Kevin Drum

A recently published research paper has been making the rounds that purports to measure the ideological slant of the Big Three cable news channels. The methodology is to (a) identify all guests who have at least ten hours of screen time over the past decade, (b) add up the amount of time they appear each day, and (c) assign them an ideology score based on how much they contributed to either Democratic or Republican candidates.

I have some issues with this, but let's put that aside. Here are the basic results:

I have helpfully added the dashed red line to indicate the zero level, at which the roster of guests is neutral, and then I've even more helpfully added a red dot for the year 2018 on MSNBC. Other years might have done as well, but 2018 is fine for illustrating my big problem with this paper.

As you can see, the researchers claim that MSNBC had a net conservative guest roster in every single time slot during 2018. That eventually turned around, and by 2021 the roster was enormously liberal.

This doesn't pass the finger test. Does anyone believe that right smack in the middle of Donald Trump's first term, MSNBC was essentially a center-right station? Or that in prime time, with every host blathering nonstop about Mueller and Russia, it was dead center? Help me out here. Does this make any sense at all?

UPDATE: In fairness, I should say that I had a Twitter conversation with one of the authors (Josh McCrain), and he insisted that I gotten the paper wrong. He says the only thing they measure is guest ideology, not the overall slant of the channel or program.

That's true as far as it goes, and they're very clear about exactly what they measured—and I made a few modest changes in the post to make that more explicit. The problem is that the paper mentions "media bias" over and over. For example: "We believe that this measure [i.e., guest ideology] offers a highly scalable method for estimating bias in television outlets and programs."

I don't buy this. It's trivially true that liberal programs tend to have liberal guests and conservative programs tend to have conservative guests, although the authors do almost nothing to demonstrate this empirically. More to the point, though, is whether smallish changes in the lineup of guests indicates whether the overall bias of a program is becoming more liberal or conservative.

This is where things get weird. McCrain apparently agrees that guest ideology is only a small part of overall bias because it doesn't account for the ideology of the host. However, that's not mentioned in the paper itself. Via Twitter, he asserts that overall bias is roughly the sum of host ideology and guest ideology but provides no empirical evidence for this.¹ My guess is that guest ideology is a very small part of overall bias, and therefore modest changes in guest ideology probably have very little effect on overall bias. More likely, it represents what kind of stuff is in the news at any given moment and who's president at the time. It's hard to think of anything internal to a show that would change so synchronously on all three channels. It almost has to be something external.

That's my take, anyway, and it might be wrong. Regardless, this is the question at hand and the paper does almost nothing to address it. It merely measures guest ideology using a dicey (in my opinion) methodology and then tosses up a chart. It tell us nothing empirically about the overall slant of either channels or individual shows.

¹Sorry, no links for this or anything else. Apparently McCrain deleted most of his side of our Twitter conversation. But maybe I'm not looking right.

I was puttering around in my local Target yesterday and I noticed something in the clothing department. In the name of diversity and body positivity, both the mannequins and the pictures of smiling models covered the full gamut of body types: thin, fat, big, tall, short, you name it.

But that was only in the women's clothing section. In the men's section it was still 2010: the body types ranged from 32-inch waists to 34-inch waists and there was nobody with a BMI over 25. Everyone was slim, fit, and muscular.

Comments?

And that's a good thing! My doctor tells me that I've been upgraded from non-urgent to urgent on the waiting list for my eagerly anticipated CAR-T treatment. I still don't have a date, but presumably this means I'm inching my way to the top of the list.

(This change has nothing to do with the severity of my cancer, which has been steady for many months. Though I will say that the latest chemo regimen I'm on sure does pile on the fatigue. I think I sleep about 80 hours a week these days.)

Rick Nevin writes in with the latest data on juvenile arrests. It's pretty spectacular:

I don't know that I agree with Rick's trendlines—I doubt that juvenile crime is going to hit zero anytime soon—but his basic idea is sound. And it's remarkable that even as lead poisoning has flattened out, teen crime rates continue to plummet:

• Since 1990, the property crime rate among Black juveniles has gone down 90% and the violent crime rate has gone down 80%.
• Among all juveniles, the property crime rate has gone down 90% and the violent crime rate has gone down 75%.

The crazy thing about all this is that if you judge by the squawkings of police chiefs and elected officials, you'd think America was still trapped in the middle of a massive crime wave. But it ain't so. The numbers go up and down a bit from year to year and place to place, and the pandemic has obviously had an effect recently, but generally speaking kids just aren't involved in much crime these days. At the same time, 20-somethings are following right along. Their numbers will be similar to that for teens within a few more years.

And don't forget that we're at the start of the decade that will also see a reduction in violence in the Middle East. I'm dead serious about that.

The Washington Post reports today about MoFi Records, a company that creates analog reissues of famous albums on vinyl. But a few weeks ago a customer discovered that the mastering process they used was not, in fact, completely analog:

In a sometimes halting video posted to the YouTube channel of his Phoenix record shop, the ‘In’ Groove, [Mike] Esposito said that “pretty reliable sources” told him that MoFi (Mobile Fidelity), the Sebastopol, Calif., company that has prided itself on using original master tapes for its pricey reissues, had actually been using digital files in its production chain. In the world of audiophiles — where provenance is everything and the quest is to get as close to the sound of an album’s original recording as possible — digital is considered almost unholy. And using digital while claiming not to is the gravest sin a manufacturer can commit.

