Above: the front page of The Huffington Post as of 3:25 PM EST.
Below: my first piece for HuffPo, on Michael Bloomberg’s Super PAC and the scourge of outside campaign spending. (I’ve written previously about this here and here.)
At the time, many progressives cheered the appearance of Independence USA as a welcome response to the deluge of money then flooding the airwaves from conservative activists. After the Illinois special election results, the applause is likely to grow louder. But the degradation of campaign finance laws, a development that has facilitated the proliferation of organizations like Bloomberg’s, is an unqualified blight on democracy. Liberals may have triumphed in this round, but the true message of Robin Kelly’s victory is that no political candidate is immune to the scourge of outside (and outsized) spending.
ESPN sports columnist Bill Simmons (a.k.a. “Sports Guy”) was suspended from Twitter for disparaging the network in regard to the above video:
ESPN has suspended superstar columnist Bill Simmons from Twitter after he criticized the network’s controversial First Take show, according to a Deadspin report.
On First Take last week, NFL player Richard Sherman eviscerated host Skip Bayless in an extended exchange that quickly went viral online. Bayless has long antagonized sports fans for what many see as convoluted rants and unnecessary criticism of athletes intended to generate controversy more than provide actual value to viewers. Sherman was widely celebrated for standing up to Bayless and dressing the host down.
In Google’s official announcement of the end of Reader, which it plans to mothball in July, it said the product had a “devoted following who will be very sad to see it go.” But usage had declined, and the company says it wants to focus more energy on fewer products. Reader’s popularity came not just from its innovative tools but from its social aspect, Wired’s Mat Honan points out. “Reader gave users the ability to friend, follow and share stories with others. It let readers share stories with each other, and comment on them too.” But the company removed that function in 2011, replacing it with an option to share on G+. “That was effectively the end of the Reader community.” Now Reader itself follows. But boy was Google right about that devoted following.
The White House petition can be found here. As is clear from the numerical figures in the above screenshot, the aspirations appear slightly excessive.
If ever there were an indication of the influence exerted by Paul Krugman and his intellectual kin, take a look at this:
One day after Republicans rolled out a detailed proposal aimed at eliminating the federal deficit through steep cuts and repealing many of the president’s accomplishments, Mr. Obama told them pointedly in a rare visit that their highest fiscal priority was not his.
“Our biggest problems in the next 10 years are not deficits,” the president said, according to accounts from the meeting, bluntly rejecting an idea that has become Republican fiscal dogma…
Senator Patty Murray, the Washington Democrat and Senate Budget Committee chairwoman who outlined her budget on Wednesday, summed up her party’s objections to Republican austerity measures, which Democrats have said rob the country of needed investment.
“Deficit reduction at the expense of economic growth is doomed to failure,” she said.
Emphases mine. But mostly, Krugman’s.
Another gem from that piece:
“The president seemed to say, ‘If we’re going to do the areas we agree on, you have to also do some of mine,’ ” said Representative James Lankford of Oklahoma, bristling at Mr. Obama’s suggestion. “If we can find the areas we agree on, why can’t we just do those?”
Indeed, Sir Lankford. Why can’t we just enact all the policies that the party who just lost its second straight presidential election wants to implement? It’s truly a modern-day mystery.
Courtesy of WashingtonPost.com.Courtesy of MediaMatters.org.
Yesterday, Breitbart.com editor at large Larry O’Connor picked up on a news piece about Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman:
Breitbart.com ridiculed Paul Krugman for filing for Chapter 13 bankruptcy protection in a since-deleted post whose claims originated with a satire website. Just last month, Breitbart.com castigated a news outlet for running with a story from that same website.
In the March 11 post, Breitbart.com editor at large Larry O’Connor mocked the Nobel Prize winning economist and New York Times columnist for his alleged financial mismanagement. Unfortunately for O’Connor, the report that Krugman went bankrupt is clearly a joke and originated from the satirical website The Daily Currant. O’Connor has since deleted the post without explanation. (Update: O’Connor tweeted, saying he “trusted Boston.com as the source for that Krugman piece, but they were duped by Daily Currant, therefore, so was I!”)
Most of the reaction has predictably zeroed in with glee on Breitbart’s error. Media Matters’ headline for the above article was “Breitbart.com Runs With Satirical Story About Krugman Filing For Bankruptcy.” Slate.com ran a similar piece titled “No Breitbart, Paul Krugman Hasn’t Filed For Bankruptcy.”
