As I'm sure is obvious to all of you, Jon Stewart's Daily Show is not only one of the best things on tv, it also provides very trenchant political criticism, free of boilerplate rhetoric or silly partisan loyalties. A couple of recent segments are especially important to acknowledge in this age of media illiteracy/stupidity.
1. A few weeks back, Jon discussed how certain media outlets (*ahem* cable news networks) will incessantly repeat certain "talking points" that basically categorize, filter and reduce issues or people into easily digestible chunks of information. Here's a link to the video of the segment (it's the top video link on the right side of the page). One of the most recent examples of the media's reliance on talking points is the ubiquitous use of the phrase that goes a little something like: "John Kerry and John Edwards are the 1st and 4th most liberal Senators, respectively." Now if you're a liberal like me, you'd probably think "good." Unfortunately, when the braying asses on network news are spouting this talking point, they're using "liberal" as a slur. That's troublesome. What's even more troublesome is the statement is rarely qualified or attributed to any source. For a perfect example of what I mean, check out:
2. The video of Jon's interview with Representative Harry Bonilla from last week. Watch as Jon reduces Bonilla to a stammering yahoo when he presses him to identify who originated this particular talking point. Oh, how I wish Jon was in the White House Press Corps. (Again, the video link is on the upper right side of the page).
Obviously, making a claim like this without backing yourself up is underhanded and cheap. It becomes far worse when you realize that the allegation isn't even true. For proof, head on over to Salon, and read the excellent debunking of this talking point by Tim Grieve.
One final election related tidbit: Today, a helpful gent wrote Altercation and explained the whole "margin of error" thing, in reference to a poll that gave Kerry 48% and Bush 43% of the vote:
Todd Gitlin's statement that given the +/-4 % margin of error in the Time poll, Bush and Kerry could be in a virtual tie, shows how little the concept is understood even by media literate folks. Margin of error is another term for 'confidence limits' which are the bounds that one is 95% certain (the most common benchmark) that the estimated value lies. So the Times pollsters are 95% certain that Kerry's actual figure is between 44% and 52%, while Bush's 95% likely to be between 39% and 47%.
This is similar to an exercise I used to give to my statistics class: given these figures, what is the probability that the two men are tied? You need a table of z scores to solve this, but in this case +/-4% implies a z-score of 1.65, so there is a SD of 2.42%. So for Kerry and Bush to be tied at say 45.5% (halfway between the two) that would be equivalent to a z-score of 1.03 for each, which corresponds to a probability (in the tails) for EACH man of 0.152 (15%).
Now, of course joint probabilities are multiplicative (still with me?) so the probability that Bush and Kerry are tied at 45.5% is 0.023 (2.3%). And that's actually the best case scenario for Bush. The probability that they are both tied at either 44% (worst Kerry scenario) or 47% (best Bush scenario) is 0.016 (1.6%). Now you know why most people in the media never bother to discuss this (because most don't understand it), and instead pretend that there still could be a horse race.
1. A few weeks back, Jon discussed how certain media outlets (*ahem* cable news networks) will incessantly repeat certain "talking points" that basically categorize, filter and reduce issues or people into easily digestible chunks of information. Here's a link to the video of the segment (it's the top video link on the right side of the page). One of the most recent examples of the media's reliance on talking points is the ubiquitous use of the phrase that goes a little something like: "John Kerry and John Edwards are the 1st and 4th most liberal Senators, respectively." Now if you're a liberal like me, you'd probably think "good." Unfortunately, when the braying asses on network news are spouting this talking point, they're using "liberal" as a slur. That's troublesome. What's even more troublesome is the statement is rarely qualified or attributed to any source. For a perfect example of what I mean, check out:
2. The video of Jon's interview with Representative Harry Bonilla from last week. Watch as Jon reduces Bonilla to a stammering yahoo when he presses him to identify who originated this particular talking point. Oh, how I wish Jon was in the White House Press Corps. (Again, the video link is on the upper right side of the page).
Obviously, making a claim like this without backing yourself up is underhanded and cheap. It becomes far worse when you realize that the allegation isn't even true. For proof, head on over to Salon, and read the excellent debunking of this talking point by Tim Grieve.
One final election related tidbit: Today, a helpful gent wrote Altercation and explained the whole "margin of error" thing, in reference to a poll that gave Kerry 48% and Bush 43% of the vote:
Todd Gitlin's statement that given the +/-4 % margin of error in the Time poll, Bush and Kerry could be in a virtual tie, shows how little the concept is understood even by media literate folks. Margin of error is another term for 'confidence limits' which are the bounds that one is 95% certain (the most common benchmark) that the estimated value lies. So the Times pollsters are 95% certain that Kerry's actual figure is between 44% and 52%, while Bush's 95% likely to be between 39% and 47%.
This is similar to an exercise I used to give to my statistics class: given these figures, what is the probability that the two men are tied? You need a table of z scores to solve this, but in this case +/-4% implies a z-score of 1.65, so there is a SD of 2.42%. So for Kerry and Bush to be tied at say 45.5% (halfway between the two) that would be equivalent to a z-score of 1.03 for each, which corresponds to a probability (in the tails) for EACH man of 0.152 (15%).
Now, of course joint probabilities are multiplicative (still with me?) so the probability that Bush and Kerry are tied at 45.5% is 0.023 (2.3%). And that's actually the best case scenario for Bush. The probability that they are both tied at either 44% (worst Kerry scenario) or 47% (best Bush scenario) is 0.016 (1.6%). Now you know why most people in the media never bother to discuss this (because most don't understand it), and instead pretend that there still could be a horse race.