Did you hear about this? Did you hear about that? Are you thinking about a Jay Leno monologue? Or perhaps you’re thinking about Anthony Crispino?
Most likely you are thinking about the never-ending texts, e-mails, Twitter, Clubhouse, billboards, everything… There is no escape. The news is our daily fabric.
I previously determined the voice of New York, but this week, 2xParked will review the print side of NYC news. Do you know what you are reading?
A Shy Zebra
What is black and white and red (read) all over?
How does this riddle hold up in the digital age? Using this tool (which was used to analyze paintings in the Met), I decided to look at the home page of four major NYC papers.
What is black and white and read all over? The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Both media outlets primarily have black, white, and grey variants as their main hues.
What is black and white and red all over? Red is featured prominently in the schemes for the New York Post and the New York Daily News.
The riddle will hold up, but the humor might be lost.
Faux News
It is bordering on silly how much the term “fake news” is used after former New York City resident Donald Trump popularized it. (See Google ngram).
As former NYC resident Benjamin Franklin once said, “It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it.”
In news there is a relationship between media and consumer. Reporters (ie humans) are susceptible to mistakes, but there is trust in the process that mistakes will be remedied, acknowledged, and prevented. Blurring of opinion and reporting among news reporters on Twitter erodes this trust. Highly respected news outlets have separate opinion and news sections for a reason. Most reporters in New York are excellent, but to consumers, Franklin’s statement holds true.
Being a trusted source is a responsibility of the media. Analyzing those facts is the onus of the consumer. Because we are given a narrative instead of bullet points, the supporting language will inherently have bias, both intentional and incidental. The most obvious type of bias is political learning. AllSides™ has created its own AllSides Media Bias Rating™ which takes in a hoard of data to see where different news sources stand politically. Here is how the top four distributed newspapers in NYC stand in terms of political leaning:
I looked at some of the biggest news stories to hit NYC over the past few years to see how they were reported by the left leaning New York Times and the right leaning New York Post. I hypothesized before analyzing how I thought these outlets might cover the story. I then compared a text analysis of the total story’s sentiment, which is positive or negative based on certain words and phrases, to each hypothesis.
We see that for the most part, my hypotheses hold. For stories which might favor the right, the New York Post news articles had a stronger positive sentiment. For stories which might favor the left, the New York Times had a stronger positive sentiment. Interestingly, the New York Times were less likely to use emotional language in their articles than the New York Post.
With any good reporting of data, there should be acknowledgement of limitations of an analysis:
There was no control to see if each paper is left or right leaning. This analysis only compares each outlet to the other.
The sample is small. These are only five stories. To make definitive conclusions, I would hope to add at least 5x more.
The sample is biased. I only included stories I felt might be partisan based on my understanding.
The analysis is biased. This type of text analysis works best with fiction pieces. The wording of news articles is likely (hopefully) different.
Despite the flaws, it does not mean this analysis should be thrown out. If we trust the facts, extra effort is required of the reader to disseminate them from narrative. A biased narrative does not mean fake facts.
MayorModel
There is a whole slew of new campaign contribution data to add to the model this week. Here is how the mayoral election is looking now.
Yup. The website is not working, so I can’t access the data. I will keep updating this week and will publish an update on my Twitter. Stand by.
"Fake News" was drawn by Ink&thyme, drawing life's unforgettable moments. For unique art drawn just for you, check them out on Facebook and on Instagram.
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Comments? Suggestions? Questions? Email me at 2xParked@gmail.com.