For student journalists, the beats are the same but the protections are different
‘The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, which documents First Amendment aggressions in the United States, has collected student journalism-based incidents at both the university and high school levels. Since its launch in 2017, the Tracker has documented five cases of high school newspapers being censored or placed under prior review for their coverage of controversial topics. At the university level, it has collected two arrests, two physical attacks and three border stop involving student journalists, as well as three cases of subpoenas or legal orders.
In recognition of the expansion of student journalism as a key source of accountability and record for their local communities, two of the Tracker’s partners—the Student Press Law Center and the Newseum—along with the Freedom Forum Institute, declared 2019 the “Year of the Student Journalist.” This year also marks the 50th anniversary of a key Supreme Court decision in favor of student First Amendment rights: Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District.
While the Vietnam-era case of Tinker centered on students wearing armbands in protest, it has become the bellwether for free speech and journalism at both the high school and university levels. The 7-2 ruling iconically stated that neither “students [n]or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”
While Tinker holds—for now—the state of journalism is rapidly changing. With legacy newsrooms shuttering and the number of working journalists contracting as freelancers increasing, the role of the student journalist has expanded to fill some of the void.’
Why it matters: The death of local news in America is routinely cited as one of the country’s biggest threats to democracy. With fewer opportunities in local journalism and less job security at the local level, finding talent to fill local newsrooms has become a central focus.
Even without the week’s depressing report on just how widespread is the loss of local news — 400 counties and counting, with no newspaper — let us be thankful for the people who are still out there trying to be watchdogs on local institutions. “If every American gave 30 minutes a day to an earnest and open-minded effort to stay on top of the news, we might actually find our way out of this crisis.”
AXIOS
We have to talk about technocracy, how it has driven massive sociopolitical change.
Media outfits, breaking from the high-minded, dispassionate liberalism that dominated journalism in the middle decades of the 20th century, earn enormous profits by whipping millions of viewers into a frenzy of furious anger at perceived slights and condescension. Political campaigns and even whole social movements are motivated by the perception of disrespect.
Bill Moyers:
“A democracy can die of too many lies. And we’re getting close to that terminal moment unless we reverse the obsession with lies that are being fed around the country.”
NPR
If the children are the future, the future might be very ill-informed.
That’s one implication of a new study from Stanford researchers that evaluated students’ ability to assess information sources and described the results as “dismaying,” “bleak” and “[a] threat to democracy.”
As content creators and social media platforms grapple with the fake news crisis, the study highlights the other side of the equation: What it looks like when readers are duped.
The researchers at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education have spent more than a year evaluating how well students across the country can evaluate online sources of information.
In exercise after exercise, the researchers were “shocked” — their word, not ours — by how many students failed to effectively evaluate the credibility of that information.
The students displayed a “stunning and dismaying consistency” in their responses, the researchers wrote, getting duped again and again. They weren’t looking for high-level analysis of data but just a “reasonable bar” of, for instance, telling fake accounts from real ones, activist groups from neutral sources and ads from articles.
Most middle school students can’t tell native ads from articles.
The researchers showed hundreds of middle schoolers a Slate home page that included a traditional ad and a “native ad” — a paid story branded as “sponsored content” — as well as Slate articles.
Most students could identify the traditional ad, but more than 80 percent of them believed that the “sponsored content” article was a real news story.
“Some students even mentioned that it was sponsored content but still believed that it was a news article,” the researchers wrote, suggesting the students don’t know what “sponsored content” means.
Most high school students accept photographs as presented, without verifying them.
Most college students didn’t suspect potential bias in a tweet from an activist group.
The researchers sent undergraduate students a link to a tweet by MoveOn about gun owners’ feelings on background checks, citing a survey by Public Policy Polling.
“The kinds of duties that used to be the responsibility of editors, of librarians now fall on the shoulders of anyone who uses a screen to become informed about the world,” Wineburg told NPR. “And so the response is not to take away these rights from ordinary citizens but to teach them how to thoughtfully engage in information seeking and evaluating in a cacophonous democracy.”
We started by investigating the rise of the alt-right on more obscure forums like 4chan and 8chan as well as on the popular chat app Discord. We were soon struck by the many references extremists made to YouTube videos, and decided to explore this platform.
The amount of right-wing extremist content available on YouTube turned out to be overwhelming: There was racism, antisemitism, antifeminism, white nationalism, and conspiracies on “cultural marxism,” “white genocide,” and “the great replacement” (the idea that white people are slowly being replaced by nonwhites through birth rates and immigration).
Around the same time, researchers began to worry that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm was exacerbating the spread of extremist content by slowly pulling viewers into a rabbit hole of hate. The recommendations that popped up when users were watching videos would slowly become more extreme: A user could start out with a left-leaning video on racism and slowly but surely end up, through a series of recommendations, watching right-wing extremist content.
[…]
In the end, we compiled a list of 1,500 channels, about evenly spread on the left-right spectrum. YouTube has a very liberal API with which you can query the database for a lot of metadata. We wrote extensive software (packaged in a reusable Python library) to examine:
600,000 videos
450,000 transcripts of those videos (by using YouTube’s automatic closed-captioning service, which is not available for all videos)
120 million comments on those videos
20 million recommendations automatically generated from viewing those videos
That’s a lot of data — about 100 GB. But what to do with it?
LOS ANGELES, CA, UNITED STATES – 2019/02/06: The CNN logo is seen atop its bureau in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Ronen Tivony/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Jay Rosen:
“What if the hosts threw their shows over to the beat reporters more often? What if guests who lied weren’t brought on again? What if people who had worked on campaigns couldn’t be brought on to spin the news unmitigated?”
[Jay Rosen is a media critic and journalism professor Studio 20 program at NYU.]
WHEN I THINK OF CNN—when I watch it, or when I scroll through Twitter, or when I think of what I want to write about it—I think of what Jeff Zucker, CNN president, saidin 2017: “The idea that politics is sport is undeniable, and we understood it and approached it that way.”
The contrast now is stark. It’s not that the CNN beat reporters are good and hosts are bad—many of the latter are accomplished journalists, too. It’s just that what is mostly reflected on the screen—especially during prime time—seems to be less news reporting, more punditry, more round tables, more horse race politics, more talking heads, more interviews and interviewees yelling at each other, more that makes the news more confusing for the viewer (or at least for this viewer).
I find myself wrestling with this tension when I write these columns. I know I’m not the only one: Bernie Sanders’ campaign manager, Faiz Shakir went on Brian Stelter’s Reliable Sources and expressed frustration that the networks were more focused on politics than on policy, and that, on TV news shows, “it tends to be a game”. (Stelter, to his credit, acknowledged that many viewers agree, and that “the shiny object, the sensationalism, it’s a problem.”)
The past is still present: why colonialism deserves better coverage
By Elliot Ross
Countries such as Britain and the USA also retain control over colonial territories. And let’s not forget the settler colonial countries such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, where the colonisation of indigenous lands has been entrenched and institutionalised in the long-term.
Colonial domination not only shapes our ideas about race, but also strongly influences how people think about class, culture, gender, and sexuality
The roots of autocracyand corrupt government run deep. Purely cultural, ahistoricalexplanations not only risk reproducing racist tropes, they mask the role of powerful international corporate interests in sustaining systems of resource extraction, profiteering, exploitation and rent-seeking that sustain the underlying economic transactions that has always made colonialism financially profitable for colonisers.
Everyday Colonialism is also about probing my own status as a beneficiary of these long histories
“Truth cannot be given the same level of coverage as falsehood. We shouldn’t make them equivalent. It’s not partisan for the media to be partisan towards the truth.”
