you could produce an “objective” map of the bias of the sources using multidimensional scaling (which, hopefully, would be fairly easy to interpret).

OxBlog’s Patrick Belton links to an interesting Weekly Standard piece on how the newspaper of the future should be designed—primarily, that it should be online, and take advantage of the medium.

It’s a somewhat novel approach, but I think people are always going to want tactile feedback when reading large amounts of text. “Digital paper” will probably be the closest we ever get to being truly paperless. This is one thing I think Babylon 5 got right about the future; even in the 23rd century, people will still want a newspaper: it may be custom-built for them, but otherwise it won’t look much different from the newspaper of 2001 or 1801.

Greg Greene of the Green[e]house Effect takes a look back from two months away at the fallout from the Sean-Paul Kelley plagiarism mini-scandal. In the comments the debate is shaping up as: was Sean-Paul a Jayson Blair, a Rick Bragg, or something completely different? And, can (or should) the blogosphere adequately police itself to make sure others don’t repeat The Agonist’s mistake?

As I predicted, Howell Raines is out the door, along with Times managing editor Gerald Boyd, who I actually expected to stay on. It was more than the ten days that I estimated in that earlier post (as Joy helpfully points out), so I can’t claim any real prescience on the issue. That’s why I’m a political scientist, not a media studies guy.

Now back to explaining how Dutch voters with varying levels of political sophistication attribute responsibility for coalition performance… at least I can do that.

Now, I’m not one who normally goes out on a limb to defend Paul Krugman. Heck, I’ve called him a snakeoil salesman in this weblog, so I’m hardly the world’s biggest fan. But I also think Eugene Volokh is right to disparage Neal Cavuto’s immature response to a drive-by insult at the end of Tuesday’s Krugman column in The New York Times.

I don’t disagree with Cavuto’s basic point—“Your World,” his daily Fox News show, has a designated commentary segment, and Cavuto’s comments were made during that segment, so he’s not under any obligation to be objective there, just as Krugman’s column’s presence on the op-ed page (and, some might argue, in the Times itself) relieves him of any obligation to be “fair and balanced” in that column. But I think Cavuto could have produced a more mature response. Similarly, I think Donald Luskin’s “Krugman Truth Squad” feature at his weblog and NRO would be far more effective if he limited the name-calling and stuck to the (frequent) instances where Krugman is clearly wrong or is distorting the truth to serve his left-wing agenda.

James Joyner agrees.

New York Times executive editor Howell Raines says he won’t resign. I give him no more than ten days.

Via InstaPundit.

InstaPundit is now disavowing Pravda’s suggestion that he’s “The New York Times of the bloggers.”

May I humbly suggest that the mantle be passed to Sean-Paul?

Yes, I was in the mood for a cheap shot. So sue me.

ScrappleFace has a worldwide exclusive: New York Times editor Howell Raines’ reaction to the Jayson Blair plagiarism/story-invention scandal, as written by Blair himself.

Scott Johnson, whose Feedster is one of my favorite blog resources, has a good essay entitled “Why You Shouldn’t Watch CNN Any More.” It’s about a week old, but I just ran across it now.

David Carr of Samizdata takes apart the BBC’s director general, Greg Dyke, for his pathetic defense of the tax-funded broadcaster’s “objectivity” and monopolistic practices.

The Laughing Wolf has more, tying Dyke’s comments to Eason Jordan’s perfidity.

Carl Bernstein, the lesser half of Woodward and Bernstein, is quite upset that students at UIUC were apparently able to deduce who Deep Throat was. (Link via Glenn Reynolds.)