andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-683 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining

683 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-28-Asymmetry in Political Bias


meta infos for this blog

Source: html

Introduction: Tyler Cowen points to an article by Riccardo Puglisi, who writes: Controlling for the activity of the incumbent president and the U.S. Congress across issues, I find that during a presidential campaign, The New York Times gives more emphasis to topics on which the Democratic party is perceived as more competent (civil rights, health care, labor and social welfare) when the incumbent president is a Republican. This is consistent with the hypothesis that The New York Times has a Democratic partisanship, with some “anti-incumbent” aspects . . . consistent with The New York Times departing from demand-driven news coverage. I haven’t read the article in the question but the claim seems plausible to me. I’ve often thought there is an asymmetry in media bias, with Democratic reporters–a survey a few years ago found that twice as many journalists identify as Democrats than as Republicans–biasing their reporting by choosing which topics to focus on, and Republican news organization


Summary: the most important sentenses genereted by tfidf model

sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore

1 Tyler Cowen points to an article by Riccardo Puglisi, who writes: Controlling for the activity of the incumbent president and the U. [sent-1, score-0.406]

2 Congress across issues, I find that during a presidential campaign, The New York Times gives more emphasis to topics on which the Democratic party is perceived as more competent (civil rights, health care, labor and social welfare) when the incumbent president is a Republican. [sent-3, score-0.832]

3 This is consistent with the hypothesis that The New York Times has a Democratic partisanship, with some “anti-incumbent” aspects . [sent-4, score-0.114]

4 consistent with The New York Times departing from demand-driven news coverage. [sent-7, score-0.291]

5 I’ve never been clear on which sort of bias is more effective. [sent-10, score-0.334]

6 On one hand, Fox can create a media buzz out of nothing at all; on the other hand, perhaps there’s something more insidious about objective news organizations indirectly creating bias by their choice of what to report. [sent-11, score-1.402]

7 But I’ve long thought that this asymmetry should inform how media bias is studied. [sent-12, score-0.797]

8 It can’t be a simple matter of counting stories or references to experts and saying that Fox is more biased or the Washington Post is more biases or whatever. [sent-13, score-0.296]

9 Some of the previous studies in this area are interesting but to me don’t get at either of the fundamental sorts of bias mentioned above. [sent-14, score-0.334]

10 You have to look for bias in different ways to capture these multiple dimensions. [sent-15, score-0.41]

11 Based on the abstract quoted above, Puglisi may be on to something, maybe this could be a useful start to getting to the big picture. [sent-16, score-0.073]


similar blogs computed by tfidf model

tfidf for this blog:

wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)

[('bias', 0.334), ('fox', 0.252), ('puglisi', 0.249), ('organizations', 0.238), ('biasing', 0.211), ('democratic', 0.204), ('incumbent', 0.193), ('media', 0.187), ('asymmetry', 0.183), ('news', 0.177), ('york', 0.156), ('president', 0.131), ('riccardo', 0.125), ('times', 0.119), ('buzz', 0.117), ('insidious', 0.117), ('topics', 0.115), ('consistent', 0.114), ('murdoch', 0.105), ('competent', 0.098), ('inform', 0.093), ('partisanship', 0.092), ('civil', 0.089), ('hand', 0.088), ('indirectly', 0.088), ('welfare', 0.084), ('rights', 0.084), ('reporters', 0.083), ('activity', 0.082), ('perceived', 0.082), ('notably', 0.082), ('counting', 0.078), ('biases', 0.077), ('capture', 0.076), ('labor', 0.075), ('choosing', 0.075), ('biased', 0.073), ('campaign', 0.073), ('creating', 0.073), ('controlling', 0.073), ('quoted', 0.073), ('objective', 0.071), ('congress', 0.071), ('journalists', 0.07), ('washington', 0.07), ('emphasis', 0.069), ('presidential', 0.069), ('twice', 0.068), ('references', 0.068), ('new', 0.067)]

similar blogs list:

simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle

same-blog 1 1.0000001 683 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-28-Asymmetry in Political Bias

Introduction: Tyler Cowen points to an article by Riccardo Puglisi, who writes: Controlling for the activity of the incumbent president and the U.S. Congress across issues, I find that during a presidential campaign, The New York Times gives more emphasis to topics on which the Democratic party is perceived as more competent (civil rights, health care, labor and social welfare) when the incumbent president is a Republican. This is consistent with the hypothesis that The New York Times has a Democratic partisanship, with some “anti-incumbent” aspects . . . consistent with The New York Times departing from demand-driven news coverage. I haven’t read the article in the question but the claim seems plausible to me. I’ve often thought there is an asymmetry in media bias, with Democratic reporters–a survey a few years ago found that twice as many journalists identify as Democrats than as Republicans–biasing their reporting by choosing which topics to focus on, and Republican news organization