-EJ Dionne, American journalist, political commentator, and long-time op-ed columnist for The Washington Post.
A message to the Fourth Estate: Don’t amplify the lies. Report truth.
For most of corporate America, nothing has really changed in the last year — despite initial promises and action, writes Axios’ Dan Primack.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) is once again hosting his prized “Davos in the Desert,” which saw a rush of cancellations last year, and he wouldn’t have risked a repeat embarrassment.
Most big companies never stopped doing business with the Saudis. Or, in the case of Wall Street, trying to get Saudi business. That’s particularly true when it comes to deals like the upcoming Aramco IPO, which could be the largest global float of all time.
The bottom line: MBS bet that CEOs didn’t care enough. He was right.
—
Frontline
Season 2019 Episode 13 | 1h 54m 48s
‘A year after the murder of columnist Jamal Khashoggi, FRONTLINE investigates the rise of Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. In a two-hour documentary, Martin Smith — who has covered the Middle East for FRONTLINE for 20 years — examines the crown prince’s vision for the future of Saudi Arabia, his handling of dissent and his ties to Khashoggi’s killing.’
News media companies make up 12 of the 15 most polarizing brands in America today, according to a new Morning Consult poll provided to Axios media trends expert Sara Fischer.
CNN and Fox News continue to be the most divisive news companies.
Why it matters: The gap between how Republicans and Democrats view national media brands like CNN and Fox News continues to widen, according to the polling, which points to an increase in America’s polarization.
Between the lines: The gap is being driven by substantial decreases in Republican approval of media brands other than Fox News.
The difference between how the two parties viewed CNN grew from a 66-point gap last year to an 80-point gap this year, due to a 12-point drop in net favorability among Republicans, from -13% to -25%.
Republicans held more negative views than Democrats of every media outlet on the list except for Fox News.
The difference between how the two parties view Fox News grew from a 54-point gap last year to a 74-point gap this year.
The bottom line: Even outlets that are generally considered nonpartisan, like ABC News and CNBC, rank among the most polarizing brands in America.
Executive Director of the McCain Institute Kurt Volker resigned from his position as the U.S. Special Envoy for Ukraine Friday, following reports he collaborated with Ukraine and President Donald Trump.
An ASU official confirmed Volker’s resignation Friday, and said the University could not speak about his future at ASU because the University does not comment on personnel matters.
Volker met with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo Friday to announce he would be resigning, the official said.
Volker’s name was mentioned in the recent whistleblower complaint, which has sparked an impeachment inquiry for Trump. Trump has defended his actions, including a phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky where Trump requested dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden.
The complaint details that Trump told his staff to cut aid to Ukraine unless they helped find information on presidential candidate Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.
According to the complaint, Volker helped organize meetings with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Ukrainian officials.
The complaint also alleges that Volker went to Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, to help guide Ukraine officials on how to handle Trumps’s demands.
Editor’s Note: This is a breaking story and will be updated as more information becomes available.
News coverage of current affairs is predominantly negative. American accounts of this tendency tend to focus on journalistic practices, but this cannot easily account for negative news content around the world. It is more likely that negativity in news is a product of a human tendency to be more attentive to negative news content. Just how widespread is this tendency? Our evidence suggest that, all around the world, the average human is more physiologically activated by negative than by positive news stories. Even so, there is a great deal of variation across individuals. The latter finding is of real significance for newsmakers: Especially in a diversified media environment, news producers should not underestimate the audience for positive news content.
(Thanks to Dr. Alfonso Montuori for sharing this article.)
Cross-national evidence of a negativity bias in psychophysiological reactions to news
Stuart Soroka, Patrick Fournier, and Lilach Nir
PNAS September 17, 2019 116 (38) 18888-18892; first published September 3, 2019
Edited by Susan T. Fiske, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and approved August 5, 2019 (received for review May 14, 2019)
Significance
News coverage of current affairs is predominantly negative. American accounts of this tendency tend to focus on journalistic practices, but this cannot easily account for negative news content around the world. It is more likely that negativity in news is a product of a human tendency to be more attentive to negative news content. Just how widespread is this tendency? Our evidence suggest that, all around the world, the average human is more physiologically activated by negative than by positive news stories. Even so, there is a great deal of variation across individuals. The latter finding is of real significance for newsmakers: Especially in a diversified media environment, news producers should not underestimate the audience for positive news content.
Abstract
What accounts for the prevalence of negative news content? One answer may lie in the tendency for humans to react more strongly to negative than positive information. “Negativity biases” in human cognition and behavior are well documented, but existing research is based on small Anglo-American samples and stimuli that are only tangentially related to our political world. This work accordingly reports results from a 17-country, 6-continent experimental study examining psychophysiological reactions to real video news content. Results offer the most comprehensive cross-national demonstration of negativity biases to date, but they also serve to highlight considerable individual-level variation in responsiveness to news content. Insofar as our results make clear the pervasiveness of negativity biases on average, they help account for the tendency for audience-seeking news around the world to be predominantly negative. Insofar as our results highlight individual-level variation, however, they highlight the potential for more positive content, and suggest that there may be reason to reconsider the conventional journalistic wisdom that “if it bleeds, it leads.”
This paper is focused on the human propensity to give more weight to negative information than to positive information and the relevance of this tendency for the nature of news coverage. The importance of negativity biases for news is relatively clear. Negativity biases affect news selection, and thus also news production, as well as citizens’ attitudes about current affairs. Testing for the prevalence of negativity biases and considering their implications for the nature of news content is central to our understanding of the flow and impact of mass-mediated current-affairs content. In a period during which news around the world is especially wrought with negativity, this subject is of obvious significance.
The paper proceeds as follows. We first review the existing literature on negativity biases, particularly as it relates to news consumption, highlighting the paucity of comparative research on the issue. We note that one major consequence of this gap in research is an inability to distinguish the extent to which these negativity biases vary due not just to individual-level, but also to cultural, political, or media-system factors. The key, we argue, lies in testing for differences in responses to news content across both individuals and cultures. We then present results from what is, to our knowledge, the single largest, directly comparable body of data on negativity biases in psychophysiological responses to video news.
Results, based on over 1,000 respondents across 17 countries and 6 continents, suggest that there is, on average, a negativity bias in psychophysiological reactions to video news content. There are, however, also considerable differences in the way in which individuals react to negative versus positive news content. These individual-level differences are not easily explained by culture or country. Indeed, there is considerable within-country variation in responses to news content. This fact highlights the possibility that news content could be attention-grabbing for some citizens even if it is not systematically negative.
Background
Our research is motivated by 2 widely recognized features of modern-day communications. First, mass-mediated news is a central and critical component of large-scale representative democracy. Media provide a critical flow of information between elites and citizens and are a vital mechanism for democratic accountability. Second, negative tone is a defining feature of news; good news, in contrast, is nearly synonymous with the absence of news. This asymmetry in coverage has been the focus of a considerable body of work on mass media in the United States (1, 2), and it is evident in studies of media content and journalists’ decisions cross-nationally (3⇓–5). Importantly, this work suggests that, even as news coverage has been negative for many years, it has also been increasing in recent decades.
In sum, the nature and quality of mass-mediated news content is central to the nature and quality of representative democracy, and that content is systematically skewed toward negative information. This is partly a function of the demand for negative news, since market forces will produce news in line with consumers’ interests, including negativity (6). Even so, the tone of news content has been cited as a source of systematic deficiencies in what citizens know about their governments and the world around them (1). Inadequate or incorrect political knowledge, citizen apathy, and disengagement—these are just some of the consequences attributed to the overwhelmingly negative nature of news content.