Granted, the original satirical article on The Daily Currant is pretty funny. (Krugman thought so too.) Sample segment:
The filing says that Krugman got into credit card trouble in 2004 after racking up $84,000 in a single month on his American Express black card in pursuit of rare Portuguese wines and 19th century English cloth[.]
But to me, it was far more disturbing that a Boston Globe site got the story wrong than that Breitbart’s faux-journalistic outfit did. (Hell, it was just a couple weeks ago that Breitbart got busted for creating the lobbying group “Friends of Hamas” out of thin air.) Media Matters has since run an in-depth analysis of how an Austrian blogger’s mistakenly serious reading of The Daily Currant piece snaked its way onto the Boston.com site, and it’s a bit disturbing:
The bogus story that New York Times columnist Paul Krugman had filed for bankruptcy appeared on Boston.com, the sister website of The Boston Globe, through a third-party content provider that posts content without editorial approval and provides such content to more than 200 web outlets.
That provider, meanwhile, took the story from an Austrian-based blog without any editorial review or fact-checking of its own, a practice that is becoming more and more common in the Internet content sharing world. The blog has since deleted its post and all posts from the author appear to have been removed from Boston.com.
Over at The Washington Post, Erik Wemple got in touch with Globe editor Brian McGrory:
Brian McGrory, the Globe’s editor, explains that no editorial official at his paper ever made a decision to post the piece. “The story arrived deep within our site from a third party vendor who partners on some finance and market pages on our site,” says McGrory. It was never on the Boston.com homepage, says McGrory. “We never knew it was there till we heard about it from outside.” Since the posting went up, McGrory attests to having done “urgent work to get it the hell down,” something that appears to have happened, though not as quickly as McGrory would have liked. “The idea that we’d have a partner on our site is actually news to me,” says McGrory, who vows to “address our relationship with that vendor.”
Granted, McGrory is new on the job. But it’s pretty frightening that even the Globe‘s editor has no idea what appears on its site. Then again, based on the steadily declining quality of Boston.com over the past few years, I guess this shouldn’t be surprising. As Mathew Ingram succinctly put it:
if you need a primer in why editorial oversight of syndicated content is important, look no further: http://t.co/1IInROF137 /via @shoq
The rate has dropped in cities large and small, in suburbs and rural areas and in all regions of the country. It has fallen among households with children, and among those without. It has declined for households that say they are very happy, and for those that say they are not. It is down among churchgoers and those who never sit in pews.
The household gun ownership rate has fallen from an average of 50 percent in the 1970s to 49 percent in the 1980s, 43 percent in the 1990s and 35 percent in the 2000s, according to the survey data, analyzed by The New York Times.
The story, reported by Sabrina Tavernise and Robert Gebeloff, noted the data’s seeming contradiction to prevailing media narratives:
The findings contrast with the impression left by a flurry of news reports about people rushing to buy guns and clearing shop shelves of assault rifles after the massacre last year at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.
“There are all these claims that gun ownership is going through the roof,” said Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research. “But I suspect the increase in gun sales has been limited mostly to current gun owners. The most reputable surveys show a decline over time in the share of households with guns.”
The Times should know a thing or two about the impression left by that “flurry of news reports:” it contributed substantially to creating it. Here is an excerpt from a New York Times article on December 21st of last year, headlined “Shop Owners Report Rise in Firearm Sales as Buyers Fear Possible New Laws:”
With gun-control legislation getting more serious discussion than it has in years, gun sales are spiking as enthusiasts stock up in advance of possible restrictions.
Gun sales have been increasing over the past five years, with marked increases around the 2008 and 2012 elections, and after mass shootings like the one in Aurora, Colo., and now in Newtown, Conn…
There is increasing demands for guns in the United States. Last year, the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted 16.45 million background checks for firearm sales through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, a 14 percent jump from the previous year. In the first 11 months of this year, the bureau conducted 16.8 million background checks, a record since the system’s founding in 1998.
The article goes on to check in on various online and brick-and-mortar gun shops, all of whom dutifully trumpet the massive demand at their stores. (Imagine that: a gun shop owner who’s just been given an enormous audience by a global newspaper declares that he is doing brisk business? I don’t know about you, but sounds like an “I’ll take him at his word” situation to me.)
As Washington focuses on what Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. will propose next week to curb gun violence, gun and ammunition sales are spiking in the rest of the country as people rush to expand their arsenals in advance of any restrictions that might be imposed…
Gun dealers and buyers alike said that the rapid growth in gun sales — which began climbing significantly after President Obama’s re-election and soared after the Dec. 14 shooting at a school in Newtown, Conn., prompted him to call for new gun laws — shows little sign of abating.