2 0.37436727 828 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-28-Thoughts on Groseclose book on media bias

Introduction: Respected political scientist Tim Groseclose just came out with a book, “Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind.” I was familiar with Groseclose’s article (with Jeffrey Milyo) on media bias that came out several years ago–it was an interesting study but I was not convinced by its central claim that they were measuring an absolute level of bias–and then recently heard about this new book in the context of some intemperate things Groseclose said in a interview on the conservative Fox TV network. Groseclose’s big conclusion is that in the absence of media bias, the average American voter would be positioned at around 25 on a 0-100 scale, where 0 is a right-wing Republican and 100 is a left-wing Democrat. (Seeing as the number line is conventionally drawn from left to right, I think it would make more sense for 0 to represent the left and 100 to be on the right, but I guess it’s too late for him to change now.) Groseclose places the average voter now at around

3 0.31057611 812 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-21-Confusion about “rigging the numbers,” the support of ideological opposites, who’s a 501(c)(3), and the asymmetry of media bias

Introduction: One of my left-wing colleagues pointed me to this Fox TV interview in which UCLA political scientist Tim Groseclose expresses displeasure with having his research criticized by liberal advocacy group Media Matters for America. My colleague thought it was irresponsible and unprofessional for Groseclose to get all indignant about the criticism. But I understood. I remember how after the state Attorney General’s office released the study Jeff Fagan and I did on police stops ( see here for the research-paper version), we were viciously attacked. Some creep from the NYC Law Department sent a nasty letter full of accusations that were . . . I’d say “bullshit” but I don’t want to say that because “bullshit” contains the word “shit” and I don’t want to use profanity on this blog . . . anyway, this lawyer creep sent us an aggressive letter with bogus claims about our research competence. He could’ve just said: Yes, the NYPD stops ethnic minorities at a rate disproportionate to their c

4 0.15929237 286 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-20-Are the Democrats avoiding a national campaign?

Introduction: Bob Erikson, one of my colleagues at Columbia who knows much more about American politics than I do, sent in the following screed. I’ll post Bob’s note, followed by my comments. Bob writes: Monday morning many of us were startled by the following headline: White House strenuously denies NYT report that it is considering getting aggressive about winning the midterm elections. At first I [Bob] thought I was reading the Onion, but no, it was a sarcastic comment on the blog Talking Points Memo. But the gist of the headline appears to be correct. Indeed, the New York Times reported that White House advisers denied that a national ad campaign was being planned. ‘There’s been no discussion of such a thing at the White House’ What do we make of this? Is there some hidden downside to actually running a national campaign? Of course, money spent nationally is not spent on targeted local campaigns. But that is always the case. What explains the Democrats’ trepidation abou

5 0.15812753 1291 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-30-Systematic review of publication bias in studies on publication bias

Introduction: Via Yalda Afshar , a 2005 paper by Hans-Hermann Dubben and Hans-Peter Beck-Bornholdt: Publication bias is a well known phenomenon in clinical literature, in which positive results have a better chance of being published, are published earlier, and are published in journals with higher impact factors. Conclusions exclusively based on published studies, therefore, can be misleading. Selective under-reporting of research might be more widespread and more likely to have adverse consequences for patients than publication of deliberately falsified data. We investigated whether there is preferential publication of positive papers on publication bias. They conclude, “We found no evidence of publication bias in reports on publication bias.” But of course that’s the sort of finding regarding publication bias of findings on publication bias that you’d expect would get published. What we really need is a careful meta-analysis to estimate the level of publication bias in studies of publi

6 0.12581538 1042 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-05-Timing is everything!

7 0.11876762 960 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-15-The bias-variance tradeoff

8 0.11075343 2255 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-19-How Americans vote

9 0.10665926 659 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-13-Jim Campbell argues that Larry Bartels’s “Unequal Democracy” findings are not robust

10 0.10611691 1418 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-16-Long discussion about causal inference and the use of hierarchical models to bridge between different inferential settings

11 0.10568134 394 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-05-2010: What happened?

12 0.10534009 79 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-10-What happens when the Democrats are “fighting Wall Street with one hand, unions with the other,” while the Republicans are fighting unions with two hands?

13 0.1041334 721 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-20-Non-statistical thinking in the US foreign policy establishment

14 0.09970998 2092 andrew gelman stats-2013-11-07-Data visualizations gone beautifully wrong

15 0.096939407 321 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-05-Racism!