These facts point to the importance of understanding why media content is the way it is. They also highlight the need to understand if and why media consumers prioritize negative coverage. Concerns about media coverage typically focus on the supply side of the media—i.e., choices of journalists and editors—but the demand side may be equally important. Even as people say they want more positive news, they systematically select more negative news (7), for instance. This should come as no surprise: There are, after all, burgeoning literatures across the social sciences identifying negative biases in human information processing and behavior (8⇓⇓⇓–12).
What explains the apparently widespread preference for negative information? One account is rooted in evolutionary theory. Attention to negativity may have been advantageous for survival. Negative information alerts to potential dangers (13); it has special value in terms of “diagnosticity” (14), or the “vigilance” (15) that is required to avoid negative outcomes. This account of the negativity bias is evident in literatures in physiology (16), neurology (17, 18), and, particularly, work on the importance of “orienting responses” in evolutionary biology (19). This account leads to the expectation of a negativity bias present across all human populations.
Another account is evident in work on cultural psychology and anthropology, as well as recent work on “media systems.” This research emphasizes the possibility that there are cross-cultural differences in negativity biases. There is, after all, work examining cross-cultural variation in related psychological phenomena, including self-assessments (20, 21), self-esteem (22), satisfaction (23), optimism (24), and reasoning (25). One frequent contrast in this work is between what seem to be more optimistic countries in the West (typically the United States) and less optimistic countries in the East (typically Japan). And, while cross-cultural explorations into negativity biases specifically are rare, several important exceptions find evidence of cross-national differences (23, 26, 27).
Systematic cross-national differences in responsiveness to news content might provide clues about how this negativity bias arises. What might drive this cross-cultural variance? The literature on cultural values points to some possibilities (28). Societies deal with anxiety about future uncertainties in different ways, and the extent to which members of a culture feel threatened by ambiguous or unknown situations may well affect the tendency to focus on negative information. A range of institutional factors may also matter. Societal tension between groups, and especially conflict that has crystallized in the polarization of political-party systems, may matter for negativity, at least where attentiveness to news coverage is concerned. Another dimension of variability is rooted in the institutionally coded professional practices of journalists (29). A strong professional requirement that journalists routinely cover politics in conflictual terms may also lead to viewers’ habitual expectation and attention to negativity.
Note that neither the evolutionary nor the cultural-institutional account depends on a conscious desire for negative information so much as an unconscious adaptation or learned tendency to prioritize negative information. Note also that the 2 accounts are not in competition—negativity biases are almost certainly conditioned by both. Consider work on the importance of “social learning,” alongside biology, as the basis of culture (30) and work in neurology and physiology on culture–gene coevolution (31, 32). We also do not want to discount the possibility that variation in negativity biases is not a primarily cross-cultural phenomenon, but an individual one. There already is work suggesting that negativity biases in reactions to video news vary across gender, for instance (33). And there is a growing literature focused on differences in negativity biases across political ideologies (34⇓–36).
Individual-level variables may be at the root of cross-cultural variation, insofar as individual-level factors vary across cultures. Individual-level variation may also be entirely independent of culture or work differently across cultures. Thus far, we simply do not know the extent to which heightened activation in response to negative news content is a culturally determined phenomenon. This not only limits our understanding of negativity biases generally, it limits our understanding of the demand and supply of negative news content.
Cross-National Physiological Responses to News
Our cross-national work responds to growing pleas for a more comparative approach to (political) psychology (37) and more comparative work in political communication as well (38). We also build upon a small, but growing, literature focused on cross-national experimentation in psychology and economics (39, 40).
Our analyses are based on laboratory experiments run in 17 countries: Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Denmark, France, Ghana, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, Senegal, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We also have 2 separate samples in Canada, Anglophone and Francophone, and 2 separate samples in Israel, Jewish and Palestinian. Our results are based on 1,156 respondents; to our knowledge, this is the largest and most broadly comparative psychophysiological study in the social sciences to date. (SI Appendix discusses sampling decisions in detail; SI Appendix, Fig. S1 shows the distribution of respondents by country and gender, and SI Appendix, Fig. S2shows the distribution of age by country.) The study protocol is straightforward: Respondents watched 7 randomly ordered BBC World News stories on a laptop computer while wearing noise-cancelling headphones and sensors on their fingers to capture skin conductance and blood volume pulse. (Videos were subtitled where necessary, and tests suggested that subtitles do not change the results presented here. See SI Appendix, Table A5.)
There already is a considerable body of work examining negativity biases in psychophysiology; there is a growing literature on psychophysiological reactions to political news content as well (33, 41, 42). Physiological measures have the advantage of capturing real-time, often subconscious, reactions to news content. We examined normalized skin-conductance levels (nSCLs), indicating physiological activation connected to, e.g., “orienting responses,” and the “fight or flight” response. We also relied on heart-rate variability (HRV)—specifically, the root mean square of the successive differences (RMSSD), capturing a combination of activation (increasing heart rate) and attentiveness (decreasing heart rate). (For more thorough accounts of both measures, see, e.g., refs. 43and 44.) Note that past work also views HRV as a measure of “emotional regulation” (45). The 2 perspectives are similar—each focuses on variation caused by the excitatory sympathetic nervous system and inhibitory parasympathetic nervous system, and each views higher HRV as an indicator of both activating and calming/focusing responses.
The tone of video content was the primary independent variable. Negativity was measured as an interval-level measure based on the average of second-by-second coding by expert coders (outlined in more detail in SI Appendix). Expert coders’ assessments were in line with assessments from study participants. (Average story ratings, by country, are shown in SI Appendix, Fig. S3.)
Analyses use data at several different levels of aggregation. Variation in heart rate was necessarily measured over longer intervals—in this case, over the course of entire news stories. Analysis of RMSSD values is thus at the respondent–story level. Skin conductance can be measured over very short time periods; here, we examined nSCL using a time-series panel dataset in which each respondent was a “panel” and nSCL was captured at 1-s intervals. The processing of physiological measures is discussed in SI Appendix.
The basic results for RMSSD, estimated across all participants in all countries, are illustrated in Fig. 1. Results are based on the regression model shown in SI Appendix, Table S2. (SI Appendix, Table S3 reproduces the same model, assigning weights to individuals so that all country-level samples are weighted equally; results are not substantively different.) The shift shown in Fig. 1, from an average story tone of −2 (positive) to +2 (negative), is equivalent to 10% of the observed SD in RMSSD. Participants thus exhibited higher variability in heart rate during negative news stories than they did during positive news stories. Given past work on HRV and media content (44), we interpret these results as reflecting higher attentiveness and arousal during these negative stories.
The estimated effect of news story tone on RMSSD, all countries combined.
Results for nSCL are illustrated in Fig. 2, based on second-by-second models shown in SI Appendix, Table S4. Note that these results are similar to those using the same respondent-stimulus-level data as was used for RMSSD; these models are included in SI Appendix, Table S2 (without country weights) and SI Appendix, Table S3 (with country weights). The second-by-second models of nSCL interacted negativity with time (in seconds, by story), given past work suggesting that the impact of negativity on skin conductance decreases over the course of a news story (42). Fig. 2 shows the estimated impact of negative (+2) content, versus neutral (0) and positive (−2) content, 20 s into a news story. The shift shown in Fig. 2 is equivalent to 65% of the observed SD in nSCL. The evidence supports the expectation that physiological arousal is greater for negative news coverage than for positive news coverage.
The estimated effect of by-second news story tone on nSCL, 20 s into news stories, all countries combined.