December set a record for the criminal background checks performed before many gun purchases, a strong indication of a big increase in sales, according to an analysis of federal data by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a gun industry trade group. Adjusting the federal data to try to weed out background checks that were unrelated to firearms sales, the group reported that 2.2 million background checks were performed last month, an increase of 58.6 percent over the same period in 2011. Some gun dealers said in interviews that they had never seen such demand.
And finally, another three weeks and a day later, on February 2nd of this year, the Times struck again, heralding “The Most Wanted Gun in America,” the Bushmaster AR-15:
Before Newtown, the rifles sold for about $1,100, on average. Now some retailers charge twice that. At Pasadena Pawn, on the wall behind glass counters of handguns, are three dozen or so AR-15-style rifles. Dangling from nearly every one is a tag that says “Sold.”
“The AR-15, it’s kind of fashionable,” says Frank Loane Sr., the proprietor. His shop has a revolving waiting list for the rifles, and a handful of people are now on it. “The young generation likes them, the assault-looking guns…”
But despite the headlines, and partly because of them, commercial gun sales are growing. Last year, they were up 16 percent industrywide, according to estimates from the National Shooting Sports Foundation, an industry trade association. Semiautomatic rifles like the AR-15 are responsible for a significant share of that growth.
One can be forgiven for reading The New York Times and leaving with the impression that, yes, the entire country is stampeding its nearest weapons shops and loading up on anything with a trigger. This is just the latest in a long line of examples of the media helping to create a story, then reporting on the fallout from that story from a detached perspective, as if the press had nothing to do with the preceding whirlpool of artificially manufactured “news” in the first place.
Nick Bilton of The New York Timesrecently noted that, at some point following the implementation of Facebook’s “Sponsored Posts” feature, his non-sponsored posts started receiving far less exposure than before:
Early last year, soon after Facebook instituted a feature that let people subscribe to others’ feeds without being friends, I quickly amassed a healthy “subscriber” list of about 25,000 people…
Since then, my subscribers have grown to number 400,000. Yet now, when I share my column, something different happens. Guess how many people like and reshare the links I post?
If your answer was over two digits, you’re wrong.
From the four columns I shared in January, I have averaged 30 likes and two shares a post. Some attract as few as 11 likes. Photo interaction has plummeted, too. A year ago, pictures would receive thousands of likes each; now, they average 100. I checked the feeds of other tech bloggers, including MG Siegler of TechCrunch and reporters from The New York Times, and the same drop has occurred.
What changed? I recently tried a little experiment. I paid Facebook $7 to promote my column to my friends using the company’s sponsored advertising tool.
To my surprise, I saw a 1,000 percent increase in the interaction on a link I posted, which had 130 likes and 30 reshares in just a few hours. It seems as if Facebook is not only promoting my links on news feeds when I pay for them, but also possibly suppressing the ones I do not pay for.
Following this article, Reuters’ Anthony De Rosa spoke to a Facebook rep and then posted a short list of three misconceptions that he implied Bilton — and/or others like him — had disseminated. Among them:
Misconception #1: Sponsored/Promoted Content is replacing organic content on Facebook I spoke to Vadim Lavrusik, Facebook’s journalism program manager. Here’s what he told me:
“One important thing to understand is that when someone promotes a post in feed and pays to promote it, the stuff that’s getting distribution organically still gets distribution, it doesn’t get replaced from feed. It may get a lower placement, but it doesn’t get replaced. And the placement of the sponsored post or promoted post is also based on the quality of that post (so promoted content still has a quality algorithm attached to it.) If the promoted post isn’t that good, it gets lower placement, but it will get more distribution either way because it’s being paid for, but it’s still takes quality into account.
The claim that I’ve seen explains it as if these paid posts replace organic posts, which isn’t the case. The News Feed algorithm is separate from the advertising algorithm in that we don’t replace the most engaging posts in News Feed with sponsored ones.”
This seems like a distinction without a difference. One can hardly blame Lavrusik for trying to disguise his employer’s tactics with this line of defense, but it’s not very convincing.
Why not? Well, first of all, he states that “when someone promotes a post in feed and pays to promote it, the stuff that’s getting distribution organically still gets distribution, it doesn’t get replaced from feed. It may get a lower placement, but it doesn’t get replaced.” But for all intents and purposes, being bumped to a lower placement is the exact same thing as getting replaced. Lavrusik knows this, of course, but it’s not in his — or Facebook’s — interest to acknowledge it.
