To Poll or Not to Poll

I was greatly impressed with the admition of the authors of the website retropoll.org that they tell viewers not to trust their margin of errors since only about 1 out of 4 of the people they call actually care to continue the phone conversation and answer the questions. And since many of the questions are "if" or "should" questions, such as: Should Israel abide by the United Nations resolutions that require Israel to return all Israeli settlers to within its UN established borders? - there's really no telling if the said margin of error is accurate.

In any event, I found this particular aspect of Media and Politics to be quite informative. After the reading the assigned materials, I checked out a poll done by the organization "RetroPoll". I quoted it above but will expand on it here. Their basic methodology and mission is to expose delusions of the people which they attribute to none other than the mass media. Their polls are of a random nature, with this particular poll that I observed being: Native American (4.4%), Asian/Pacific Islander (2.4%), African American (15.6%), Latin American (11.7%), European-American (57.6%), Decline to State (5.9%), Biracial (2.4%). The article "The Nation in a Room", by James S. Fishkin of the Boston Review discourages the use of random polling claiming that the people are not properly informed on the subjects and therefore will only give you the basic headline answers that they ususally hear. This is, for the most part true. I think that the organizaton RetroPoll understands this at its most fundamental level and uses it to form their mission. They want those headline answers. Their out there to see how educated the people really are, I don't think they are your usual run-of-the-mill pollsters who are out to endorse some product or some campaign, they are out to prove the true difficulty in polling!

"Can you look at a situation without naming it? Naming it, making it a word, causes fear."
-Bruce Lee

In Orwell's World

"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity."
While reading Orwell's piece about the abuse that language suffers and its effects on society, I found myself agreeing with his premises and was thrilled that someone else could put it into such a clear format. I think as well that these days, it seems that the more vague your ideas, the loftier they seem, and therefore less prone to attack. I read recently that a there is a gnawing peer-pressure for professors at Harvard to produce as many scholarly books as they can, and by this measure they are judged. Speaking from assumption alone, it proabably isn't easy to sit down and breeze throguh one of those, and I wouldn't be worried so much as to the content of the book as to the way it will be expressed. I fear the lack of clear, pristine ideas in clear language. I also feel this could be the difference between reading the Leighley book, for instance and the McChesney. The McChesney, and I am not alone on this, is hard to focus on when reading. He does appear to speak convincingly, but at sentences such as: "Ultimately, one must hold to the conviction that the media system that best serves democratic values will contribute to generating an economic system most responsive to the genuine needs of the population (pg. 23)." You could probably have said the same idea like this: "Ultimately, it appears that the media system that integrates with the people, will contribute to an economy suited to the people." It just seems to me that this idea could have been stated more easily.

To relate Orwell to what we have done in class, I would say that the media does not so much excel in using flowery words and phrases, for that would confuse many people, but they use simple words, but with a vague meaning. And, as we learned previously, their main steam of information comes from the US government, who are masters of framing and vagueness. So no surprise there.

There is a hysterical Jon Stewart clip that is pertinent to this topic. You can find it online at the daily show website , under the title, "The Write Wing". In it Jon Stewart compares the different Presidential speeches with some being very vague and flowery, which he claims were clearly written for the President; and others which are incompetently typical of the President. To me, I don't know if Bush has the problem that Orwell speaks of in terms of flowery talk, we pretty much know when he's lying even when he's not haveing his speaches written for him.

In one of the prefaces to Animal Farm, Orwell writes that his book was almost not published since it used pigs as a clear reference to the Soviets. I think Orwell did this to simply express what his view already were, that a good metaphor is very important in conveying a clear idea.

MSM vs. New Media

Is there a difference between MSM and New Media? This question, I believe, was the underlying one in the 2003 debate between the 5 commisioners of the FCC over media ownership. According to the chief commissioner, Michael Powell, there really is no difference between MSM and New Media, and the kind of information and the way it is reported in over the Internet and blogs, etc, will rival the MSM and needs to be "regulated" by deregulating the ownership laws. He claimed that if nothing were to be done to help the MSM companies grow, they would fall by the wayside in this new media age.

His opponents, Commissioners Copps and Adelstein, would argue and say that the two are vastly different and if the bar was let down further to allow the MSM companies to grow bigger, they would take over all the minor broadcasting comapnies that sent signals through television, thereby depriving the local viewership of vital information concerning their locales through a non-biased medium. How are MSM and New Media different? For one, accessability. There is so much information on the Internet that McChesney does well in terming it a "bottomless well of information". From one's very own home one can access newspapers from around the world in any major language. This is markedly different than second-hand MSM news, ostensibly people would opt for the Internet thereby validating Powell's stance. To further seem to validate his stance, one would think that New Media offers something that MSM could rarely provide - instant dialogue and engagement. For instance, if you read something on a blog that you disapproved of, you could, with the mere click of a button, issue a public response denouncing the publisher. This is seemingly the way to go.

However, as McChesney points out, research has shown that the MSM profit had in fact increased from 1996 (the year of the Telecommunications Act to deregulate media ownership) to 2003 - undermining the whole thrust of Powell's claim that the MSM corporations are in dire stress and are will go under if something is not done. Perhaps this can be explained in light of the above assumptions, that while the Internet is a bottomless well of information, and may even be a replacement of MSM, that is not what the people are comfortable with. McChesney points out that there is a economical concept called "bandwagon effects (pg. 216)", where "technology will grow in value as more people use it until it monopolizes the the field over even superior rivals (ibid)." Such is the case, I believe, with the Internet vs. MSM. People have grow so accustomed to MSM, that it would be very difficult to convince them of its obsoleteness. Let's be honest, TV lets you become more knowledgable by remaining lazy. It great, and people love it. The Internet and New Media, on the other hand, require people to be active. Another downside of the New Media is it's amount of material, and with that, the harder the choice for the individual user. With MSM, there are only a few channels on the non-cable networks, and the MSM would be in big trouble without those, for they are the real moneymakers. As they admit themselves: that it is impossible to make a profit by solely running a cable TV network.

In 2003, the political activists among the American people came out and spoke up with great numbers against the decision that would hand over greater amounts of money and power to the big media corporations. Michael Powell said in a futile effort, that his followers are the happy guys in the fraternaties just sitting back with their beer enjoying the TV as they know it. At the end of the day however, money talks... except hopefully, in a democracy, like this one.

The Media vs. Foley

Over some of the break, I got to spend some time in the 22nd Congressional District of Florida visiting family. Around the dinner table, we spoke about the many issues facing the world. At the top of list of course, was the situation surrounding former Representative Mark Foley. Foley resigned from office last month after a sex-scandal leaked out linking Foley to teenage boys. The news spread like wildfire. Not only was it's speed stunning but its intensity as well. It was the hot topic of the media for weeks, airing all the time. I was wondering what made this such a big seller and I came up with a few suggestions that happen to fit into the Leighley model of media motivators. One is the unsurprising "profit-seeking" model in which the media jumped on this story like it was their new secret weapon ready for launch. The Foley scandal, like any sex scandal is very interesting and attracts hoards of viewers. That is the simple explanation. A more sophistocated look at the way the media handled the scandal is to look at it through the lens of the "Public Advocate" model. It would be one thing for a politician to engage in sexual misdemeanors, after all, he is a human like any other (why we place such a strong moral code on them is beyond me), but it would be quite another for a politician who has advocated for the protection of children and outwardly protests the mistreatment of them, and who has even authored bills to that end, to engage himself in the very atmosphere of pedophelia itself. This I believe could be another possible reason the media has propelled this story to the top headlines - it is outrageuous.