Note that while these findings are in line with past work, they are among the first to rely on such a large sample, focused on actual video news content, and not based exclusively on Anglo-American respondents. The fact that a negativity bias in physiological responses to video news is readily evident in cross-national data using stimuli with high external validity is of real significance. To be clear: This study directly demonstrates that humans around the world are more activated by negative news coverage. We are, perhaps, one step closer to accounting for the high frequency of negative news content around the world.
Recall, however, that our principal goal is to examine the possibility of systematic cross-national variation. Figs. 3 and 4 offer the critical diagnostic test. Fig. 3 shows the estimated effect on RMSSD of a 1-unit increase in negativity, based on models estimated separately for every participant, using the same specification as in SI Appendix, Table S2. The distribution of these estimated effects is shown, by country, where “estimated effects” are the coefficients for the negativity measure. The figure makes clear the high degree of variability underlying the overall result in Fig. 1. On balance, there are more participants to the right of the zero line—suggesting that respondents are more attentive to and activated by negative news stories. Overall, the mean coefficient is greater than zero. But there is a great deal of within-country variability as well. Indeed, Fig. 3 shows asterisks beside the countries for which the mean coefficient is significantly greater than zero (based on a 1-tailed t test); only Brazil, Canada, France, Italy, and Sweden showed systematically higher RMSSD during negative video content.
The estimated effect of news story tone on RMSSD, by country. Asterisks indicate the countries for which the mean coefficient is significantly greater than zero (based on a 1-tailed t test).
The estimated effect of by-second news story tone on nSCL, 20 s into news stories, by country. Asterisks indicate the countries for which the mean coefficient is significantly greater than zero (based on a 1-tailed t test).
The story is relatively similar for nSCL, in Fig. 4, which plots the estimated effect of a 1-unit increase in negativity on nSCL, based on second-by-second models estimated separately for each participant, using the same specification as in SI Appendix, Table S4. Again, results are shown by country, and asterisks are shown beside the countries for which the mean coefficient is significantly greater than zero (based on a 1-tailed t test). Results point to significant negativity biases in 9 of the 17 countries. In 2 countries, New Zealand and Sweden, the impact of negativity is, on average, opposite to our expectations, although not significantly so. (And note that while country-by-country results vary slightly across different model specifications and levels of data aggregation, in all cases, the basic story is the same: an overall average negativity bias, but with a good degree of individual-level difference; SI Appendix.)
Country accounts for very little of the variation in Figs. 3 and 4. ANOVAs suggest that country (included as a factor variable, with no additional controls) accounts for 1.5% of the observed variance in coefficients for RMSSD and 2.7% of the observed variance in coefficients for nSCL. Even if there were cultural, political, and/or media-system variables correlated with cross-national differences, then, it seems unlikely that they would explain much variance, and, indeed, we find no significant correlations between such measures and the coefficients used in Figs. 3 and 4 (SI Appendix, Table A6). This is not to say that there are no systematic individual-level differences—there clearly are significant differences in the ways in which individuals react to negative versus positive news content. Those differences simply do not appear to be strongly connected to country-level contextual factors.
Discussion
Our results suggest that negativity biases in reactions to news content are not a uniquely American phenomenon. Reactions to video news content reveal a mean tendency for humans to be more aroused by and attentive to negative news. That said, there also is considerable individual-level variation around that mean, and, in some instances, country-level samples would not on their own suggest statistically significant negativity biases in responsiveness to video news content.
Note that our results are focused entirely on reactions to news content—they do not run contrary to evidence of other systematic and important cross-cultural differences in psychology and information processing, nor do they counter the claim that deep-seated negativity biases in information processing are endemic. There is, of course, a good deal of work in psychology and neurology highlighting negativity biases in information processing generally (13, 16⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓–22, 46). Our goal has been to examine the degree to which these widely accepted psychological and neurological findings are evidenced in reactions to video news content. This is because we are interested in understanding why news content looks the way it does, and we allow for the possibility that reactions to news content are conditioned by a range of contextual and cultural factors beyond fundamental (physiological and neurological) negativity biases in information processing. That said, our results find little impact of country-level context in conditioning physiological responsiveness to video news.
There are, of course, a number of limitations to this study. We opted for nearly identical stimuli across countries, which has the advantage of comparability, but also means that we capture responses to news that may be different from what is typical in each country. A survey question asking about differences between our BBC and domestic news stories suggests small to moderate observed differences for all (non-U.K.) countries in our study (SI Appendix, Fig. S4). Even so, understanding the demand and supply of news may benefit from further country-specific analysis, targeting not just the tone, but also other varying aspects of news coverage.
We also do not want to discount entirely the possibility that context matters for negativity biases. The diagnosticity, or “outlyingness” (47), of negative content may well vary across contexts; those contexts may simply not correspond to the national–cultural samples we examine here. Indeed, even one’s own personal information environment, structured by factors such as income and employment, may affect negativity biases and news consumption. All we can say definitively here is that there is no link in our data between physiological reactions to valenced news content and national contexts—political, media, or otherwise.
That said, our results demonstrate a broadly cross-national negativity bias in responsiveness to video news content, while at the time demonstrating a very high degree of individual-level variation. This individual-level variation has important implications for how we understand news production. Most importantly, it suggests that audience-seeking news media need not necessarily be drawn to predominantly negative content. Even as the average tendency may be for viewers to be more attentive to and aroused by negative content, there would appear to be a good number of individuals with rather different or perhaps more mutable preferences. One lesson of our analyses is that work on media coverage and news production should not lose sight of these individual-level differences. For those focused on the substance and nature of news content, individual-level variability in negativity biases highlights the possibility for the audience-seeking success of news coverage that is less systematically negative.
Materials and Methods
There are 6 sections included in SI Appendix. SI Appendix, section A describes the experimental protocol. SI Appendix, section B includes the script used to introduce participants to the experiment. This study was reviewed and approved by the Comité d’Éthique de la Recherche des Arts et des Sciences at the Université de Montréal. Written informed consent was sought from and provided by all participants, using text included in SI Appendix, section C. SI Appendix, section D discusses both sampling and location in each country. SI Appendix, section E describes the processing of physiological data. SI Appendix, section F briefly reviews alternative estimation strategies. For the purposes of education and research, data and replication materials are available through the Harvard Dataverse (48).
Acknowledgments
We thank conference participants and colleagues for remarks, some of which were fundamental to the study; in particular, Vin Arceneaux, Chris Dawes, Johanna Dunaway, John Hibbing, Peter John Loewen, and Daniel Rubenson. We thank research coordinators and research assistants at our own and other institutions: Saja Abu-Fani, Maxim Alyukov, Jeremy Adrian, Thiago Barbosa, Alexandre Blanchet, Danin Chen, Yolanda Clatworthy, Lou d’Angelo, Danlin Chen, Veronica Dazzan, Fatou Diop, Thomas Donovan, Marie Fly, Nicole Gileadi, Amanda Hampton, Matthias Heilke, Emma Heffernan, John Jensenius, Gonoi Ken, Saga Khaghani, Robert Lee Vidigal, Ling Liu, Sofie Lovbjerg, Eleonora Marchetti, Radhika Mitra, Alex Nevitte, Hiroki Ogawa, Vijeta Pamnani, Shang Pan, Amma Panin, Shang Pan, Andres Parado, Heidi Payter, Martina Perversi, Felipe Torres Raposo, Tea Rosic, Autumn Szczepanski, Alassane Sow, Dominic Valentino, Omer Yair, and Kirill Zhirkov. We have relied on colleagues to help facilitate experiments abroad and owe special thanks to Michael Bang Petersen, Sharon Barnhardt, Pazit Ben-Nun Bloom, Fatou Binetou Dial, Ray Duch, Vladimir Gelman, Peiran Jiao, Masaru Kohno, Neils Markwat, Johan Martinsson, Gianpietro Mazzoleni, Elin Naurin, Nicholas Sauger, Sergio Splendore, Nurit Tal-Or, Yariv Tsfati, Mathieu Turgeon, and Jack Vowles. Experiments were run by using purpose-built software by Bennett Smith, first designed for work with Stephen McAdams and Elisabeth Gidengil; and preliminary work depended on laboratory space and funding from the Center for the Study of Democratic Citizenship and from the Hebrew University Halbert Center. This work was supported by the Social Science and Humanities Council of Canada.
