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Manner of Speaking
Joined: 09 Jan 2003
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 Posted: Sat Jul 29, 2006 3:59 pm Post subject: Two Views of the Same News Find Opposite Bias |
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Two Views of the Same News Find Opposite Biases
By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 24, 2006; Page A02
You could be forgiven for thinking the television images in the experiment were from 2006. They were really from 1982: Israeli forces were clashing with Arab militants in Lebanon. The world was watching, charges were flying, and the air was thick with grievance, hurt and outrage.
There was only one thing on which pro-Israeli and pro-Arab audiences agreed. Both were certain that media coverage in the United States was hopelessly biased in favor of the other side.
The endlessly recursive conflict in the Middle East provides any number of instructive morals about human nature, but it also offers a psychological window into the world of partisan behavior. Israel's 1982 war in Lebanon sparked some of the earliest experiments into why people reach dramatically different conclusions about the same events.
The results say a lot about partisan behavior in general -- why Republicans and Democrats love to hate each other, for example, or why Coke and Pepsi fans clash. Sadly, the results also say a lot about the newest conflicts between Israel and its enemies in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, and why news organizations are being besieged with angry complaints from both sides.
Partisans, it turns out, don't just arrive at different conclusions; they see entirely different worlds . In one especially telling experiment, researchers showed 144 observers six television news segments about Israel's 1982 war with Lebanon.
Pro-Arab viewers heard 42 references that painted Israel in a positive light and 26 references that painted Israel unfavorably.
Pro-Israeli viewers, who watched the very same clips, spotted 16 references that painted Israel positively and 57 references that painted Israel negatively.
Both groups were certain they were right and that the other side didn't know what it was talking about.
The tendency to see bias in the news -- now the raison d'etre of much of the blogosphere -- is such a reliable indicator of partisan thinking that researchers coined a term, "hostile media effect," to describe the sincere belief among partisans that news reports are painting them in the worst possible light.
Were pro-Israeli and pro-Arab viewers who were especially knowledgeable about the conflict immune from such distortions? Amazingly, it turned out to be exactly the opposite, Stanford psychologist Lee D. Ross said. The best-informed partisans were the most likely to see bias against their side.
Ross thinks this is because partisans often feel the news lacks context. Instead of just showing a missile killing civilians, in other words, partisans on both sides want the news to explain the history of events that prompted -- and could have justified -- the missile. The more knowledgeable people are, the more context they find missing.
Even more curious, the hostile media effect seems to apply only to news sources that strive for balance. News reports from obviously biased sources usually draw fewer charges of bias. Partisans, it turns out, find it easier to countenance obvious propaganda than news accounts that explore both sides.
"If I think the world is black, and you think the world is white, and someone comes along and says it is gray, we will both think that person is biased," Ross said.
The experiment, of course, did not address whether news reports were in fact biased -- who would decide? -- or how the media ought to cover conflicts. Partisans argue that assigning equal weight to both sides is wrong when one side (theirs) is right. In any event, psychologists such as Ross are less interested in rating the news or in which side is right than in the curiosities of human perception: Why are partisans invariably blind to how news coverage might help their side?
If someone says several nice things about you and one derogatory thing, what sticks in your mind? People who are deeply invested in one side are quicker to spot and remember aspects of the news that hurt than they are to see aspects that help, said Richard Perloff, a Cleveland State University political communication researcher.
Perloff elicited the same clashing perceptions of bias from pro-Israeli and pro-Arab audiences when he showed them news clips with equal amounts of violence.
Ross and Perloff both found that what partisans worry about the most is the impact of the news on neutral observers. But the data suggest such worry is misplaced. Neutral observers are better than partisans at seeing flaws and virtues on both sides. Partisans, it turns out, are particularly susceptible to the general human belief that other people are susceptible to propaganda.
"When you are persuaded by something, you don't think it is propaganda," Ross said. "Israelis know they see the world the way they do because they are Israelis, and Arabs, too. The difference is people think in their case, their special identities are a source of enlightenment, whereas other people's source of enlightenment is a source of bias."
