Sources of Media Bias
Tyler Cowen observes:
I might add that Washington Post restaurant reviews are far too positive. If WP readers were simply told “There are hardly any good restaurants in your crummy little city,” this wouldn’t do much for WP circulation or advertising revenue.
This sort of thing — the need to keep running a business — is the real source of media bias in all domains. Note that it also wouldn’t work to say “there are a bunch of good restaurants in your city, but nothing much has changed in the past 18 months.” Note similarly that things like People’s “50 sexiest people” list have implausible levels of turnover. Sometimes this sort of thing can have really pernicious effects, like US News’s college rankings which aren’t taken seriously by anyone who understands the issues but seem to have a large distorting effect on the policies of many American colleges and universities.
26 Responses to “Sources of Media Bias”
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November 23rd, 2008 at 5:01 pm
While I agree with your opinion on the USN&WR rankings, the assertion that they “aren’t taken seriously by anyone who understands the issues” is blatantly false, at least in the legal world. Employers buy into it wholesale, thus students buy into it wholesale, thus law schools buy into it wholesale. It’s an unfortunate self-perpetuating system, but the fact of the matter is that it is taken tremendously seriously and affects nearly every aspect of the legal education system.
November 23rd, 2008 at 7:58 pm
The WaPo is a regional paper. If there aren’t enough good restaurants inside the Beltway — which I doubt, given the ethnic diversity of the area — there are certainly plenty of good ones reasonably nearby in Baltimore, Annapolis and in the Maryland and Virginia hinterlands. If the paper is overly focused on upscale eateries, that’s white-collar constipation (a chronic WaPo ailment), not a lack of good restaurants.
November 23rd, 2008 at 8:18 pm
…sez the Harvard grad.
November 23rd, 2008 at 8:21 pm
What kind of people read this blog? All sorts of opinions about restaurant rankings and law school rankings, but no opinions about the 50 sexiest people?
November 23rd, 2008 at 8:35 pm
no opinions about the 50 sexiest people?
As it happens, all the readers of this blog are so overflowingly sexy that such matters are of no concern to us.
November 23rd, 2008 at 9:32 pm
This is one of th stupidest generalizations I’ve ever encountered on here, and is the product of sheer ideology and pseudo-sophistication, and has absolutely nothing to do with an entire legacy of research in which actual intellectuals have used actual empirical research to look into apparent patterns of news and other coverage.
If the intent is to try to suggest that anyone not adopting such a blindly idiotic approach is somehow politically or economically unsophisticated, well, good luck with that, because it’s about as convincing as George Will’s weekly TV put-downs where he tries to blame the New Deal for the Depression.
November 23rd, 2008 at 10:03 pm
This is one of the stupidest generalizations I’ve ever encountered on here
Unfortunately, it’s not entirely off the mark either. For-profit media companies make their money by selling ads—high circulation/viewership is good only insofar as it attracts advertising revenue. To pretend that media content isn’t also governed by that relationship is a bit naive.
November 23rd, 2008 at 11:06 pm
The graduate school rankings of US News are taken very seriously by students applying to grad school, especially if they don’t know exactly what subdiscipline they want to focus on when they get there. From the point of view of a research professor (who should know better, right?), the major difference among schools is… the quality of grad students.
November 23rd, 2008 at 11:31 pm
James, Matt made a categorical statement about *the* source of media bias. If said source is one of many, then the categorical statement is false. It is hard to see what point Matt’s statement might have if not to implicitly dismess other explanations of media bias.
November 23rd, 2008 at 11:33 pm
dismess = dismiss, of course. The text box you use to write here doesn’t show all of your work if you are not using a default text size it seems.
November 24th, 2008 at 7:44 am
I’ve learned to value review sites that print at least some negative reviews, even if the rest are too positive I know I can discount for that and pick out the useful information. Also sites with user generated reviews tend to feature more negative reviews than sites with reviewer generated reviews.
Countering this bias is that you can pick up more information, even favorable, from a negative review than a positive one. There are only so many ways you can say that “this is wonderful! you must go to it or see it!”