On April 29, 1974, President Richard M. Nixon points to the transcripts of the White House tapes after he announced during a nationally-televised speech that he would turn over the transcripts to House impeachment investigators. Photo: AP
“As a junior aide in President Richard Nixon’s White House, I saw congressional oversight and investigation command immensely greater power and respect than it does today,” Jonathan C. Rose — special assistant to Nixon from 1971 to 1973, and associate deputy attorney general from 1973 to 1975 — writes in The Atlantic.
“As evidence implicating the White House mounted, the administration displayed no inclination toward negotiation or accommodation with the Senate Watergate Committee. On March 15, 1973, Nixon issued an edict asserting executive privilege, declaring that White House aides and papers were entirely off limits to the committee. If the committee desired to press the issue, the president said, it could pursue a contempt prosecution through the courts.
“Pressed for his reaction, [Senate Watergate Committee Chairman Sam] Ervin said Nixon’s position was ‘executive poppycock, akin to the divine right of kings.’ Ervin declared that his committee had no intention of submitting to the suggested judicial delays, but would instead utilize the Senate’s sergeant at arms to arrest any recalcitrant White House aide, bring him to the bar of the Senate for trial, and ultimately compel him to testify.
“As damaging revelations continued to mount and the stigma of cover-up gathered strength, the White House floated trial balloons, offering the Watergate Committee possible closed-door interviews with White House aides. …
“By mid-April 1973, Nixon’s resistance to testimony by White House aides had collapsed, and a number of them testified. This testimony disclosed the White House taping system and confirmed the existence of tapes. Those disclosures ultimately led to Nixon’s departure from office.”
Starting on 30 September, you’ll be able to follow them on our English-language platform, where they’ll join forces with our 50,000 members to investigate some of the major themes of our time.
While The Correspondent is a relatively small start-up, we’ve done our absolute best to put together a diverse team — both in terms of the topics our correspondents will be covering and the locations they’ll be reporting from.
After launching, we’ll introduce you to some of our freelance correspondents, who will be helping us to cover an even greater variety of topics and perspectives. We’ll also be translating internationally relevant pieces by a number of our Dutch correspondents into English in order to share their work — and their unique insights — with the rest of the world.’
At 28, OluTimehin Adegbeye (1991) may be the youngest member of our team of correspondents, but her CV speaks for itself.
Timehin’s work on political power structures, gender, and social inequality has been published in multiple languages around the world. She has written for a variety of publications including This Is Africa, Africa is a Country, and BellaNaija, and her 2017 TED Talk on the future of urban development has garnered well over two million views (and counting) — it’s no wonder her Wikipedia bio describes her as “a prominent figure among Nigerian and African feminists of her generation”.
As our correspondent covering the topic of Othering, she’ll investigate the myriad ways in which people are forced into the role of “the other” — in the media, in politics, and in everyday life. Her mission: to understand what divides us, in order to discover what unites us.
If you’ve spent any time at all on Twitter, there’s a good chance you’ve encountered science journalist Eric Holthaus (1981) at some point. With nearly half a million followers, he’s one of the most influential voices in the debate surrounding one of the great challenges of our time: climate change.
A trained meteorologist, Eric combines an impressive grasp of climate science with an insatiable desire to find solutions to this problem. His work has previously appeared in The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Slate and Grist, to name just a few.
As our Climate correspondent, Eric not only aims to shed light on the causes and consequences of climate change, but he also wants to enlist your help in answering the question: what needs to change between now and 2030 in order to avert a global climate crisis?
During our very first Skype meeting, Italian journalist Irene Caselli(1981) shared with us a startling insight: when it comes to who you are, who you’ll become, and the world you’ll grow up in, virtually nothing will have as great an impact as the first 1,000 days of your life.
After spending over a decade in Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina reporting for major news outlets like the BBC, Deutsche Welle and The Washington Post, Irene will be joining our dream team here at The Correspondent.
On her beat, The First 1,000 Days, she’ll examine how our earliest years — a period that everyone experiences but no one remembers — have the power to shape not only the people we become, but also the societies we live in. From the influence of parental leave on economic inequality to the latest in brain development research to the long-term consequences of stress, Irene will explore issues that affect everyone, not just those of us with children.
During a week-long introductory session at our headquarters in Amsterdam, we asked all five of our correspondents to bring along an object with sentimental value. When it was his turn, Indian journalist Tanmoy Goswami (1983) opened his bag and drew out a small medical booklet about his dealing with depression.
This experience has proven to be an invaluable source of inspiration for his work as a journalist. Tanmoy, a self-described “mental-health nerd”, specializes in reporting on the science and economics of mental healthcare around the world.
His career path has taken him from Fortune India and Times Internetto his new home here at The Correspondent. In his role as our Sanitycorrespondent, he’ll continue his transnational quest to explore the many facets of modern mental health.
As you might guess from the title of her new book, We Need New Stories, Nesrine Malik (1977) is a journalist on a mission: to seek out new ideas for a better world.
Born in Sudan, based in London, and frequently spotted in Cairo, Nesrine has been shaped by a variety of cultures, and she’s eager to find out what we can learn from them. Nesrine made a name for herself as a writer and columnist for The Guardian (you can read her column here) and was awarded the 2019 Orwell Prize for her work on identity politics.
As our Better Politics correspondent, she’ll embody one of The Correspondent’s core principles: we don’t just cover the problem, but also what can be done about it. So get ready to join Nesrine on her mission — we can’t wait to see what kinds of ideas our members come up with!
We’ll also be introducing a number of freelance correspondents and announcing which of our Dutch pieces will be made available in English soon, so stay tuned!
Amy Walter, host of Politics w/Amy Walter on The Takeaway:
‘Dear young aspiring journalists, the reason for the outpouring of sadness and love for Cokie Roberts isn’t just b/c she was smart and really good at what she did. Her
humanity
set her apart. She didn’t sacrifice it for her job.’
The Fifth Congress had recessed in July 1798 without declaring war against France, but in the last days before adjourning it did approve other measures championed by Abigail Adams that aided in the undoing of her husband—the Alien and Sedition Acts. Worried about French agents in their midst, the lawmakers passed punitive measures changing the rules for naturalized citizenship and making it legal for the U.S. to round up and detain as “alien enemies” any men over the age of fourteen from an enemy nation after a declaration of war. Abigail heartily approved. But it was the Sedition Act that she especially cheered. It imposed fines and imprisonment for any person who “shall write, print, utter, or publish…any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress of the United States, or the President of the United States” with the intent to defame them. Finally! The hated press would be punished. To Abigail’s way of thinking, the law was long overdue. (Of course she was ready to use the press when it served her purposes, regularly sending information to relatives and asking them to get it published in friendly gazettes.) Back in April she had predicted to her sister Mary that the journalists “will provoke measures that will silence them e’er long.” Abigail kept up her drumbeat against newspapers in letter after letter, grumbling, “Nothing will have an effect until Congress pass a Sedition Bill, which I presume they will do before they rise.” Congress could not act fast enough for the First Lady: “I wish the laws of our country were competent to punish the stirrer up of sedition, the writer and printer of base and unfounded calumny.” She accused Congress of “dilly dallying” about the Alien Acts as well. If she had had her way, every newspaperman who criticized her husband would be thrown in jail, so when the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed and signed, Abigail still wasn’t satisfied. Grumping that they “were shaved and pared to almost nothing,” she told John Quincy that “weak as they are” they were still better than nothing. They would prove to be a great deal worse than nothing for John Adams’s political future, but the damage was done. Congress went home. So did Abigail and John Adams.” ― Cokie Roberts, Ladies of Liberty
Marianne Williamson: America doesn’t just have a gun crisis.
