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By Posted on Posted in Miscellany No Comments

1.

The Hassell et al. 2020 Science Advances article "There is no liberal media bias in which news stories political journalists choose to cover" reports null results from two experiments on ideological bias in media coverage.

The correspondence experiment emailed journalists a message about a candidate who planned to announce a candidacy for state legislator, with a question of whether the journalist would be interested in a sit-down interview with the candidate to discuss the candidate's candidacy and vision for state government. Experimental manipulations involved the description of the candidate, such as "...is a true conservative Republican..." or "...is a true progressive Democrat...".

The conjoint experiment asked journalists to hypothetically choose between two candidacy announcements to cover, with characteristics of the candidates experimentally manipulated.

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2.

Hassell et al. 2020 claims that (p. 1)...

Using a unique combination of a large-scale survey of political journalists, data from journalists' Twitter networks, election returns, a large-scale correspondence experiment, and a conjoint survey experiment, we show definitively that the media exhibits no bias against conservatives (or liberals for that matter) in what news that they choose to cover.

I think that a good faith claim that research "definitively" shows no media bias against conservatives or liberals in the choice of news to cover should be based on at least one test that is very likely to detect that type of bias. But I don't think that either experiment provides such a "very likely" test.

I think that a "very likely" scenario in which ideology would cause a journalist to not report a story has at least three characteristics: [1] the story unquestionably reflects poorly on the journalist's ideology or ideological group, [2] the journalist has nontrivial gatekeeping ability over the story, and [3] the journalist could not meaningfully benefit from reporting the story.

Regarding [1], it's not clear to me that any of the candidate announcement stories would unquestionably reflect poorly on any ideology or ideological group. The lack of an ideological valence to the story is especially lacking in the correspondence experiment, given that a liberal journalist could ask softball questions to try to make a liberal candidate look good and could ask hardball questions to try to make a conservative candidate look bad.

Regarding [2], it's not clear to me that a journalist would have nontrivial gatekeeping ability over the candidate announcement story: it's not like a journalist could keep secret the candidate's candidacy.

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3.

I think that title of the Hassell et al. 2020 Monkey Cage post describing this research is defensible: "Journalists may be liberal, but this doesn't affect which candidates they choose to cover". But I'm not sure who thought otherwise.

Hassell et al. 2020 describe the concern about selective reporting as "... journalists may omit news stories that do not adhere to their own (most likely liberal) predispositions" (p. 1). But in what sense does a conservative Republican announcing a candidacy for office have anything to do with adhering to a liberal disposition? The concern about media bias in the selection of stories to cover, as I understand it, is largely about stories that have an obvious implication for ideologically preferred narratives. So something like "Conservative Republican accused of sexual assault", not "Conservative Republican runs for office".

The selective reporting that conservatives complain about is plausibly much more likely—and plausibly much more important—at the national level than at a lower level. For example, I don't think that ideological bias is large enough to cause a local newspaper to not report on a police shooting of an unarmed person in the newspaper's distribution area; however, I think that ideological bias is large enough to influence a national media organization's decisions about which subset of available police shootings to report on.

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By Posted on Posted in Race No Comments

The Monkey Cage published a post that claimed that "U.S. media outlets disproportionately emphasize the smaller number of terrorist attacks by Muslims". Such an inference depends on the control variables making all else equal, but the working paper on which the inference was based had few controls and few alternate specifications. The models controlled for fatalities but the Global Terrorism Database used for the key reference also lists the number of persons injured, and a measure of total casualties might be a better control than only fatalaties. For example, the Boston Marathon bombing is listed as having 1 fatality and 132 injured, but the models in the working paper would estimate the media coverage to be the same as if the bombing had had 1 fatality and 0 injured.

Moreover, as noted in the comments to the post, the Boston Marathon bombing is an outlier in terms of the outcome variable (20 percent of articles were devoted to that single event). But the working paper reported no model that omitted this outlier from the analysis, so it is not clear to what extent the estimates and inferences reflect a "Muslim perpetrator" effect or a "Boston Marathon bombing" effect. And, as also noted in the comments, proper controls would reflect the difference in expected media coverage for terrorist attacks in which the perpetrator was killed at the scene versus terrorist attacks in which there was a manhunt for the perpetrator.

Finally, from what I can tell based on the post and the working paper, the number of articles for the Boston Marathon bombing might include articles published before it was known or credibly suspected that the perpetrators were Muslim. If so, then the article count for the Boston Marathon bombing might be inflated because media coverage of the bombing before the religion of the perpetrators was known or credibly suspected cannot be attributed to the religion of the perpetrators.

My request for the data and code used for the post was declined, but hopefully I'll remember to check for the data and code after the working paper is published. In the meantime, I asked the authors on Twitter about inclusion of articles before the suspects were known and about results when the Boston Marathon bombing is excluded from the analysis.

