Following the tragic shooting in Aurora, CO, Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post and others were dismissive of Americans’ support for reasonable gun restrictions. In fact, polls consistently show that Americans strongly favor common-sense gun regulations, such as the assault-weapons ban and background checks. Matt Gertz analyzes media attempts to short-circuit the debate.
FROM Media Matters
By Pam Martens / AlterNet
The paper of record is in serious need of a fact checker when it comes to whether the Glass-Steagall Act could have prevented the financial crisis.
July 1, 2012 |
The paper of record is in serious need of a fact checker when it comes to whether the Glass-Steagall Act could have prevented the financial crisis. Promoting ignorance could help sink the financial system — again.
On April 8, 1998, the New York Times ran a slobbering editorial pushing for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. It sounded like it came straight from Sandy Weill’s public relations flacks. Weill, head of Wall Street brokerage and investment firms Smith Barney and Salomon Brothers, as well as insurance company, Travelers Group, wanted to merge with a large commercial bank, Citicorp, owner of Citibank, and get his speculative hands on that pile of insured deposits.
The merger was illegal at the time under the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act. The legislation was enacted after the 1929 stock market crash to keep speculative gambling on margin and risky underwriting of stocks away from conservative savers’ bank deposits. Jamie Dimon, today’s chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who just this year oversaw the blow up of $2 billion of insured depositors’ funds through risky derivatives trading, was Weill’s first lieutenant at the time of the merger and helped to mastermind the deal. The merged firm was called Citigroup.
The Glass-Steagall Act (formally known as the Banking Act of 1933) created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and barred banks holding insured deposits from merging with securities firms or investment banks. The Travelers/Citicorp merger was also illegal under the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956 which barred bank and insurance company mergers.
The New York Times editorial gushed:
“Congress dithers, so John Reed of Citicorp and Sanford Weill of Travelers Group grandly propose to modernize financial markets on their own. They have announced a $70 billion merger — the biggest in history — that would create the largest financial services company in the world, worth more than $140 billion… In one stroke, Mr. Reed and Mr. Weill will have temporarily demolished the increasingly unnecessary walls built during the Depression to separate commercial banks from investment banks and insurance companies.”
What the New York Times calls “unnecessary walls” were the bulwarks that stood between the small investor and a rigged looting machine; between another Great Depression and a stable economy; between fair distribution of wealth and a nation with 46 million people living below the poverty level, including one in every five children; between a nation where people were proud to save to buy a few shares of stock and a nation that now reviles everything about Wall Street, from its lousy repentance to its obscene pay to its sappy regulators.
According to a CNN poll conducted October 14 – 16, 2011, 80 percent of Americans say Wall Street bankers are greedy; 77 percent say they’re overpaid; 66 percent say they are dishonest. And that’s likely just what’s fit to print.
Having greased the skids for the financial debacle, the New York Times, instead of doing an intense examination of how it got it so wrong, is now permitting the revisionist history of the crisis through the pen of its financial writer, Andrew Ross Sorkin, who doubles as a co-anchor at the serially conflicted CNBC.
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News Corp Split, Buffett’s Bet Top Year of Big Media Ownership Changes: "According to the investment banking firm of Dirks, Van Essen & Murray, which monitors newspaper transactions, a total of 71 daily newspapers were sold as part of 11 different transactions during 2011, the busiest year for sales since 2007. And newspapers were not the only media to undergo major changes. The last 18 months also saw local television sales reach new heights, the merging of Newsweek and the Daily Beast, Comcast’s acquisition of NBC Universal, the Huffington Post’s movement into web TV and further reach among U.S. broadcast companies into the Hispanic market. The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has compiled a new interactive database to help users make sense of the changes at the highest levels. Who Owns the News Media provides detailed statistics on the companies that now own our nation’s news media outlets, from newspapers to local television news stations to radio to digital, and this accompanying summary highlights the major changes of the year."
As Election Day 2012 draws nearer, the "Twitterverse" promises to light up again and again with explosions of political opinion. But which tweets are the genuinely expressed feelings of individual users and which are systematic disseminations of information meant to support or discredit an idea—the textbook definition of propaganda?
A new study out of the Georgia Tech School of Computer Science calls such patterns of communication "hyperadvocacy." The study identifies four characteristic behaviors of Twitter hyperadvocates, whose actions clearly separate them from the tweeting behavior of typical users. Associate Professor Nick Feamster directed the study, working with former postdoctoral researcher Cristian Lumezanu and Associate Professor Hans Klein of Georgia Tech’s School of Public Policy.