Courtesy of Chitika.
Facebook’s News Feed is infinite: when you scroll down, it loads more posts. In other words, there’s no real estate scarcity going on here. As long as you keep scrolling, Facebook will keep loading. But much like Google’s search rankings, everyone knows that it’s generally the first listings that get by far the most attention. For example, this study demonstrates that just under 95% of all Google clicks come from the first page of search results. All subsequent results pages combined represent barely over 5% of click-throughs.
I’d venture a guess that the Facebook News Feed has a similar-looking curve. Of course, its average time-on-site is going to be a lot higher than Google’s, but the same laws apply — the farther down the page something is, the less likely it is that a user will see it. Sponsored Posts, by definition, push non-sponsored posts farther down the page. Ergo, they are less likely to be seen. So even if it’s technically true, when Lavrusik says a non-sponsored post “doesn’t get replaced,” he’s not saying anything meaningful at all.
My second disagreement with De Rosa on this point has to do with his conclusion:
There’s a few things that make Nick an edge case, someone who uses and experiences Facebook slightly differently than the broader membership. He was one of the privileged few who were “recommended” members to follow, which allowed him to gain a lot of followers early on. Most members have to scratch and claw to get noticed, a recommended user list gives you an opportunity to catapult your following in a less organic fashion. Just like on Twitter, it creates an inauthentic illusion of “influence,” and as much as I loathe that word and the next one I am going to use, “engagement,” the quality of that “engagement” goes down as your artificial following grows.
I also noticed that Nick tends to post a lot of links, instead of photo posts, which tend to get a lot more “likes” “shares” and comments. If they’re not getting that kind of (ugh) “engagement,” then they’re in turn showing up lower organically in your follower’s newsfeed. This is a feature, not a bug.
But as Bilton himself mentioned:
From the four columns I shared in January, I have averaged 30 likes and two shares a post. Some attract as few as 11 likes. Photo interaction has plummeted, too. A year ago, pictures would receive thousands of likes each; now, they average 100. I checked the feeds of other tech bloggers, including MG Siegler of TechCrunch and reporters from The New York Times, and the same drop has occurred.
In other words, Bilton is not comparing apples and oranges. He’s comparing similar posts from before and after Facebook’s methodology change. So De Rosa’s comment on the fact that user engagement differs by the type of content doesn’t apply here.
Anecdotally, I’m a fairly standard Facebook user: I have around 700 friends and I don’t believe I have any subscribers. (To be honest, I can’t remember whether I ever set up my profile to allow it.) And I’ve noticed very similar patterns to Bilton’s regarding engagement on my own posts. I can’t speak for Nick Bilton, but I’m quite sure I’m not an edge case.
Just to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with Facebook’s strategy here. Especially now that it’s public, its responsibility is to make money for its shareholders, and the implementation of Sponsored Posts makes a lot of sense on certain levels. Vadim Lavrusik’s defense is similarly understandable: he works for Facebook, so his slick reasoning is to be expected. But that doesn’t mean any of us should be remotely convinced by it.
Andrew Sullivan posted some thoughts — titled “Pwning Krugman” — on the above video:
Still, Scarborough came prepared and clearly prevailed over a Nobel laureate in economics. Not bad for a hack. And he’s dead right about Krugman’s contempt for those with whom he disagrees. It actually weakens his case unnecessarily. And I have to say that over the past five years, I think Krugman has been more right than wrong.
Is Sullivan watching the same video I am? Scarborough not only misrepresented the substance of Krugman’s critique (multiple times, via multiple intentional misreadings of Krugman’s older books), but he seems to have done this deliberately. If he “pwned” Krugman, it’s only in the sense that a Nobel Prize-winning economist doesn’t spend most of his time learning to look good while being consistently wrong on TV. (I should know this: I just saw Krugman speak at a TEDx event a few weeks ago, and he wasn’t any more impressive as a speaker from fifteen feet away as he is on TV.)
What Krugman (oddly enough) didn’t emphasize sufficiently in his exchange with Scarborough is that both of the excerpts from his books came from well before the financial crisis era: 1997 and 2005. Instead, he rather admirably admitted that he had “learned a few things” since that time. This is certainly the case — and, it might be said, contrasts with Sullivan’s depiction of “Krugman’s contempt for those with whom he disagrees.”
(Side note: The New Yorker ran a fascinating profile of Krugman and his wife, the economist Robin Wells, in March 2010. One of the great nuggets from that piece was the revelation that it is Wells, and not Krugman, who tends to write with more vitriol: “On the rare occasion when they disagree about something, she will be the one urging him to be more outraged or recalcitrant.”)
