Harvard Study—US RW media is as batshit as you think

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Harvard Study—US RW media is as batshit as you think

Post by Seabass » Fri Nov 16, 2018 8:35 am

Yeah, I know... "no shit", "water is wet", and "thank you Captain Obvious". Still, it's interesting to see a three year Harvard study confirm it.

‘Network Propaganda’ takes a closer look at media and American politics
Based on a three-year study of the media ecosystem surrounding the 2016 presidential election, a new book from the Berkman Klein Center examines the data in depth
https://today.law.harvard.edu/network-p ... -politics/
A major contribution of the book is what the researchers deem an “asymmetric polarization” model that stems from their research on partisan media ecosystems. The model, created with data from the media sources most-cited during and after the election period, shows that left-wing media outlets are more closely aligned with centrist media outlets, though the right-wing media sources are much more skewed and “are operating in their own media world,” Roberts explained. The researchers found that this pattern was evident during the election and that it was even more pronounced during the first year of the Trump presidency.
“There are clearly two sides, and those two sides are not the same. The right is more insular; it’s more extreme; it’s more partisan,” Faris said of their findings. “That’s not a subjective opinion; that’s an empirical observation. And much of what we try to do in this book is to document that and understand what it means and how it’s reflected in different behavior.”
full article: https://today.law.harvard.edu/network-p ... -politics/
How the 'propaganda feedback loop' of right-wing media keeps more than a quarter of Americans siloed
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la ... story.html
Nothing came out more clearly than that the right wing was unique, distinct, insular, and that left media and center left and center media were all part of the same ecosystem -- all the way from the editorially conservative Wall Street Journal to genuine left media -- occupy the single media ecosystem where sometimes some sides definitely were pushing political perspectives, but they had to be anchored in reality, because they were part of a media ecosystem where both the producers and the consumers were paying attention to a broad range of media that were committed to some basis in fact, and to having some level of accountability and responsibility for the truthfulness of what was being said.
And the critical difference is not that there aren't crazy clickbait sites on Facebook that try to get people who have left-wing orientations to click on them. They exist.

But those stories don't survive as long, because they are part of an ecosystem that says, “Stop. This story is nonsense.”

Whereas what happens on the right is that no matter how crazy the story, there will be some major media with high impact -- whether it's [Sean] Hannity on Fox News, whether it's Limbaugh, whether it's Breitbart -- that will pick up the story, reframe it, tell it again, identify it as true, and then everyone will start circulating it.

So it’s a completely different dynamic on the right than on the left.

And it's that dynamic that allowed some of the Russian propaganda to propagate. It’s that dynamic that allowed the fake news clickbait providers to make a lot more money on the right than on the left.

It’s the fact that the people who are in there really have lost an anchor in reality that has made them so susceptible to propaganda, both foreign and domestic.
To the best we can tell from surveys, it looks like it's about half to 60% of Republicans -- which is to say somewhere between 25% and 35%, or between a quarter and a third of the American population in general -- exists in cult-like isolation in a right-wing media ecosystem.
And it's that difference: not the supply of crazy stories; they exist on the left and the right, not even the excitement of people on the left and the right to share on Facebook the craziest story. It’s that dynamic of the top media repeating, confirming, accrediting and recycling, that made the difference.

To the point that by December of 2016, 46% of Trump voters told a YouGov poll that they believed there was some truth in the Clinton pedophilia story.

That's not just crazy Facebook on the margins. That can only happen through a committed propagandist effort by the most viewed and the most trusted form of media on the right, which is Fox News.
full article: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la ... story.html
"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." —Voltaire
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Re: Harvard Study—US RW media is as batshit as you think

Post by Scot Dutchy » Fri Nov 16, 2018 11:19 am

We have two members that prove that exactly.
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Re: Harvard Study—US RW media is as batshit as you think

Post by L'Emmerdeur » Sun Nov 18, 2018 7:34 pm

Unless things have changed, the Los Angeles Times is geoblocked in Europe. As an alternative, here is a link to the podcast episode that the piece in the Los Angeles Times is essentially a transcript of, if anybody cares to listen to it.

Further, there is also an article about the book on the Open Society site with a link to the book itself, which is open access.

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Re: Harvard Study—US RW media is as batshit as you think

Post by pErvinalia » Sun Nov 18, 2018 9:35 pm

Harvard is full of Marxists.
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Re: Harvard Study—US RW media is as batshit as you think

Post by Joe » Sun Nov 18, 2018 10:20 pm

Didn't George W. Bush get his Marxist Bachelor of Arts there?
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Re: Harvard Study—US RW media is as batshit as you think

Post by L'Emmerdeur » Sun Nov 18, 2018 11:01 pm

It's unsurprising that the finding of approximately 1/3 of the American public getting their news and having their views shaped by a right-wing media environment matches the number of hard-core Trump supporters. In polls his approval rating never falls below about 35%.

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Re: Harvard Study—US RW media is as batshit as you think

Post by Seabass » Sat Nov 24, 2018 9:58 pm

"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." —Voltaire
"They want to take away your hamburgers. This is what Stalin dreamt about but never achieved." —Sebastian Gorka

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Re: Harvard Study—US RW media is as batshit as you think

Post by Seabass » Mon Jan 14, 2019 4:02 am

A different study, somewhat related...

