Dmitriy T.M. sent in a TED talk in which Ben Goldacre discusses the problems with many of the scientific findings we hear about in the media, highlighting the importance of scientific literacy and critical consumption of science reporting:
And while we’re on the topic of potentially misleading statistics, Dolores R. and Sarah E. sent in an image posted at boing boing as one of “the best set of infographics ever,” helpfully illustrating the difference between correlation and causation:
Katrin sent in a really interesting attempt to disrupt the narrative about the Netherlands that is being told on Fox News. The 3-and-a-half minute video shows Fox anchors and guests calling the Dutch “naive” and the country “out of control,” “a cesspool of corruption and crime,” “a mess,” “anarchy,” and “a Disneyworld for those people,” then counterposes that commentary with images of and statistics about the country.
It’s a fascinating example of two sides contesting over the framing of a nation.
By far, the best part occurs at 2:40. Gretchen Carlson mentions that 40% of Americans in the U.S. report having ingested marijuana, compared to 22% of the Dutch. O’Reilly responds with shocking statistical illiteracy (or a willingness to assume the illiteracy of his viewers). Confusing percentages with whole numbers, he says:
The way they do the statistics in the Netherlands is different, plus its a much smaller country, it’s a much smaller base to do the stats on.
In “Portraying Tiger Woods: Characterizations of a ‘Black’ Athlete in a ‘White’ Sport,” Andrew Billings discusses how race plays a role in sports commentators’ evaluations of golfers, and particularly in how they describe and comment upon Tiger Woods. A content analysis of 37.5 hours of coverage of golf tournaments between April and August of 2001 by CBS, NBC, and ABC, during which 2,989 evaluative comments occurred, revealed patterns in how sportscasters described Tiger Woods compared to other golfers. When he was losing, Woods was more likely than other golfers in the same position to be described as lacking composure or concentration, of “self-destructing,” and of lacking control over his emotions. Overall, Billings found that the types of language other students have found to be applied to Black athletes were applied to Woods only when he was losing. When he was doing well, commentators did not significantly stereotype Woods.
The study is interesting in light of a video sent in by Jason Eastman. This Wall Street Journal segment discusses the results of a study that investigated how media depictions of college quarterbacks’ performances. A recent study published in the Academic of Management Journal found that media coverage rarely gave African American quarterbacks credit for leadership. When their teams do well, it is because of their natural athletic talent; when they do poorly, it is lack of leadership — blame not equally placed on White quarterbacks when their teams do poorly. So Blacks are blamed more for losses but get less credit for successes — an outcome of stereotyping that has disturbing implications for hiring and promotion in the workplace (sorry for the ad):
Full cites:
Andrew Billings. 2003. “Portraying Tiger Woods: Characterizations of a ‘Black’ Athlete in a ‘White’ Sport.” The Howard Journal of Communications 14: 29-37.
Andrew Carton and Ashleigh Shelby Rosette. 2011. “Explaining Bias against Black Leaders: Integrating Theory on Information Processing and Goal-Based Stereotyping.” Academy of Management Journal 54: 1141-1158.
Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.
What we don’t talk about when we don’t talk about class. That was the title I wanted to use, but it was too long, and besides, there are already too many of these Raymond Carver variants.
Class seems to have disappeared from public discourse, except for the Republicans’ insistence that to mention inequality at all is to engage in “class warfare.” The only class we hear about, whether from politicians or the media, is the middle class. Here, for example, are the results of a Lexis-Nexis search of news transcripts in the previous month.
On TV news, the upper and lower class do not exist.
So how do we talk about those at the top and bottom of society? The discussion of inequality is now all about income. While “lower class” and “upper class” had only three and four mentions, respectively, in this same period, income terms (high, upper, low, lower) numbered over 300.
For some historical perspective, I looked at Google Ngrams for the frequency of class terms in books.
The pattern for upper class is similar — a large decline in class talk, a much smaller decrease in income talk — though class references still outnumber income references.