16 0.092999913 1347 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-27-Macromuddle

17 0.089518204 518 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-15-Regression discontinuity designs: looking for the keys under the lamppost?

18 0.088219039 1577 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-14-Richer people continue to vote Republican

19 0.086737156 1927 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-05-“Numbersense: How to use big data to your advantage”

20 0.084333338 601 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-05-Against double-blind reviewing: Political science and statistics are not like biology and physics


similar blogs computed by lsi model

lsi for this blog:

topicId topicWeight

[(0, 0.149), (1, -0.075), (2, 0.083), (3, 0.014), (4, -0.068), (5, -0.0), (6, -0.018), (7, -0.012), (8, 0.003), (9, 0.01), (10, -0.009), (11, 0.005), (12, 0.016), (13, 0.005), (14, 0.003), (15, 0.039), (16, -0.017), (17, 0.008), (18, -0.01), (19, 0.007), (20, -0.028), (21, -0.014), (22, -0.001), (23, 0.002), (24, 0.005), (25, 0.029), (26, 0.0), (27, -0.013), (28, 0.054), (29, 0.015), (30, -0.036), (31, 0.018), (32, 0.063), (33, 0.055), (34, -0.044), (35, 0.023), (36, -0.06), (37, 0.035), (38, 0.042), (39, -0.013), (40, -0.045), (41, -0.002), (42, 0.025), (43, -0.005), (44, 0.063), (45, 0.064), (46, 0.112), (47, 0.035), (48, -0.018), (49, -0.083)]

similar blogs list:

simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle

same-blog 1 0.96475834 683 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-28-Asymmetry in Political Bias

Introduction: Tyler Cowen points to an article by Riccardo Puglisi, who writes: Controlling for the activity of the incumbent president and the U.S. Congress across issues, I find that during a presidential campaign, The New York Times gives more emphasis to topics on which the Democratic party is perceived as more competent (civil rights, health care, labor and social welfare) when the incumbent president is a Republican. This is consistent with the hypothesis that The New York Times has a Democratic partisanship, with some “anti-incumbent” aspects . . . consistent with The New York Times departing from demand-driven news coverage. I haven’t read the article in the question but the claim seems plausible to me. I’ve often thought there is an asymmetry in media bias, with Democratic reporters–a survey a few years ago found that twice as many journalists identify as Democrats than as Republicans–biasing their reporting by choosing which topics to focus on, and Republican news organization

2 0.82679993 828 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-28-Thoughts on Groseclose book on media bias

Introduction: Respected political scientist Tim Groseclose just came out with a book, “Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind.” I was familiar with Groseclose’s article (with Jeffrey Milyo) on media bias that came out several years ago–it was an interesting study but I was not convinced by its central claim that they were measuring an absolute level of bias–and then recently heard about this new book in the context of some intemperate things Groseclose said in a interview on the conservative Fox TV network. Groseclose’s big conclusion is that in the absence of media bias, the average American voter would be positioned at around 25 on a 0-100 scale, where 0 is a right-wing Republican and 100 is a left-wing Democrat. (Seeing as the number line is conventionally drawn from left to right, I think it would make more sense for 0 to represent the left and 100 to be on the right, but I guess it’s too late for him to change now.) Groseclose places the average voter now at around

3 0.81940401 812 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-21-Confusion about “rigging the numbers,” the support of ideological opposites, who’s a 501(c)(3), and the asymmetry of media bias

Introduction: One of my left-wing colleagues pointed me to this Fox TV interview in which UCLA political scientist Tim Groseclose expresses displeasure with having his research criticized by liberal advocacy group Media Matters for America. My colleague thought it was irresponsible and unprofessional for Groseclose to get all indignant about the criticism. But I understood. I remember how after the state Attorney General’s office released the study Jeff Fagan and I did on police stops ( see here for the research-paper version), we were viciously attacked. Some creep from the NYC Law Department sent a nasty letter full of accusations that were . . . I’d say “bullshit” but I don’t want to say that because “bullshit” contains the word “shit” and I don’t want to use profanity on this blog . . . anyway, this lawyer creep sent us an aggressive letter with bogus claims about our research competence. He could’ve just said: Yes, the NYPD stops ethnic minorities at a rate disproportionate to their c

4 0.69790661 394 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-05-2010: What happened?