Elderly, conservatives shared more Facebook fakery in 2016
https://apnews.com/c2e7517984a64c6a922e84d550e1e041
People over 65 and ultra conservatives shared about seven times more fake information masquerading as news on the social media site than younger adults, moderates and super liberals during the 2016 election season, a new study finds.

The first major study to look at who is sharing links from debunked sites finds that not many people are doing it. On average only 8.5 percent of those studied — about 1 person out of 12 — shared false information during the 2016 campaign, according to the study in Wednesday’s journal Science Advances . But those doing it tend to be older and more conservative.
When other demographic factors and overall posting tendencies are factored in, the average person older than 65 shared seven times more false information than those between 18 and 29. The seniors shared more than twice as many fake stories as people between 45 and 64 and more than three times that of people in the 30- to 44-year-old range, said lead study author Andrew Guess, a politics professor at Princeton.

The simplest theory for why older people share more false information is a lack of “digital literacy,” said study co-author Joshua Tucker, also co-director of the NYU social media political lab. Senior citizens may not tell truth from lies on social networks as easily as others, the researchers said.
When other demographics and posting practices are factored in, people who called themselves very conservative shared the most false information, a bit more than those who identify themselves as conservative. The very conservatives shared misinformation 6.8 times more often than the very liberals and 6.7 times more than moderates. People who called themselves liberals essentially shared no fake stories, Guess said.

Nagler said he was not surprised that conservatives in 2016 shared more fake information, but he and his colleagues said that does not necessarily mean that conservatives are by nature more gullible when it comes to false stories. It could simply reflect that there was much more pro-Trump and anti-Clinton false information in circulation in 2016 that it drove the numbers for sharing, they said.

However, Baum said in an email that conservatives post more false information because they tend to be more extreme, with less ideological variation than their liberal counterparts and they take their lead from President Trump, who “advocates, supports, shares and produces fake news/misinformation on a regular basis.”

The researchers looked at differences in gender, race and income but could not find any statistically significant differences in sharing of false information.
"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." —Voltaire
"They want to take away your hamburgers. This is what Stalin dreamt about but never achieved." —Sebastian Gorka

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Re: Harvard Study—US RW media is as batshit as you think

Post by JimC » Mon Jan 14, 2019 4:03 am

Ageist!

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Re: Harvard Study—US RW media is as batshit as you think

Post by Seabass » Mon Jan 14, 2019 4:07 am

Let me know if you need help with the google machine, Jim. :hehe:
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Re: Harvard Study—US RW media is as batshit as you think

Post by Brian Peacock » Mon Jan 14, 2019 6:03 am

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Re: Harvard Study—US RW media is as batshit as you think

Post by Seabass » Fri Jul 26, 2019 6:59 pm

What I’ve Learned From Collecting Stories of People Whose Loved Ones Were Transformed by Fox News
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/ ... -news.html

It was somewhere around the 100th response that my brain turned to mush.

Last week, I devoted an installment of my newsletter Welcome to Hell World to a dozen stories from people who, like me, had close relationships that had been strained or ruined by family members who’d become obsessed with Fox News.

No matter where the stories came from they all featured a few familiar beats: A loved one seemed to have changed over time. Maybe that person was already somewhat conservative to start. Maybe they were apolitical. But at one point or another, they sat down in front of Fox News, found some kind of deep, addictive comfort in the anger and paranoia, and became a different person — someone difficult, if not impossible, to spend time with. The fallout led to failed marriages and estranged parental relationships. For at least one person, it marks the final memory he’ll ever have of his father: “When I found my dad dead in his armchair, fucking Fox News was on the TV,” this reader told me. “It’s likely the last thing he saw. I hate what that channel and conservative talk radio did to my funny, compassionate dad. He spent the last years of his life increasingly angry, bigoted, and paranoid.”

Something about the piece struck a chord. It had gone viral, and wave after wave of frustrated and saddened Fox News orphans began to commiserate with me and with each other on Twitter and in my messages. Others wrote of similar phenomenon in Australia with the television channel Sky or in the U.K. with the tabloid Daily Mail. I heard from more than a hundred people who felt like they could relate to what they all seemed to think of as a kind of ideological brain poisoning. They chose Fox News over their family, people told me. They chose Fox News over me.

There was the one reader who wrote of his Puerto Rican uncle becoming a Fox News junkie, and turning on his own people, as he put it, in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. “He was literally sitting in the dark and still defending Trump,” he said, which seemed a metaphor almost too on the nose. Hearing stories like that over and over again all weekend wasn’t pretty.

As some critics of the piece pointed out, it seems a bit silly, if not stupid, to scapegoat a cable-news network for our family members’ interpersonal shortcomings. I get that. I don’t have an empirical way to assign blame or figure out causality. Maybe Fox News causes some people to turn toward hard-right conservatism; maybe it’s merely a precipitating factor; maybe it’s neither, and for most people, change in political attitudes came from elsewhere. In requesting stories about family members and Fox News, I wasn’t undertaking a scientific experiment — merely seeking to see if there are other people who had the same experiences I had, and felt the same way I did.

What I learned is that there are. Whatever the actual direction of causality, there are many, many Americans who blame Fox News for changes in their loved ones, and many people out there who feel as though their friends and family members have been lost to a 24/7 stream of right-wing propaganda.

continued: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/ ... -news.html
"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." —Voltaire
"They want to take away your hamburgers. This is what Stalin dreamt about but never achieved." —Sebastian Gorka

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