But back to the Krugman/Scarborough debate. In both of the Krugman quotes that Scarborough cites, the crisis was years away. (In the case of the first quote, it was an entire decade away.) As Krugman tried to explain, he wrote about the dangers of the deficit back then precisely because the economy was stronger during those periods. But Scarborough consistently ignored the fact that Krugman has, time and time again, emphasized the foolishness of tackling the deficit during a recovery from a recession. To simply ignore this central qualification of Krugman’s deficit critique is to ignore the entire argument. “Pwning” Krugman? Not in the least.
(UPDATE — 10:51 AM EST 3/6/2013): I’m watching the full debate now. Krugman actually did a substantively much better job of making his point clear — that deficit reduction should be contingent upon a healthier economy — than he did in the brief clip shown above. (He continued to stumble when Scarborough brought up his previous quotes, despite the fact that these words were written during healthier economic times.) Indeed, he seems to have performed much better in the full debate than he even did in that short clip.
One person who agrees with Andrew Sullivan’s depiction of the “pwnage?” Well, Paul Krugman (kinda):
Well, we’ll see how it comes out after editing, but I feel that I just had my Denver debate moment: I was tired, cranky, and unready for the blizzard of misleading factoids and diversionary stuff (In 1997 you said that the aging population was a big problem! When Social Security was founded life expectancy was only 62!) Oh, and I wasn’t prepared for Joe Scarborough’s slipperiness about what he actually advocates (he’s for more spending in the near term? Who knew?)
I’ve long mounted a soapbox in defense of two related ideas. The first is that average Americans care less about policy specifics than we give ourselves credit for, and that public perception is defined more by soundbites, rhetoric, and presentation than by substance.
The second idea, which follows from the first, is that liberal politicians could — and should — mount a stronger defense of their policies without fear of reprisals from the conservative end of the spectrum. This is not because such reprisals won’t come — unless you’ve been in hiding since 2009, this has been the position of Congressional Republicans since Day 1 — but because holding to one’s principles in the face of political opposition is quite often perceived as indicative of having a better, more sensible policy.
Broockman and Skovron find that legislators consistently believe their constituents are more conservative than they actually are. This includes Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives. But conservative legislators generally overestimate the conservatism of their constituents by 20 points. “This difference is so large that nearly half of conservative politicians appear to believe that they represent a district that is more conservative on these issues than is the most conservative district in the entire country,” Broockman and Skovron write. This finding held up across a range of issues.
The authors conclude:
For those interested in strengthening democratic responsiveness, one tempting conclusion from this analysis is that alternative means of informing legislators about their constituents’ views need to be devised – democratic campaigns and elections appear to do little to update politicians’ perceptions of their constituents. However, on reflection, the fact that candidates and legislators know so little about their constituents and learn so little about them from campaigns and elections is perhaps indicative of a deeper and more basic problem of elite motivation. When Miller and Stokes (1963) conducted their authoritative study of information flows between representatives and their constituencies it was less clear how representatives might ascertain their constituencies’ views with a great deal of precision even if they so desired – reliable district-level opinion surveys were still relatively rare. However, if today’s elites viewed congruence with majority opinion as a primary goal we would expect considerably more knowledge of this opinion in our sample than we observe; such knowledge is quite inexpensive to obtain relative to the cost of modern campaigns. As with voters’ typically low level of motivation to learn about their representatives (Downs 1957, ch. 13), it thus appears that our respondents must have found little desire to accurately ascertain public opinion on political issues of the very highest salience. Politicians clearly do respond to cues about the political consequences of their actions when taking political positions (e.g. Kollman 1998; Bergan 2009), but accurately ascertaining the state of constituency opinion does not appear to rank fairly highly on their priorities necessary for gaining and maintaining access to political authority.
It’s simply too bad that there’s no institution designed to elucidate the opinions held by both the electorate and their chosen political representatives. An institution that could widely disseminate publicly relevant information on the vital policy issues of the day. An institution that would strip away the gratuitous sideshows, celebrity gossip, and tabloid fare, and focus instead on investigative reporting to enlighten its readers both within and without the halls of power.
We should build such an institution. And I propose we call it The Media.
They need one, anyway. As Matthew Yglesias points out, “The idea is that we can know things are really getting out of hand since even nonwhite people can get loans these days! They ought to be ashamed.”
Perhaps they should have taken their cues from this instead.