It has a culture crisis.
By Marianne Williamson
The Washington Post
Marianne Williamson is a Democratic candidate for president.
Another day, another mass shooting. We grieve for Odessa, Tex., and we grieve for America.
The aftermath of every mass shooting follows a now-routine pattern: Feverish coverage will be followed by politicians and pundits engaging in a predictable conversation about gun-safety legislation. All of which we know by now. Of course, we need universal background checks; we need to close all loopholes; we need to outlaw bump stocks; and we need to outlaw assault weapons and the bullets needed to shoot them. But politicians trotting out various forms of I-will-do-this-or-that neither gets to the heart of the matter nor breaks the logjam that has made this horrific and uniquely American problem so intractable.
It is not just our gun policy but our politics that fails to free us of this insanity. Until we override the nefarious influence of money on our politics, it will not be possible to break the National Rifle Association’s chokehold on our society. It is not the will nor safety of the people but the profits of gun manufacturers that is given primacy in our gun policies. Legislation that establishes public funding for federal campaigns should be the battle cry of our generation.
But even then, Americans will have to look deeper for the causal layers of our epidemic of violence. We will have to look beyond politics. We will have to look at ourselves.
As individuals, Americans are not a violent people, but it is undeniable that we’re a violent culture. Regular mass shootings are not societally normal. And until we face this, the situation will not fundamentally improve.
Most politicians stick to a discussion of symptoms only. Politics should be the conduit for our most expanded conversation about societal issues, not the most superficial one. Conventional politics does not lend itself to a discussion of the deeper issues that plague us. Yet go deeper we must.
America does not just have a gun crisis; it has a cultural crisis. America will not stop experiencing the effects of gun violence until we’re ready to face the many ways that our culture is riddled with violence.
Our environmental policies are violent toward the Earth. Our criminal justice system is violent toward people of color. Our economic system is violent toward the poor. Our entertainment media is violent toward women. Our video games are violent in their effect on the minds of children. Our military is violent in ways and places where it doesn’t have to be.
Our media is violent in its knee-jerk shaming and blaming for the sake of a better click rate.
Our hearts are violent as we abandon each other constantly, breeding desperation and insanity. And our government is indirectly and directly violent in the countless ways it uses its power to help those who do not need help and to withhold support from those who do.
The darker truth that Americans must face now is this: Our society is not just steeped in violence; we are hooked on violence. And in area after area, there are those who make billions of dollars on deepening the hook. Until we see that, we will just have more violence. Our minds must awaken so we can see all this. Our hearts must awaken so we can change all this. And our politics must change so we can discuss all this.
Though gun-safety legislation should be fervently pursued, a political establishment so steeped in the ways of brute force is hardly equipped to be the purveyor of a solution to the problem of violence in this country. With a nearly $740 billion military budget but only $40 billion proposed for the State Department budget, our outsize commitment to brute force and ever-withering commitment to soul force is obvious. With the Air Force seeking 100 stealth B-21 Raiders, each with a price tag of $550 million and each equipped to carry both nuclear and conventional weapons, while 12.5 million children in the United States live in food-insecure homes — the idea of politicians who allow this to happen being the ones who are going to save us from the epidemic of violence in America is almost laughable.
We will not break free of dysfunctional realities until we are willing to embrace more functional ones. I propose a U.S. Department of Peace to coordinate and harness the powers of conflict resolution; restorative justice; violence prevention; trauma-informed education; mindfulness in the schools; child and family wrap-around services; social and emotional learning; and a world-class peace academy to train and to deploy thousands of peace-builders, plus national conferences and a presidential task force for peace creation. We will make every effort to promote a culture of peace both at home and abroad. We will address the root causes, not just the symptoms of violence in America. And in time, we will transform our culture from one of conflict to one of peace.
Nothing is going to fundamentally change until enough of us are willing to take a stand for fundamental change. And no change could be more fundamental than for the United States to transform from a culture of violence to a culture of peace. From the frequency of attack to the frequency of forgiveness. From a land of fear to a land of love.
The occupier of the Oval Office, DT’s campaign and key allies plan to make allegations of bias by social media platforms a core part of their 2020 strategy, officials tell me.
Look for ads, speeches and sustained attacks on Facebook and Twitter in particular, the sources say.
The irony: The social platforms are created and staffed largely by liberals — but often used most effectively in politics by conservatives, the data shows.
Why it matters: DT successfully turned the vast majority of his supporters against traditional media, and hopes to do the same against the social media companies.
Republicans’ internal data shows it stirs up the base like few other topics.
“In the same way we’ve seen trust in legacy media organizations deteriorate over the past year, there are similarities with social media companies,” a top Republican operative involved in the effort told me.
Between the lines: The charges of overt bias by social media platforms are way overblown, several studies have found. But, if the exaggerated claims stick, it could increase the chances of regulatory action by Republicans.
“People feel they’re being manipulated, whether it’s by what they’re being shown in their feeds, or actions the companies have taken against conservatives,” the operative said.
“It’s easy for people to understand how these giant corporations could influence them and direct them toward a certain favored candidate.”
How tech execs see it: They know the escalation is coming, so they are cranking up outreach to leading conservatives and trying to push hard on data showing that conservative voices often outperform liberal ones.
Reality check, from Axios chief tech correspondent Ina Fried: What is real is that most of the platforms have policies against bias that some conservative figures have run afoul of.
Managing editor Scott Rosenberg notes that Twitter is Trump’s megaphone, while Facebook is often his favorite place to run ads.
What’s next: By the time 2020 is over, trust in all sources of information will be low, and perhaps unrecoverable.
A nation without shared truth will be hard-to-impossible to govern.
MIT Management/Sloan Schools
A 4-step plan for fighting social media manipulation in elections
by Meredith Somers
Social media manipulation of voters shows no sign of abating. Two professors propose a new research agenda to fight back.
Since the 2016 presidential election, there’s been no shortage of reports about false news being shared across social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter — and with the 2020 vote only a year away, the question is not when will the misinformation strike, but how can we guard against it?
MIT professor of IT and marketing Sinan Aral and associate professor of marketing Dean Eckles propose a four-step process for researchers to measure and analyze social media manipulation, and to turn that data into a defense against future manipulation.“Without an organized research agenda that informs policy, democracies will remain vulnerable to foreign and domestic attacks,” the professors write in an article for the August 30 edition of Science magazine.
1.
Catalogue exposures to manipulation
To defend against manipulation, Aral and Eckles write, researchers need to index a variety of social media information:
What texts, images, and video messages were advertised?
What type of advertisement was used (organically posted, advertised, or “boosted” through paid promotion)?
What social platforms were these texts, images, and video messages appearing on?
When and how were they shared and re-shared by users (in this case, voters)?
2.
Combine exposure and voting behavior datasets
In the past, public voting records and social media accounts were compared using data like self-reported profile information. But this type of comparison can be improved by using location data already being collected by social media companies, the researchers write.
