Confirmation Bias As someone who watches MSBNC not at all, approximately once every 2 or 3 months maximum, this leaves CNN and Fox that I can comment upon. The following article discusses news coverage of the Trayvon Martin killing, days ago, clearly a tragedy and quite possibly a case of an out-of-control 'junior G-man,' viz, armed neighborhood watch citizen, someone who once had ambitions to become a cop. I had a run-in with someone like that back in the late 90s in Arizona , the issue being a minor problem parking my car in a parking lot. Oops, I slightly bumped into a parked car when I needed to avoid a family that was unexpectedly walking in the area as I was navigating into a parking stall. As luck had it, a wannabe future cop was nearby and proceeded to issue a "citizen's arrest" for my "crime." Upon which he called the real police. When an officer showed up he had no idea what the fuss was about since the infraction was so trivial and the would-be future lawman was obviously overzealous and desperate to report some kind of infraction to demonstrate his bona fides. BTW, I was not charged with anything; the owner of the car could not be located --the information in the data base was obsolete and the owner had not updated relevant facts and could not be located-- and I simply went on my way, especially since the ding I was responsible for was just that, a very small dime-size dimple. Someone like the hyper "G-man" but transposed to another setting and perhaps some bad-mouthing on the part of a black teenager and it is understandable why --if this scenario is true to the facts-- there may have been resort to lethal force. Obviously I do not know, but as a plausible version of events. However, is this newsworthy ? Granted it is important to the parents of both the dead teen and the man who shot him, but how in the world does this constitute genuine national news ? The article talks about CNN's coverage, which is frequent, and Fox coverage, which is not quite non-existent. It then draws the conclusion that Fox is racist and CNN is a paragon of social responsibility. Needless to say, although I now am basically turned off by all of Fox news except Special Report and Shannon Breem's reporting, otherwise the Right-wing bias is so overwhelming that it has become a major turn off, I do not see racism in Fox's lack of interest in the TM case. I could care less about it myself, not because of racial views , but because the story is about a local incident with zero objective national meaning. Yet CNN is covering the story because, you see, black folks and their white Leftist supporters have made this into a cause celebre, a test case to make an issue out of white "racism." Where , then , is the bias ? Seems to me it is with CNN, for seeking to politicize the event. And the bias seems to also be with the black community that is trying to make this into a national issue as if this sort of incident is commonplace and occurs all over the map, day in and day out. Which is ridiculous. And self-serving. And a classic example of how a major part of the African-American community has become accustomed to playing the victim card to gain attention and press for one or another political objective. Victimhood pays. All of this said, the blog makes a valid point. If I only watched Fox then the likelihood of confirmation bias clouding my judgement would be high. Same thing if all I watched was CNN. You would get just one viewpoint, and whether this was your intention or not, over time that bias would rub off. So, I switch back and forth between Fox and CNN when news stories are important to me and some kind of TV news is a good idea. Besides, a combination of Wolf Blitzer and John King can be halfway decent, just as Special Report on Fox is almost always top quality. Otherwise no point in watching either Fox or CNN, and whenever Anderson Cooper comes on air and I am watching CNN, I immediately change the channel since he disgusts me. Is there a better way to neutralize the effect of confirmation bias ? If there is, and the question concerns TV news, please let me know. Billy =============================================== Montclair SocioBlog Wednesday, March 21, 2012 Faulty Cognitive Wiring and the News
March 21, 2012 Posted by Jay Livingston Have you heard about the killing of Trayvon Martin? Even if you watch the news channels, the answer might depend on which one you watch. ThinkProgress counted the number of stories about this killing on three cable news outlets in the week following the event. (http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-16N6yAnP_os/T2oU_05sDRI/AAAAAAAAC-w/Sp24mnmDuFg/s1600/00+Cable+News.jpg) Megan McCardle (_here_ (http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/03/the-anatomy-of-media-bias-trayvon-martin-mike-daisey-and-the-press/254837/) ) interprets the data as an example of “the Availability Heuristic, a rule of thumb that says the frequency of an event should correspond to how quickly you can think of examples of it.” The Availability Heuristic makes us overestimate the risk of shark attacks. The Availability Heuristic is probably behind my students’ writing confidently that teenage pregnancy has been steadily rising (thank you, MTV). McCardle looks at the graph and sees a reason for different perceptions of racism as a problem: the disparity here may have something to do with whether one thinks institutional racism remains a serious problem in the United States. Conservatives often seem to think it isn’t, and that if anything, the real problem is how often spurious charges of white racism are deployed by their political opponents, while liberals more often tend toward the opposite view. Maybe both groups are drawing justified inferences from the data they’re seeing. Do Fox viewers discount racism because of what they see? Or is the network disparity more an example of another cognitive wiring problem – Confirmation Bias? Confirmation bias is our tendency to seek out and to remember information that fits with our existing ideas. Faced with information that clashes with that world view, we ignore, forget, distort, or misinterpret. In Foxland – the world of both those who create Fox news and those who consume it – racism is not a real problem. A story of a white Hispanic man armed with a 9mm chasing down and shooting a black teenager armed only with Skittles has no place in that world. The Fox news producers don’t want to tell that story, and the viewers don’t want to hear it. If in the days since this graph appeared, the story has become too big for even Fox to ignore. I would imagine that Fox will instead interpret the events so as to fit with the view that McCardle suggests – that whites are the victims. If you watch Fox, get ready to hear a lot about self-defense. -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