Two Views of the Same News Find Opposite Bias: Washington Post |
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Milwaukiedave
Joined: 02 Oct 2004
Location: Goseong
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| Posted: Sat Jul 29, 2006 8:21 pm Post subject: |
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| Good article MOS, it definately is a war not only in terms of bombs, but words as well. Both sides seem determined to try to one up each other with the US media. |
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mithridates
Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency
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| Posted: Sat Jul 29, 2006 8:52 pm Post subject: |
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Yeah, that was pretty interesting. This in particular sounds like a few posters here:
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Were pro-Israeli and pro-Arab viewers who were especially knowledgeable about the conflict immune from such distortions? Amazingly, it turned out to be exactly the opposite, Stanford psychologist Lee D. Ross said. The best-informed partisans were the most likely to see bias against their side.
Ross thinks this is because partisans often feel the news lacks context. Instead of just showing a missile killing civilians, in other words, partisans on both sides want the news to explain the history of events that prompted -- and could have justified -- the missile. The more knowledgeable people are, the more context they find missing. |
I can think of some people here that are knowledgable but still immune to distortions, like On The Other Hand and Bucheon Bum for example. I find that people who seem to post like they're on a kind of crusade to be the worst. They're usually pretty obvious by their "this whole board/country/world is biased against what I know to be right, I don't expect you to listen anyway but blah blah blah" schtick. |
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Milwaukiedave
Joined: 02 Oct 2004
Location: Goseong
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| Posted: Sat Jul 29, 2006 10:50 pm Post subject: |
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Mirth,
My problem is that I really don't feel like to know enough to argue one way or the other. So even though I read about the conflict in the Middle East in the paper, I am kind of overwhelmed by those on both sides arguing about this. |
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Manner of Speaking
Joined: 09 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Sun Jul 30, 2006 3:35 am Post subject: |
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Milwaukiedave and Mithridates,
Glad you guys liked it; I thought it was interesting and topical, and also related to a thread Gopher started a couple of days ago about Athenian democracy.
I found it at this website. Sometimes I think if I had a million bucks, I'd go back to school and get a degree in Anthropology:
Anthropology in the News (Texas A & M University). |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Sun Jul 30, 2006 1:37 pm Post subject: |
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MOS, you do not need $1 million to go back to school and get a doctorate, either in anthro or medical history, which, I think, are you primary interests.
In any case, the article you post does continue the discussion we had going concerning problems with the information and analysis the news media presents us with everyday.
I think the above author, in the article you reprint here, is primarily talking about politicization and polarization, something that has plagued not only the news media, but professional academics for quite a while.
If you have time, I recommend checking out Peter Novick's That Noble Dream: the "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). After the two World Wars, objectivity, the holy grail of the American historical profession, lost ground to the relativist critique and was then more or less obliterated by postmodernism where, as Novick shows us, "comity collapsed," and "every group became its own historian."
One former U.S. ambassador, who was very much under fire in his time for his association in the Chilean coup d'etat, has called this "advocacy journalism and scholarship."
I do not believe that pure objectivity is possible. Only a supernatural being could be objective. But we can strive for professionalism and discipline ourselves to report and contextualize facts, and be as dispassionate about it was we can manage.
We can especially strive to eschew sensational mythmaking (e.g., contributing to "the murderous Israelis," "the heroic Hezbollah and their free medical services" "Chavez for the people," "W. Bush the antichrist," "the evil, Nazi-like American empire") and just stick to the facts and the context.
Others do not share this view. And this is something of a raging conflict in many circles.
Take the following comparison, and tell me which account you might be inclined to check out and recommend to others:
(Exhibit A) Paul E. Sigmund, an American political scientist specializing in Latin American affairs, The Overthrow of Allende and the Politics of Chile, 1964-1976 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977).
Sigmund opens his account with the following words against "the mythmakers of left and right":
| Sigmund wrote: |
| Although there has been no lack of angry rhetoric and suspicion about the overthrow of Salvador Allende's socialist government in Chile, no one has yet offered an exhaustive, objective account of what happened, or a balanced analysis of how and why it occurred...Allende was neither an innocent social democrat overthrown by fascist thugs and the CIA, nor a Marxist revolutionary who manipulated Chile's democratic institutions in order to set the stage for a violent Communist seizure of power. |
(Exhibit B) Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (New York: The New Press, 2003).
