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
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.
![]()
Megan McCardle (here) 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.
-- 
