Media bias and political consensus: Evidence from Berlusconi. How much does media bias affect electoral outcomes? This column examines the Italian case, where Berlusconi, the prime minister, has controlled six out of seven national channels for ten years. It exploits exogenous variation in viewers' exposure to Berlusconi using random switchovers from analogue to digital TV that increased free national channels tenfold. It argues the switch has caused a drop in Berlusconi’s vote share by 5.5 to 7.5 percentage points. For the third time in six years, Italians are called to vote for their national representatives. It is the sixth time that electors vote in a context of media bias. For ten years during the period 1994-2011, Berlusconi has controlled six out of seven national channels, due to his dual role as a media tycoon and prime minister. Della Vigna and Kaplan (2007) provide evidence that the introduction of Fox News increased Republican vote by 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points in the 2000 Presidential elections.
As Britain debates new rules, the US plans more deregulation - Opinion. Like in politics, it always seems to take scandals to usher in media reform. And scandal, forever part of a formula driven by sensationalism that spark circulation and rating wars, is now a permanent part of the terrain as so many media outlets across so many platforms furiously compete against each other for market share and mind share. As a general rule, most media prefer to stay out of the media so as not to call attention to their choices or techniques. As corporate entities, they prefer to fade into the background, except when they are promoting their programming or hyping their personalities.
While focusing on their news offerings, they want to remain invisible in the news lest their own agendas and profit maximising strategies become too public. But, sometimes, media practices cannot be contained internally, thanks to disgruntled former employees and whistleblowers. When they go public, the public often turns on the press. Freedom of press Later, as the Economist reported: Why Americans don't understand the Middle East. I hardly ever watch network news, but I happened to stumble across this appalling report on NBC's "Rock Center" last night.
In this clip, reporter Richard Engel blames this week's anti-American violence on "conspiracy theories" that Arab populations have been fed over the years by their rulers, including the idea that the United States and Israel are colluding to control the Middle East. It's no secret there are conspiracy theories circulating in the Middle East (as there are here in the good old USA: Remember the "birthers?
") I've heard them every time I've lectured in the region and done my best to debunk them. But by attributing Arab and Muslim anger solely to these ideas, Engel's report paints a picture of the United States (and by implication, Israel) as wholly blameless. In his telling, the U.S. has had nothing but good intentions for the past century, but the intended beneficiaries of our generosity don't get it solely because they've been misled by their leaders. Broadcasting or fraudcasting? New York, NY - The big media news of recent weeks was not the obviously insincere attempts by British politicians to distance themselves from Rupert Murdoch.
It was not Madonna exposing a breast in Turkey or her backside in Rome, in what seems like a competitive race to the bottom against Lady Gaga. It was when Dylan Ratigan, angry man of US cable news station MSNBC, decided to end his daily talk show - on which he had come closer than any other TV host in denouncing the pernicious control that big money has over US politics. He said he first left "a 15-year career in financial journalism amid the crisis of 2008. I did this to join the traditional cable news ranks with a clear goal of revealing the ruthless truth about our biggest problems and telling the inspiring stories of those who are resolving them despite all odds".
And that he did, until he couldn't stomach doing it anymore and began to devote more time to the issue he is most passionate about - getting money out of politics.
Kristof: The journalist as tourist. New York, NY - "Iran is a relatively rich and sophisticated country, more so than most of its neighbours. " Nicholas Kristof's seemingly unconscious invocation of some of the oldest and most tiresome orientalist clichés in his recent columns in the New York Times, following a short visit to the beleaguered Islamic Republic, once again raises the question of recycled tropes and their instrumental function in not so much revealing the misperceptions of the Muslim world at large - for no-one should really care what Kristof or his "paper of record" thinks about anything - but far more immediately, the dire state of critical awareness at the heart of a floundering empire about the world at large.
The journalistic recycling of orientalist clichés should no longer be irksome because they distort and abuse reality, for they are in fact revelatory - they indeed say very little about the orientalised, but reveal a lot about the orientalist. 'A tourist is an ugly human being' Nicholas in Wonderland. Truthout | Fearless, Independent News and Opinion. Exclusive: The Paris Review, the Cold War and the CIA. In 1958, the Paris Review’s George Plimpton wrote his Paris editor with a grand proposal. The Russian author Boris Pasternak had just been awarded the Nobel Prize. But under pressure from the Soviets — humiliated that “Dr. Zhivago” had to be smuggled out of the country — he refused it. “The Pasternak affair has caused such a stir here,” writes Plimpton from the journal’s New York office, “and is in itself an event of such importance in lit’r’y history that we feel the Review somehow should chronicle what has happened…” Writing to Nelson Aldrich, the Paris editor, Plimpton suggests short statements by a “variety of authors asked to comment.
What does Sartre have to say on this matter … Aragon, Neruda, Waugh? The Paris Review has been hailed by Time magazine as the “biggest ‘little magazine’ in history.” At the celebration of its 200th issue this spring, current editors and board members ran down the roster of literary heavyweights it helped launch since its first issue in 1953.
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