From the media, you get the impression that except for a handful of people at the top and the bottom, there really is only one class in America — the middle class — and that the working class has faded into history. Yet the GSS subjective social class item (“Which class would you say you belong in?”) gets the same results as it did in 1972: a roughly equal split between “middle” and “working” that accounts for 9 out of 10 Americans.
On January 18th, 2012 many sites on the internet went “black” to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), including Wikipedia, Boing Boing, Reddit, Cheezburger, Craig’s List, WordPress, Wired, and Sociological Images too, to name a few (in solidarity, Google blacked out it’s logo). While written ostensibly to make it easier to stop pirating of music, movies, and other media, opponents argue that the Acts are so penalizing and over-reaching that they would essentially criminalize sharing and creativity. There’s a great slideshow of the blacked out sites at the Los Angeles Times.
The next day proved that this online action made a large difference, at least in the short run. Seventy Congress members switched their positions or newly decided to stand against the Acts (Boing Boing). Congress has postponed actions on the Act, which was slotted for today.
From the point of view of Sociological Images, this is a much needed victory. From a sociological point of view, it is another illustration of how the internet creates both new legal issues and facilitates new social movement tactics.
Sociologists and others use the term “agenda setting” to describe the way that the media focuses our attention on some things and not others. In this way, media actors may not control how we think about things, but they may very well control what we think about.
This instance of agenda setting involves SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. Media Matters put together this figure illustrating the relative number of television segments given to SOPA and other issues — the British Royal Family, the football player Tim Tebow, Casey Anthony and her missing daughter, Alec Baldwin’s behavior on a plane, and the Kardashian divorce — between October 26th, 2011 and January 12th of this year.
Data like this is often used to explain why Americans tend to be quite uninformed about important issues. For more examples, see this post comparing the covers of TIME and Newsweek in the U.S. and elsewhere. See also: Setting the Agenda on Trump and Setting the Agenda on Janet Jackson’s “Wardrobe Failure.”
Thanks to Dolores R. for the tip! Via Socialist Texan.
“Hey look! Fox News, American Idol, and Monday Night Football had a threesome and it made a baby named the Southern Republican Presidential Debate!”
That was my first thought, anyway, as I watched my first Republican Primary debate of the season two nights ago. I was really surprised at the opening dramatization of the event on CNN. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you absolutely must watch the first few minutes of the video below (especially :40 to 2:30):
So, what do you think? Does this smack of sensationalism to you? Is this just what TV looks like these days? Without being overly nostalgic, how does this compare to the mood of previous debates? How might this framing of the debates affect how people think of the presidency, our government, the process?
The declining birth rate in Latin America, depicted in this graph, is a nice example of the way that both cultural and social change affects individual choices. Brazil is highlighted as an extreme case. It’s birthrate has fallen from over six children/woman in 1960 to under 1.9 today.
The accompanying Washington Post article, sent in by Mae C., explains that the decrease in the birthrate since the 1960s is related to migration to cities. In rural areas children are useful. They can help with crops and animals. In crowded and expensive cities, however, they cost money and take up space. Economic change, then, changed the context of individual choices.
This transition — from a largely rural country with high birthrates to an industrialized one with lower birthrates — has been observed across countries again and again. It’s no surprise to demographers (social scientists who study changes in human population). But Brazil did surprise demographers in one way:
…Brazil’s fertility rate fell almost uniformly from cosmopolitan Sao Paulo, with its tiny apartments and go-go economy, to Amazonian villages and the vast central farming belt.
The decline in birthrate, in other words, has occurred across the urban/rural divide. Demographers attribute this to cultural factors. The idea of “an appealing, affluent, highflying world, whose distinguishing features include the small family” has been widely portrayed on popular soap operas, while Brazilian women in the real world have made strong strides into high-status, well-paid, but time-intensive occupations. They mention, in particular, Brazil’s widely-admired first female president, Dilma Rousseff, who has one child.
Ultimately, then, the dramatic drop in the birthrate is due to a combination of both economic and cultural change.
© 2012 Sociological Images