This could be something like matching voter registration with home addresses based on mobile location information — the same data used for marketing purposes by social media companies.
This could be something like matching voter registration with home addresses based on mobile location information — the same data used for marketing purposes by social media companies.
One challenge of studying voter behavior, Aral and Eckles write, is that the results aren’t always accurate enough to answer questions.
Social media companies already run A/B and algorithm tests, Aral and Eckles write. The same tests could be used to measure exposure effects.
3.
Calculate consequences of voting behavior changes
Aral and Eckles write that measures like predicted voter behavior — with or without exposure to misinformation — should be combined with data like geographic and demographic characteristics for a particular election. This would help with vote total estimates in a particular area.
4.
Calculate consequences of voting behavior changes
Aral and Eckles write that measures like predicted voter behavior — with or without exposure to misinformation — should be combined with data like geographic and demographic characteristics for a particular election. This would help with vote total estimates in a particular area.
[Founded as Sigma Delta Chi at DePauw University in 1909]
“The real crisis of campus speech lies elsewhere—in the erosion of student newspapers…. Today, these outlets are imperiled by the same economic forces that have hollowed out local newspapers from coast to coast.”
Bureaucrats Put the Squeeze on College Newspapers
The corporatization of higher education has rendered a once-indispensable part of student life irrelevant, right when it’s needed the most.
In this this, Sunday, April 22, 2018 photo, while pushing up against a deadline, students collaborate to put out the upcoming edition of the Washington Square News, New York University’s independent, student-run, newspaper in New York. College journalists are speaking up for themselves in a coordinated campaign to combat some of the same forces that have battered newspapers across the country. More than 100 college newsrooms across the U.S., including the Washington Square News, are using social media campaigns, public awareness events and editorials Wednesday, April 25 to call attention to the important roles they play. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)
The Atlantic
August 23, 2019
When professional pundits talk about dangers to free expression on campus, they typically refer to a handful of incidents in which colleges have revoked invitations for controversial speakers. This, however, is a fringe issue, confined to a small number of universities. The real crisis of campus speech lies elsewhere—in the erosion of student newspapers. These once-stalwart publications have long served as consistent checks against administrative malfeasance, common forums for campus debate, and training grounds for future professional journalists. Today, these outlets are imperiled by the same economic forces that have hollowed out local newspapers from coast to coast. And unlike their professional peers, student journalists face an added barrier: The kind of bureaucratic interference Liebson met at Stony Brook is becoming the norm for student journalists.
Few school newspapers are financially independent from the institutions they cover, says Chris Evans, president of the College Media Association. As a result, college administrators hold powerful leverage over student journalists and their faculty advisers. The need for aggressive student news organizations is as acute as ever. But image-obsessed administrators are hastening the demise of these once-formidable campus watchdogs.
The AAUP report notes a “growing tendency” for administrations to conduct important business matters “behind closed doors.” Administrators slow-roll student journalists’ requests for public records. At some schools, newspaper advisers have been instructed to conduct “prior review” of student articles before publication, a precaution intended to ensure that anything that could gin up bad publicity never makes it to print.
The decline of college newspapers has taken place against the backdrop of a decades-old power shift in the American university. As the Johns Hopkins University professor Benjamin Ginsberg chronicles in his 2011 book, The Fall of the Faculty, administrative bureaucracies at American universities have grown much faster than the professoriate, a trend that Ginsberg decries.
“University administrators are no different than any other corporate executives or heads of government agencies,” Ginsberg said in an interview. “They’re engaged in constant spin designed to hide any shortcomings that they or their institution might have.”
Nothing is more empty and more dead, nothing is more insultingly insincere and destructive than the vapid grins on the billboards and the moronic beatitudes in the magazines, which assure us that we are all in bliss right now.
[AXIOS]
News Tab
Facebook executivestell me they’re hiring seasoned journalists to help curate a forthcoming “News Tab” that they hope will change how millions get news.
Why it matters: News Tab is an effort by Facebook to restore the sanity and credibility that’s lost in the chaos of our main feeds.
Facebook will personalize the News Tab, so it will need a massive amount of content, from the New York Jets to gardening.
News Tab, a personal passion of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is also an effort by Facebook to develop a healthier relationship with publishers, many of whom have had their business models destroyed by social platforms.
Facebook will pay dozens of publishers to license content for News Tab, and news from many more will be included.
The Wall Street Journalreported that the largest partners will be paid millions of dollars a year.
News Tab will try to give credit to the outlet that broke a story, rather than an aggregator.
Campbell Brown, Facebook’s head of news partnerships, said: “Our goal with the News tab is to provide a personalized, highly relevant experience … The majority of stories people will see will appear in the tab via algorithmic selection.”
A small team of journalists will pick stories for a Top News section.
Last year, Facebook killed Trending Topics, populated by contractors, after being accused of bias.
“We learned a lot from Trending,” a Facebook executive told me. “This is a completely different product.”
What’s next: A News Tab test for 200,000 users will begin in October, with a rollout to all U.S. users early next year.
Profit manipulation:
‘The Wall Street Journal reported that the largest partners will be paid millions of dollars a year.’
Gatekeeper manipulation:
‘A small team of journalists will pick stories for a Top News section.’
As News Deserts Encroach, One City Looks At A New Way To Fund Local Journalism
By Rae Ellen Bichell
Originally published on August 5, 2019 5:15 pm
Boise State Public Radio
Many parts of the Mountain West are news deserts — and it’s getting worse. More than 20 counties in our region have no local newspaper. The ones that are left are struggling. And research suggests news deserts contribute to low voter turnoutand increasing partisanship.
Scott Converse could feel the desert closing in on his community. His local newspaper in Longmont, Colorado had just announced it was closing its offices and moving to Boulder.
“All of Longmont’s news left Longmont, effectively,” says Converse. “Honestly, it just P.O.’d me.”
So, he took action. He and another Longmont resident started their own publication — the Longmont Observer. From the get-go, though, funding was a problem. It’s run by a small team of reporters and editors, all of them volunteers. Converse jokes their editor-in-chief is doing really well.
“She has gotten at least a dozen raises from zero, to two times zero, to four times zero to eight times zero,” he says. “We’re proof that news is not profitable. We get enough donations to pay our rent and our Internet here and that’s it. That’s literally it.”
“That’s how dictators get started,” reads a quote warning of the perils of a quashed press. It’s one of many flanking the Longmont Observer office where Scott Converse works.
So lately, Converse has been looking for new ideas for how to fund local journalism. That’s when he came across an article called, “Journalism is a public service. Why don’t we fund it like one?”
Simon Galperin wrote the piece. He’s the founding director of a nonprofit called the Community Information Cooperative, based in New Jersey.
“People feel it in a visceral way when they don’t have the sort of information they need to get about their day,” says Galperin. He says we need a way to publicly fund news that’s independent from the local government, and he says the way to do this is through a common technique — starting something called a special improvement district. These already exist in communities across the country for a bunch of purposes: parks, sewers, airports, highways.
“Fire safety, mosquito abatement,” Galperin adds. “So, it kind of just made sense to say, ‘Okay, let’s create one for local news and information.’”
Technically, special districts are their own independent government units. They have their own funding, separate from the city budget, and their own governing board.
“The info district idea is an opportunity for people to do this themselves without relying on benevolent billionaires or wealth to come in and prop up a news organization,” he says. “This is a way for the public to have a say in how their local news and information needs are met.”