Very simply, this is a restatement of the so-called case against Kissinger, the bloodthirsty Dark Prince. It is narrowly focused on U.S. complicity and devotes no time at all to investigating or discussing Chilean conditions and actors, or events on the ground in Santiago.
It makes the case for outrage against the U.S. govt.
(Exhibit C) Jonathan Haslam, The Nixon Administration and the Death of Allende's Chile (London: Verso, 2005).
Haslam takes account of the criticisms leveled against Kornbluh, and then procedes to restate the case against Kissinger and Nixon, while giving token attention to Chilean conditions and actors, including non-U.S. foreign actors like the Soviet KGB.
Still, Haslam opens his account with the following dedication to his Chilean friends...
| Haslam wrote: |
| For Pasy and Gabriel, who have the right to know... |
I propose that books like "Exhibit A," written in dry, academic, nonpartisan language do not create controversy or sell very well, while books like "Exhibit B" and "C" are like what you earlier referred to as "the money shot."
Thus the debate is distorted and peoples' perceptions manipulated (and "the people," by chosing to ingore one and buy the other, are very much a part of this process).
I do not believe the situation is hopeless, because there are still some writers and journalists who think like Sigmund, even if, unfortunately, "peoples' advocates" of the right and left, like Bill O'Riley, Ann Coulter, and Anderson Cooper predominate.
I have taken encouragement from the Classical Greek writers I have recently been reading. Because they seem to have been very much aware of this problem, their views coincide with my own (and yours, Manner of Speaking, I think), and they disdained this partisanship.
See Thucydides's introductory remarks...
| Thucydides wrote: |
Most people...will not take the trouble in finding out the truth, but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear...
However, I do not think that one will be far wrong in accepting the conclusions I have reached from the evidence which I have put forward. It is better evidence than that of the poets, who exaggerate the importance of their themes, or of the prose chroniclers, who are less interested in the truth than in catching the attention of their public...
And it may well be that my history will seem less easy to read because of the absence of a romantic element. It will be enough for me, however, if these words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which...will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future. My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last for ever. |
Or take Polybius, who disdains Phylarchus, an earlier Greek historian, and his dramatics...
| Polybius wrote: |
...since it was [Phylarchus's] purpose to emphasize the cruelty of Antigonus and the Macedonians and also that of Aratus and the Achaeans, he tells us that the Mantineans, when they fell into the hands of their enemies, were subjected to terrible sufferings, and that the calamities which befell this city, the most ancient and the most populous in Arcadia, were so dreadful as to horrify all the Greeks and move them to tears. In his eagerness to arounse the pity of his readers and enlist their sympathy...he introduces graphic scenes of women clinging to one another, tearing their hair and bearing their breasts, and in addition he describes the tears and lamentations of men and women accompanied by their children and aged parents as they are led away into captivity. Phylarchus reproduces this kind of effect again and again in his history...
Let us ignore for the moment the ignoble and unmanly nature of his treatment of the subject, and consider the nature and use of history itself. It is not a historian's business to startle his readers with sensational descriptions...it is his task first and foremost to record with fidelity what actually happened and was said, however commonplace this may be... |
Later, Polybius explains the centrality of context, motives, and intent when analyzing events...
| Polubius wrote: |
| Phylarchus merely relates most of the catastrophes in his history, without suggesting why things are done or to what end, and in the absence of such an analysis it is impossible to feel either pity or anger which matches the circumstances. Everybody, for example, regards it as an outrage for a free man to be beaten, but if anyone provokes this action because he was the first to resort to violence, then he is regarded as having been rightly punished...It follows that our final judgement of good and evil is decided in every case not by the actions themselves, but by the different motives and purposes of those who perform them. |
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Manner of Speaking
Joined: 09 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Sun Jul 30, 2006 9:41 pm Post subject: |
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Gopher, thanks for your message and I want to respond -- but I've got a kid's camp to prep for that's starting a week from today. 
Talk to you later..and have a good day! 
MOS |
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