The study examined tweets from two recent politically charged U.S. events: the 2010 U.S. Senate race in Nevada and the 2011 debate over raising the U.S. debt ceiling. Collecting tweets that used the hashtags #nvsen and #debtceiling, the researchers were able to gather approximately 80 percent of all tweets on those issues during the time frame under study. From a dataset of nearly 100,000 tweets for the two issues combined, Feamster and his colleagues identified the following behaviors that characterize propagandistic activities on Twitter by users on both sides of the partisan aisle:
"As social media become more and more ingrained in our culture, and as people use social media more as a source of information about the world, it’s important to know the provenance of that information—where it’s coming from and whether it can be trusted," Feamster said. "As a user, you might think the information you see is coming from lots of different sources, but in fact it can be part of an orchestrated campaign."
Indeed, the very aspect of Twitter that makes it appear less amenable to traditional propaganda also makes it difficult to address with traditional content analysis techniques. Historically researchers could sift through the content of major media vehicles (The New York Times or Wall Street Journal, for instance) looking for "extreme" language, but such methods are often rendered meaningless in the world of social media where the huge number of users makes it nearly impossible to identify a baseline "standard" language.
"Twitter is a sort of ‘extreme democracy’– everyone’s a publisher, and people can say whatever they want with no rejection or limit. It’s complete freedom of expression," said Lumezanu, now a researcher at NEC Laboratories America in Princeton, N.J. "We had to come up with a way to identify hyperadvocate behavior that didn’t try to politically valuate content, because in Twitter the content often can be misleading."
Rather than identify propaganda-like communication by focusing on content, Lumezanu proposed examining behavior instead. The term "hyperadvocacy" is politically neutral and refers simply to those users and content that are consistently biased toward a specific point of view, without necessarily having a malicious or subversive intent. Starting with the tweets from users whose political stance was clearly known (such as public figures), the researchers used existing algorithms that rely on examining retweeting patterns to determine clusters of users with similar political ideologies. Then they identified as hyperadvocates those users who retweeted predominantly messages of users in the same cluster. These users consistently demonstrated the four characteristic behaviors described above.
In short, the study provides solid preliminary evidence in social media for the kind of message influencing that has long been known to exist within traditional media. Some messages were repeatedly retweeted, creating an echo chamber effect that increased the perceived legitimacy of the positions advocated in those tweets. Researchers also found some differences in tweeting behavior between the two issues under study. For example, the Nevada Senate race had a smaller number of individual tweeters but a relatively larger number of high-volume tweeters, whereas hyperadvocacy in the debt-ceiling debate was effected through more widespread retweeting of low-volume users.
"We rely on media to serve as our window on the world, but media can also distort what we see. It can act as a lens or as a filter, enlarging some topics and minimizing others," said Klein, who directs the Internet and Public Policy Project at Georgia Tech. "Such media effects have long been studied in the mass media. This research looks for similar propaganda-like effects in new media like Twitter."
The study is described in the paper "#bias: Measuring the Tweeting Behavior of Propagandists," which Lumezanu will present at the 6th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM ’12), to be held June 4-6 at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland.
Digital Advertising and News Who advertises on news sites and how much those ads are targeted
"Between 2011 and 2015, revenue from digital advertising in the United States is expected to grow by 40% and to overtake all other platforms by 2016. Yet how much of that growth will go to underwrite news remains in doubt and throws into question the financial future of journalism as audience continue to migrate online. What will happen pivots in part on whether the news industry can move into the more lucrative areas of digital advertising, particularly using consumer data to target ads, persuading major legacy advertisers to also advertise online and moving into new revenue areas. A new study of advertising in news by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism finds that, currently, even the top news websites in the country have had little success getting advertisers from traditional platforms to move online. The digital advertising they do get appears to be standard ads that are available across many websites. And with only a handful of exceptions, the ads on news sites tend not to be targeted based on the interests of users, the strategy that many experts consider key to the future of digital revenue. Of the 22 news operations studied for this report, only three showed significant levels of targeting. A follow-up evaluation six months later found that two more sites had shown some movement in this direction, but only some, from virtually no targeting to a limited amount on inside pages. By contrast, highly targeted advertising is already a key component of the business model of operations such as Google and Facebook. These are some of the findings of the study, which analyzed the advertising in 22 different news operations and 5,381 ads representing a cross section of media. Researchers compared website ads to the advertising in legacy platforms. They also measured the level of ad customization online by having different researchers visit the sites at the same time. In addition, the report also contains a companion report by Professor Joseph Turow of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication that offers a primer on digital advertising."
CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson is set to receive a journalism award at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference from Accuracy in Media, a right-wing group with a long history of promoting anti-gay views and conspiracy theories. Attkisson — the first reporter from a mainstream news outlet to receive AIM’s annual award — has produced some notably bad journalism over the past year, particularly on the topics of clean energy and vaccines.