The story meanders through a couple thousand words, telling the story of analog reissues; the high-end audiophile community; how MoFi fessed up; and how they were caught:

Earlier this year, MoFi announced an upcoming reissue of Jackson’s 1982 smash “Thriller” as a One-Step. The news release said the original master tape would be used for the repressing, which would have a run of 40,000 copies. That’s a substantially bigger number than the usual for a One-Step, which is typically limited to between 3,500 and 7,500 copies.

Michael Ludwigs, a German record enthusiast with a YouTube channel, 45 RPM Audiophile, questioned how this could be possible. Because of the One-Step process, an original master tape would need to be run dozens of times to make that many records. Why would Sony Music Entertainment allow that? “That’s the kind of thing that deteriorates tape,” says Grundman.

“That’s the one where I think everyone started going, ‘Huh?’” says Ryan K. Smith, a mastering engineer at Sterling Sound in Nashville.

Perhaps you will notice that MoFi was initially cast under suspicion due to a technical question. Were they really playing the master tape over and over? That seemed unlikely.

What didn't cast them under suspicion—ever—was the sound of their records. Quite the contrary: everyone agrees that MoFi has some of the best sounding records in the business. It takes until literally the last paragraph of the story to address that elephant in the room:

Randy Braun, a music lover, Hoffman message board member and lawyer in New York, hopes that, in the end, the MoFi revelation will prove what he’s been saying for years, that the anti-digital crowd has been lying to itself: “These people who claim they have golden ears and can hear the difference between analog and digital, well, it turns out you couldn’t.”

Um, right. The whole thing is a ridiculous scam. Modern equipment can digitize an analog sound stream at such high resolution that almost no one can distinguish it from analog itself. Used judiciously, which MoFi did, it improves the sound without leaving so much as a trace of digital impurity.

You could hardly find a better test than this. MoFi had been doing this for years, and high-end audiophiles had been swooning over their reissues the entire time. Nobody had even an inkling that MoFi's records had been corrupted by digital processing

For years. Now can we all knock off this crap?

I had a thought today. I don't know that it matters much, but here it is.

You may recall that I wrote a post a few days ago explaining which metrics are used by NBER to date the starting points of recessions. GDP is not one of those metrics for the monthly dating, but it is used by NBER for their quarterly dating. Or, to be more accurate, they use an average of real GDP and real GDI (Gross Domestic Income).

You may also recall that although GDP and GDI are theoretically equal, in practice they differ due to real-world measurement errors. This difference is called the "statistical discrepancy" and it's been unusually large lately. Here's the average of the two over the past few years:

For what it's worth, the average of GDI and GDP was positive in the first quarter, not negative. This means that, as far as NBER is concerned, we haven't had two consecutive quarters of negative growth. Depending on what gets reported for the second quarter, we might not have any quarters of negative growth.¹

I have no special insight about what this means, if anything. I just thought it was interesting.

¹GDI for the second quarter will be released on August 25.

Oh man, not this again:

It was once the most popular boy’s name in France, inspired in part by Hollywood films and boybands. But for the more than 150,000 French Kevins, the name has become so targeted by mockery, comic sketches and class prejudice that a new documentary is hoping to set the record straight and “save the Kevins”.

....Now — as many French Kevins reach their early 30s — there is a move to fight back against the national jokes associating the name with the stereotype of an airhead in a bad-taste shirt with a souped-up car or appearing on reality TV shows.

First there was the whole We Need to Talk About Kevin thing (i.e., why did Kevin commit a school massacre?). Then there was Germany with "Kevinism," then Britain with Kevin the Carrot, and now France. Apparently the big push is to get people to stop associating Kevin with "Gros Beauf":

For God's sake. My sister's name now stands in for an entitled white bitch. My name stands in for some kind of lowlife bonehead. My brother's name—

Well, I'm not even going to tell you his name. It's safe for now, I think. But for how long? And what did my family do to deserve this?

Charlie looks so well balanced in this picture, doesn't he? But in real life he looked as if he was about crash belly first into Hilbert. He didn't, though, and Hilbert just kept on napping.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has agreed to support the latest version of Joe Biden's spending bill, but only if . . .

. . . the provision that places limits on the carried interest loophole is removed.

All I can do is laugh at this point. The CIL is now officially the cockroach of tax law. If you tossed a nuclear bomb at the entire tax code, it's the one thing that would survive. When the world ends, hedge fund bros will crawl out of the ashes, throw their fists to the sky, and laugh at the fools who thought they could take away their beloved carried interest.

Anyway, Democrats are now on the verge of passing a $400 billion spending bill. Hooray, I guess, but less than a year ago Sen. Joe Manchin (and probably Sinema too) were willing to pass a $1.5 trillion bill. If Dems had just gone along with that instead of playing endless stupid games, they would have gotten a lot more and they would have gotten it a lot sooner.

But they didn't. So $400 billion it is.

The monthly jobs report has loads of stuff in it, and I like to highlight something different each time. This month, it's average weekly hours worked:

Riddle me this: We supposedly have millions of job openings that companies can't fill. That being the case, you'd think that in the meantime they'd be giving their workers more hours. And yet, for the past year the number of hours worked has gone steadily down.

So: Four million more job openings than usual and half a million new jobs this month, but real wages are down and hours worked are down. How does this make sense?