New York City became increasingly sterile and mediocre over the past six years, but there were only so many ways writers even publications that acknowledged that could say this without getting repetitive.
November 24th, 2008 at 8:35 am
I don’t understand how Tyler Cowen could write that. The main restaurant reviewer for the Post frequently writes negative reviews, perhaps more negative than positive, in fact.
And does Cowen really believe there are “hardly any good restaurants in your crummy little city,” the “city” presumably being DC? If so, he’s flat wrong. As evidence, I would cite his Ethnic Dining Guide, which is (using print preview) 81 pages of mostly positive reviews of restaurants in the DC area.
November 24th, 2008 at 9:14 am
My guess, and admittedly this is pure conjecture, is that Cowen is referring to the lack of good mid-level to upscale restaurants in DC, not the sort of restaurants he reviews. DC is very good at cheap ethnic food, has a few decent high-end places, but very little worth a damn in the middle.
November 24th, 2008 at 10:40 am
I’m not sure the college rankings are the best example as far as keeping a business going. Isn’t USNWR going to quite publishing soon? I wonder what the impact of their rankings will be when they are a web-only organization.
November 24th, 2008 at 11:55 am
OK, I can’t speak for the WaPo, but I’m a paid restaurant reviewer for the alt-weekly in my Rust belt city, and so I have a bit of insight into this.
My editors have been very careful about separating us from any consideration of advertising effects. Indeed, is we need to call after a review meal for hours or something, they don’t even want us to hint to restaurant owners if it will be a good review, because that might imply that we’re trolling for an ad. More notably, I have not seen any impact on advertising from restaurants getting bad reviews – places we have panned continue to advertise afterwards. Getting your ad in front of tens of thousands of eyes is more valuable than punishing a paper for a review that a few thousand people will see once.
As for a preponderance of positive reviews – if it really exists – I would note that truly shitty places don’t get written up, which skews the bell curve. If a meal is fine but one dish was terrible and the service was dilatory, that’s a subpar experience, but hard to really pan, or to give 0 or 1 stars. The Michelin method handles this well – no stars means adequate, no review means inadequate, and 3 stars means world-beating – but is difficult to implement on a weekly basis: “Our reviewers visited X this week, but will not be reviewing it. Hint, hint.”
Anyway, I would say that the paper’s interest is in having well-written reviews that people want to read and trust. If the reviewer’s an asshole, that might negatively impact ad sales, but otherwise ad sales will come from circulation, and circulation comes from pleasing your readers. I know that sounds a bit naive, and I wouldn’t subscribe to it as a general statement about newspapers, but there are thousands of restaurants in the DC area; the WaPo can afford to piss off any given restaurant in the name of more honest reviews (dept. stores, in contrast, are a huge portion of newspaper ad revenues – I would expect less honest coverage of them).
November 24th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
Give it up for JRoth. Yglesias’ relentless media-baiting leads him to make increasingly uninformed statements about the business. And this statement:
For-profit media companies make their money by selling ads—high circulation/viewership is good only insofar as it attracts advertising revenue. To pretend that media content isn’t also governed by that relationship is a bit naive.
assumes that of the many things that go into a newspaper assembling an audience, constant coordination between editors and restaurant reviewers is at the top of the list. Advertisers by and large don’t care about the tone of coverage in a print publication or on a web site; if the site attracts a large enough audience, they will purchase ads to try and reach them and shrug off a bad review. To assume advertisers will ONLY buy space in publications with positive reviews reflects how poorly most people understand media operations.
November 24th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
The US News rankings are different. They may not have a lot of validity and there probably is a flavor of the month quality to them, but they are a response to the absolute unwillingness of colleges and universities to provide useful information to the purchasers of $160,000 educations regarding the service that is being offered.
I’d compare the US News rankings to Consumer Reports’ car reliability surveys and field tests– you can complain all you want about the methodology, but what the sellers would prefer is a market where nobody has any real information at all, and compared to that, the rankings are a great service.
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