Introduction: A lot of people are asking, How could the voters have swung so much in two years? And, why didn’t Obama give Americans a better sense of his long-term economic plan in 2009, back when he still had a political mandate? As an academic statistician and political scientist, I have no insight into the administration’s internal deliberations, but I have some thoughts based on my interpretation of political science research. The baseline As Doug Hibbs and others have pointed out, given the Democrats’ existing large majority in both houses of Congress and the continuing economic depression, we’d expect a big Republican swing in the vote. And this has been echoed for a long time in the polls–as early as September, 2009–over a year before the election–political scientists were forecasting that the Democrats were going to lose big in the midterms. (The polls have made it clear that most voters do not believe the Republican Party has the answer either. But, as I’ve emphasized before

5 0.69572216 659 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-13-Jim Campbell argues that Larry Bartels’s “Unequal Democracy” findings are not robust

Introduction: A few years ago Larry Bartels presented this graph, a version of which latter appeared in his book Unequal Democracy: Larry looked at the data in a number of ways, and the evidence seemed convincing that, at least in the short term, the Democrats were better than Republicans for the economy. This is consistent with Democrats’ general policies of lowering unemployment, as compared to Republicans lowering inflation, and, by comparing first-term to second-term presidents, he found that the result couldn’t simply be explained as a rebound or alternation pattern. The question then arose, why have the Republicans won so many elections? Why aren’t the Democrats consistently dominating? Non-economic issues are part of the story, of course, but lots of evidence shows the economy to be a key concern for voters, so it’s still hard to see how, with a pattern such as shown above, the Republicans could keep winning. Larry had some explanations, largely having to do with timing: under De

6 0.68152291 384 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-31-Two stories about the election that I don’t believe

7 0.67332155 1020 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-20-No no no no no

8 0.67002743 286 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-20-Are the Democrats avoiding a national campaign?

9 0.66513944 551 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-02-Obama and Reagan, sitting in a tree, etc.

10 0.66023809 84 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-14-Is it 1930?

11 0.64450508 1388 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-22-Americans think economy isn’t so bad in their city but is crappy nationally and globally

12 0.64386797 1347 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-27-Macromuddle

13 0.64341706 521 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-17-“the Tea Party’s ire, directed at Democrats and Republicans alike”

14 0.63628334 588 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-24-In case you were wondering, here’s the price of milk

15 0.63206583 1569 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-08-30-30-40 Nation

16 0.6294961 1263 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-13-Question of the week: Will the authors of a controversial new study apologize to busy statistician Don Berry for wasting his time reading and responding to their flawed article?

17 0.62540996 130 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-07-A False Consensus about Public Opinion on Torture

18 0.62155402 760 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-12-How To Party Your Way Into a Multi-Million Dollar Facebook Job

19 0.6205405 284 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-18-Continuing efforts to justify false “death panels” claim

20 0.61807209 100 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-19-Unsurprisingly, people are more worried about the economy and jobs than about deficits


similar blogs computed by lda model

lda for this blog:

topicId topicWeight

[(2, 0.024), (15, 0.014), (16, 0.122), (21, 0.037), (24, 0.107), (27, 0.011), (55, 0.042), (63, 0.022), (93, 0.228), (98, 0.015), (99, 0.266)]

similar blogs list:

simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle

1 0.95419139 1569 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-08-30-30-40 Nation

Introduction: Barack Obama’s win has a potentially huge effect on policy. The current budget negotiations will affect the level and direction of government spending and on the mix of taxes paid by different groups of Americans. We can guess that a President Romney would have fought hard against upper-income tax increases. Other areas of long-term impact include the government’s stance on global warming, foreign policy, and the likelihood that Obama will nominate new Supreme Court justices who will uphold the right to abortion announced in Roe v. Wade. When it comes to public opinion, the story is different. The Democrats may well benefit in 2014 and 2016 from the anticipated slow but steady recovery of the economy over the next few years—but, as of November 6, 2012, the parties are essentially tied, with Barack Obama receiving 51% of the two-party vote, compared to Mitt Romney’s 49%, a split comparable to Al Gore’s narrow victory in 2000, Richard Nixon’s in 1968, and John Kennedy’s in 1960.

same-blog 2 0.94940162 683 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-28-Asymmetry in Political Bias

Introduction: Tyler Cowen points to an article by Riccardo Puglisi, who writes: Controlling for the activity of the incumbent president and the U.S. Congress across issues, I find that during a presidential campaign, The New York Times gives more emphasis to topics on which the Democratic party is perceived as more competent (civil rights, health care, labor and social welfare) when the incumbent president is a Republican. This is consistent with the hypothesis that The New York Times has a Democratic partisanship, with some “anti-incumbent” aspects . . . consistent with The New York Times departing from demand-driven news coverage. I haven’t read the article in the question but the claim seems plausible to me. I’ve often thought there is an asymmetry in media bias, with Democratic reporters–a survey a few years ago found that twice as many journalists identify as Democrats than as Republicans–biasing their reporting by choosing which topics to focus on, and Republican news organization