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By Posted on Posted in Race 7 Comments

The Washington Post police shootings database as of January 4, 2016, indicated that on-duty police officers in the United States shot dead 91 unarmed persons in 2015: 31 whites, 37 blacks, 18 Hispanics, and 5 persons of another race or ethnicity. The database updates; the screen shot below is the data as of January 4, 2016.

WaPo UM

The New York Times search engine restricted to dates in 2015 returned 1,281 hits for "unarmed black", 4 hits for "unarmed white", 0 hits for "unarmed Hispanic", and 0 hits for "unarmed Asian":

nytimesUnarmedBlack

nytimesUnarmedWhite

nytimesUnarmedHispanic

nytimesUnarmedAsian

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By Posted on Posted in Race No Comments

Here are four items typically used to measure symbolic racism, in which respondents are asked to indicate their level of agreement with the statements:

1. Irish, Italians, Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors.

2. Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class.

3. Over the past few years, blacks have gotten less than they deserve.

4. It's really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites.

These four items are designed such that an antiblack racist would tend to respond the same way as a non-racist principled conservative. Many researchers realize this conflation problem and make an effort to account for this conflation. For example, here is an excerpt from Rabinowitz, Sears, Sidanius, and Krosnick 2010, explaining how responses to symbolic racism items might be influenced in part by non-racial values:

Adherence to traditional values—without concomitant racial prejudice—could drive Whites' responses to SR [symbolic racism] measures and their opinions on racial policy issues. For example, Whites' devotion to true equality may lead them to oppose what they might view as inherently inequitable policies, such as affirmative action, because it provides advantages for some social groups and not others. Similarly affirmative action may be perceived to violate the traditional principle of judging people on their merits, not their skin color. Consequently, opposition to such policies may result from their perceived violation of widely and closely held principles rather than racism.

However, this nuance is sometimes lost. Here is an excerpt from the Pasek, Krosnick, and Tompson 2012 manuscript that was discussed by the Associated Press shortly before the 2012 presidential election:

Explicit racial attitudes were gauged using questions designed to measure "Symbolic Racism" (Henry & Sears, 2002).

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The proportion of Americans expressing explicit anti-Black attitudes held steady between 47.6% in 2008 and 47.3% in 2010, and increased slightly and significantly to 50.9% in 2012.

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See here and here for a discussion of the Pasek et al. 2012 manuscript.

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By Posted on Posted in Race No Comments

Vox has a post about racial bias and police shootings. The story by Vox writer Jenée Desmond-Harris included quotes from Joshua Correll, who investigated racial bias in police shootings with a shooter game, in his co-authored 2007 study, "Across the Thin Blue Line: Police Officers and Racial Bias in the Decision to Shoot" (gated, ungated).

Desmond-Harris emphasized the Correll et al. 2007 finding about decision time:

When Correll performed his experiment specifically on law enforcement officers, he found that expert training significantly reduced their fatal mistakes overall, but no matter what training they had, most participants were quicker to shoot at a black target.

For readers who only skim the Vox story, this next sentence appears in larger blue font:

No matter what training they had, most participants were quicker to shoot at a black target.

That finding, about the speed of the response, is fairly characterized as racial bias. But maybe you're wondering whether the law enforcement officers in the study were more likely to incorrectly shoot the black targets than the white targets. That's sort of important, right? Well, Desmond-Harris does not tell you that. But you can open the link to the Correll et al. 2007 study and turn to page 1020, where you will find this passage:

For officers (and, temporarily, for trained undergraduates), however, the stereotypic interference ended with reaction times. The bias evident in their latencies did not translate to the decisions they ultimately made.

I wonder why the Vox writer did not mention that research finding.

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I doubt that the aggregate level of racial bias in the decision of police officers to shoot is exactly zero, and it is certainly possible that other research has found or will find such a nonzero bias. Let me know if you are aware of any such studies.

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By Posted on Posted in Public opinion 2 Comments

Here is Adam Davidson in the New York Times Magazine:

And yet the economic benefits of immigration may be the ­most ­settled fact in economics. A recent University of Chicago poll of leading economists could not find a single one who rejected the proposition.

For some reason, the New York Times online article did not link to that poll, so readers who do not trust the New York Times -- or readers who might be interested in characteristics of the poll, such as sample size, representativeness, and question wording -- must track down the poll themselves.

It appears that the poll cited by Adam Davidson is here and is limited to the aggregate effect of high-skilled immigrants:

The average US citizen would be better off if a larger number of highly educated foreign workers were legally allowed to immigrate to the US each year.

But concern about immigration is not limited to high-skilled immigrants and is not limited to the aggregate effect: a major concern is that low-skilled immigrants will have a negative effect on the poorest and most vulnerable Americans. There was a recent University of Chicago poll of leading economists on that concern, and that poll found more than a single economist to agree with that proposition; fifty percent, actually:

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Related: Here's what the New York Times did not mention about teacher grading bias

Related: Here's what the New York Times did not mention about the bus bias study

My comment at the New York Times summarizing this post, available after nine hours in moderation.

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