Galperin, who just published a how-to guide on starting a special district, says funding through a special district might allow a community to spread information in a bunch of different ways, including by hiring journalists — maybe even full newsrooms. Back in Longmont, that idea was a light bulb moment for Scott Converse.
“I thought, ‘That’s brilliant. What a great idea,’” he says.
He learned that there’s a type of special district that’s actually really common in Colorado. They’re for libraries. And what are libraries, he says, if not non-partisan, non-profit sources of trusted information chock full of some of the nation’s best information ninjas?
“Librarians are badasses. You do not mess with the librarian. If you try to remove a book from a library, you almost have to kill a librarian. It’s not easy. And that’s because they believe in the freedom of information,” says Converse. “They have more legal protections than just about any other entity on the planet for protecting information.”
They’re also non-partisan, nonprofit and community-driven, he adds. “What better place to put a newsroom?”
Converse dreams of the library housing not just a staff of local journalists, but also tools for citizen journalists to cover their community, like a makerspace for news.
“Never shushed anyone in a library in my life, don’t plan to start,” says Longmont Library director Nancy Kerr, as she walks through the lobby on a weekday morning. The library is gently bustling with residents looking through books on display and kids picking up prizes for summer reading.
“You expect libraries now [to] have at least a low hum of conversation going on. It’s not your parents’ or grandparents’ library,” she says.
The city is doing a feasibility study right now about how to better fund the Longmont library, including the possibility of starting a special district. Kerr says they’re asking stakeholders “a sea of questions” about the future of the library, and its role in creating local news content is among them.
“We really believe in people’s rights to read anything and everything and support that,” she says, so she was intrigued to hear the idea Scott Converse had hit on.
Libraries, Kerr says, are changing. If you haven’t been to one in a while, take a look. You might be surprised. This library has an old card catalogue full of seeds for people to plant in their gardens. Kerr says librarians help people with resumes and job applications all the time. And they just started a library of things, where people can check out everything from ukeles and telescopes to wifi hotspots.
“We’re always looking at new opportunities to connect people with information.” she says. “There have been some arguments out there that libraries are not content creators, but more and more libraries are content creators.”
In the most literal sense of content creation, a growing number of libraries host equipment for physically producing new material, like 3-D printers and machineryfor self-publishing actual books. In a broader sense, Kerr adds, they’re already starting to share more characteristics with news organizations — like the libraries that have podcasting equipment and green screens available, or even the ones with plans to house a public TV channel in the same building.
“Nothing is an impossibility for libraries,” says Kerr. “I can’t see immediately that libraries would necessarily be able to do this on their own and be the producer — the creator — of the news. But as far as disseminating news from a library, I don’t see that as a strange thing. That’s what we do.”
Scott Converse says he’s getting some pushback on the idea of a government funded news service. But he’s got an answer for that.
“It’s not government-run news. It’s news run by the people, for the people and funded by the people,” he says, just like the BBC in the U.K., CBC in Canada or, at least in part, public radio here.
Still, there are skeptics. Sure, a library could spread information about local events and such, but what would it mean for library-affiliated journalists to take on local investigations? That’s one of the questions Melissa Milios Davis is mulling.
“I think there’s a lot of people who wonder if that would erode the trust of the library for them to be in that role,” says Davis, who is a Longmont resident, a former journalist and who works for a Colorado organization called the Gates Family Foundation (different from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation). “I think that’s a real, valid concern.”
As a member of the executive committee of a group called the Colorado Media Project, she’s leading a public policy study due out in the fall on what role public funding could play in sustaining local public-interest journalism.
“We’re looking at: What is the role of philanthropy? What’s the role of individuals? And what’s the role — potentially — of local governments in supporting the information needs of communities?” she says. “I think the conundrum right now as we’re looking for different revenue sources is to really figure out where are those bright lines between what government sources could be good and better used for, in terms of informing communities, and then other things that are really the realm of independent journalism.”
The Longmont Times-Call has run a number of articles and opinion pieces criticizing the idea that the library could play a role in disseminating local news, likening it to “a government-owned press,” “a tool of dictatorships” and quoting people on issues of trust and the importance of transparent funding.
Ironically, that paper is one of many that are backed by a New York-based hedge fund, Alden Global Capital, which is not only opaque about its investors but has also shown itself to be hostile to local news.
“We’re just naturally a cynical nation about big government — about government of any kind,” says Julie Reynolds, a freelance journalist who’s investigating Alden Global Capital. But, she says, “I don’t think people understand very much about where their news comes from or how it gets produced or how it gets funded.”
The hedge fund backs the MediaNews Group, previously known as Digital First Media. According to its website, it currently owns about 100 local publications, 19 of them in Colorado, including the Longmont Times-Call and the Denver Post. Reynolds says it took her 3 years to trace what funds the newspapers were held under.
“Like most hedge funds, Alden Global Capital is a labyrinth of real estate, LLCs, small corporations, other funds, most of them based in tax secrecy havens in the Cayman Islands, where they pay lower taxes and there’s also almost no disclosure,” Reynolds says. “So, you don’t know who owns or controls those funds. We don’t actually know who ultimately is invested in them. Are there overseas actors involved in our media? We don’t really know.”
As she writes in Newsweek, Reynolds used to work at a California paper that was “stripped for parts” by Alden Global Capital. (Court records show the hedge fund used profit from such publications to buy unrelated businesses, like a pharmacy chain called Fred’s).
Reynolds recently started a new online publication to revegetate her county’s news desert. It runs on philanthropy and reader contributions to stay afloat. She says the special district idea that Longmont is looking into stands out.
“I can see some issues and concerns, but there’s always issues and concerns about the independence of the media,” says Reynolds. “I think it’s a fascinating idea.”
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUER in Salt Lake City, KUNR in Nevada and KRCC and KUNC in Colorado.
“The power in this image speaks to the current reality in the U.S. and around the world of the plight of immigrants,” said the Rev. Kenny Irby, an independent visual consultant with more than 40 years of experience in journalism and education. “It’s an authentic truth that needs to be part of the narrative.” -NPR/Emily Bogle
‘Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, frustrated because the family from El Salvador was unable to present themselves to U.S. authorities and request asylum, swam across the river on Sunday with his daughter, Valeria.
He set her on the U.S. bank of the river in Brownsville, Texas, and started back for his wife in Matamoros, Mexico. But seeing him move away, the girl threw herself into the waters. Martínez returned and was able to grab Valeria, but the current swept them both away.’
Tragically, necessarily, indelible.
In memoriam. Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and Valeria.
♡
‘Your sweet memory comes on the evening wind
I sleep and dream of holding you in my arms again
The lights of Brownsville, across the river shine
A shout rings out and into the silty red river I dive
Meet me on the Matamoros
Meet me on the Matamoros
Meet me on the Matamoros banks’
~
by Kelly McBride/Ethics & Trust
The shocking image joins a small portfolio of iconic photographs that magnify the suffering of children caught in geopolitical chaos, including Kevin Carter’s 1993 picture of a starving Sudanese child collapsed outside a feeding center during a widespread famine, Nick Ut’s 1972 picture of a naked girl burned by napalm in Vietnam, and Nilufer Demir’s 2015 picture of 4-year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi washed ashore in Turkey.
These photographs have the power to galvanize the public, much the way that David Jackson’s picture of Emmett Till’s open casket did in 1955.
No matter what your political views on immigration are, the fact that so many children are suffering because of decisions made by the U.S. government is something every American should take note of.
NPR
The Story Behind That Photo Of A Father And Daughter On The Banks Of The Rio Grande
‘NPR’s Ari Shapiro speaks with Associated Press reporter Christopher Sherman about the Salvadoran family who lost their lives trying to cross the Rio Grande.’