3 0.94504392 1397 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-27-Stand Your Ground laws and homicides

Introduction: Jeff points me to a paper by Chandler McClellan and Erdal Tekin which begins as follows: The controversies surrounding Stand Your Ground laws have recently captured the nation’s attention. Since 2005, eighteen states have passed laws extending the right to self-defense with no duty to retreat to any place a person has a legal right to be, and several additional states are debating the adoption of similar legislation. Despite the implications that these laws may have for public safety, there has been little empirical investigation of their impact on crime and victimization. In this paper, we use monthly data from the U.S. Vital Statistics to examine how Stand Your Ground laws affect homicides. We identify the impact of these laws by exploiting variation in the effective date of these laws across states. Our results indicate that Stand Your Ground laws are associated with a significant increase in the number of homicides among whites, especially white males. According to our estimat

4 0.94010866 1210 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-12-Plagiarists are in the habit of lying

Introduction: Amy Hundley writes in the New Yorker about a notorious recent case of unacknowledged literary quilting : I [Hundley] was the editor at Grove/Atlantic to whom Quentin Rowan’s novel “Appearance and the Park” was submitted (“The Plagiarist’s Tale,” by Lizzie Widdicombe, February 13th & 20th). Widdicombe writes that the editor in question thought that “its plot was too close to that of another of the house’s books, ‘My Idea of Fun,’ by Will Self,” and I can only assume that this explanation came from Rowan. In fact, Rowan had lifted a passage nearly verbatim from Will Self’s novella “The Sweet Smell of Psychosis.” It was an especially delicious one, in which Self describes the media denizens of a particular bar. I recognized it immediately and informed his agent that he’d plagiarized it. Writing a plot similar to a successful novelist’s—something that can arise innocently—is very different from plagiarizing. Appropriating and remixing someone else’s work while acknowledging sources is

5 0.93543518 1281 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-25-Dyson’s baffling love of crackpots

Introduction: Peter Woit reports on the sympathy that well-known physicist Freeman Dyson has with crackpot theorists. The interesting part is that Dyson has positive feelings for these cranks, even while believing that their theories are completely wrong : In my [Dyson's] career as a scientist, I twice had the good fortune to be a personal friend of a famous dissident. One dissident, Sir Arthur Eddington, was an insider like Thomson and Tait. The other, Immanuel Velikovsky, was an outsider like Carter. Both of them were tragic figures, intellectually brilliant and morally courageous, with the same fatal flaw as Carter. Both of them were possessed by fantasies that people with ordinary common sense could recognize as nonsense. I made it clear to both that I did not believe their fantasies, but I admired them as human beings and as imaginative artists. I admired them most of all for their stubborn refusal to remain silent. With the whole world against them, they remained true to their beliefs.

6 0.93112862 1123 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-17-Big corporations are more popular than you might realize

7 0.9077034 1432 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-27-“Get off my lawn”-blogging

8 0.90441644 1503 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-19-“Poor Smokers in New York State Spend 25% of Income on Cigarettes, Study Finds”

9 0.90127164 1711 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-07-How Open Should Academic Papers Be?

10 0.88368797 1959 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-28-50 shades of gray: A research story

11 0.87163901 1619 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-11-There are four ways to get fired from Caesars: (1) theft, (2) sexual harassment, (3) running an experiment without a control group, and (4) keeping a gambling addict away from the casino

12 0.85557449 1116 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-13-Infographic on the economy

13 0.84572005 1693 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-25-Subsidized driving

14 0.84248865 1328 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-18-Question 8 of my final exam for Design and Analysis of Sample Surveys

15 0.82530028 616 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-17-The sort of low-grade pissy blogging that degrades our public discourse and threatens to drown our more serious conversations in a sea of gossip

16 0.8197003 585 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-22-“How has your thinking changed over the past three years?”

17 0.81683326 812 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-21-Confusion about “rigging the numbers,” the support of ideological opposites, who’s a 501(c)(3), and the asymmetry of media bias

18 0.81670713 1326 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-17-Question 7 of my final exam for Design and Analysis of Sample Surveys

19 0.81634915 959 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-14-The most clueless political column ever—I think this Easterbrook dude has the journalistic equivalent of “tenure”

20 0.81617367 1650 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-03-Did Steven Levitt really believe in 2008 that Obama “would be the greatest president in history”?