Harvard study proves bias. Analysis of results should consider rule one, follow the money, and rule two, access to power matters.

Legacy, broadcast media remains a force in politics. The Harvard study shows the imbalance in coverage and subsequent election impact in the primaries this year.

This study establishes the uneven distribution of coverage, and the author attempts to explain this imbalance. The media is not biased for natural or traditional reasons, as the author would have us believe, but due to systemic oblique control. His analysis fails to consider the possibility that the United States is not a democracy but an oligarchy, a radical proposition perhaps but one that explains his findings better than his own pre-Wikileaks narrative grounded in the 1980s. Explaining results should mean finding the best fit to data, not chosing among your explanations for your own preferred vision of how you would like the world to be.

Interpretation critique

As to Patterson’s interpretation of the data: the author is not necessarily claiming to be able to interpret why the biased media coverage exists more than other people can explain his own results. Nevertheless, he goes ahead and intreprets the data (when asked). He has spent many years researching the relationship between coverage and results, all conducted prior to the revelations of the Podesta emails in Wikileaks this year.

His interpretation fails to consider the possibility that we live in an oligarchy with a small number of rich people controlling the media behind the scenes. This year’s election cannot be neatly fit into the paradigms he developed based on previous elections, as Patterson attempts to do in the Harvard Gazette interview linked above.

The author of the study fails to mention the Podesta Pied Piper memo, and subsequent coordination verifying that the stragedy did “work” to an extent: Hillary’s people did promote Trump through the media during the Republican primary. Podesta also changed the election calendar to help Trump. You don’t have to take the memo as evidence as to why Trump got so much coverage, but you should refute the conclusion that a HRC/DNC strategy was significant to Trump’s rise through free media coverage, not ignore the existence of this important, indeed unprecendented, piece of evidence, the Podesta leaks. The author’s failure to address the Podesta emails is simply his own bias. He developed his frames of reference before we had such a thing as Wikileaks and is unwilling to abandon his previous positions in light of new evidence, as required by any systematic consideration of the real world.

The black out on Bernie Sanders had a negative effect in the early races, the Harvard study concludes. This black out was not some sort of accident, as we can see from Wikileaks. There are more than 100 examples of direct coordination between the media and the campaign, a complete collapse of journalistic ethics. Some note of this fact is required to understand the data Patterson himself reports.

Patterson’s assumptions that the media gravitates to the scandalous, or that reporters are lazy, or that ratings are all important are simply that: assumptions. The owner of Univision is more concerned with US-Israel policy than maximizing his earnings at Univision. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post not to make a profit but leverage influence for Amazon. Eric Schmidt of Google was helping Podesta rig the primary in order to curry favor with the new administration, not to boost ratings. Google should be, in a more rational system, a candidate for anti-trust action as a monopoly that stiffles competition and a free market. Even a 1% chance that an administration might move to break up Google is such a danger to their ability to use their dominance in search engine to leverage dominance in other areas is such a danger to the company that working to influence the government is worth their sustained attention. Likewise Facebook. These oligarchs, like the owners of Comcast and the other media conglomerates, are not driven by the concerns of ratings, advertising, of any of the other concerns raised in the Harvard interview. They have many more interests than ratings, at least in terms of election coverage. Political coverage is a small part of their media product. And the media product itself may be a small part of their overall holdings.

Such entities want friends in government. If you spend some time looking at key media-related emails at Wikileaks, including the absolutely stunning emails from Schmidt, you see direct collusion with the DNC/HRC people. Maximizing profit for the media outlets would not explain this obsequiousness.

The author of the study, Patterson, has been doing this for awhile and is comfortable with his method and frame of reference. Wikileaks is not part of the data he considers because in the past he did not have this kind of data available. Many became used to inferring relationships that can now be established. Being able to read all the emails of the campaign manager of one campaign, as per Wikileaks, was not part of the equation in previous campaigns. That does not mean that similar machinations did not occur in other campaigns. What Patterson takes to be the natural behavior of the media based on sensationalism may only be part of the story.

The other problem with the “oligarchs rule” paradigm I propose here, as opposed to the basket of “natural” explainations proposed by Patterson, is that my proposal requires rethinking of many deeply held beliefs about the United States government. Without a free media that actually is concerned with the truth, whatever that may be, such a mental leap is hard to do for many people.

Here are some stories on how the media looks like from a Wikileaks perspective: 1 and 2 and 3. Or this or this.

Plenty out there if you want to read it.

Method question

This point is about method, not interpretation: the “negative” versus “positive” description of coverage is not likely to note the preception of “inevitable” or “already won” — that is a horse race message that is neither negative or positive, and certainly can drive down turn out or convince some people to vote for the more inevitable candidate, as other research suggests people like to vote for the candidate most likely to win.

This effect, preferring the apparently stronger candidate, may or may not have had an effect in the Democratic primary in 2016 but it would be surprising if the constant insistence that Hillary was inevitable did not drive down turn out, given that negative and positive coverage was demonstrated to affect voters.

Patterson does not consider how including super delegate totals in delegate counts — as Google routinely did — skews results. This practice is outside of the “positive” versus “negative” paradigm. In other words, research should not only look at “positive” vesus “negative” but assess how the presentation of one candidate as “inevitable” while ignoring the other candidate impacted the results.

Establishment hypothesis to explain data

In short, the main finding of the study is that media coverage by legacy media still matters and is not evenly distributed. That point is important to make and understand no matter who you supported.

And, while the media environment changed a lot from 2008 to 2016, the importance of the legacy, broadcast media has not dimished as much as I thought.

If one candidate is allowed to set the calendar, get media coverage, pick the debate schedule, get the questions in advance, raise as much money as possible with no restrictions while the other cannot, and has friends in the state attorney general offices, Board of Elections, and at the DNC, skewing voting hours, recounts, purging voter roles, and planting false stories… that is not a free and fair election.

The routine flouting of FEC rules, violations of law by the day and week, meant that the HRC campaign was campaigning without any limits on contributions and coordinating freely with the money of oligarchs. When we say that the primary was “rigged” we mean these violations of law, the apparent fraud in Nevada, Arizona, and New York, and the lack of a free press. All of these factors render the election something other than free and fair by international standards and no one is under any obligation to accept the results as legitimate.

The fundamental flaw in the analysis of this research, but not so much in the data collection itself, is the immediate discounting of the possibility of such a thing as elite consensus or an establishment. Who owns the media outlets? Are those operations really driven primarily by profit from advertising or are the owners more concerned with maintaining oligarchical control generally in the society?

What I read in this data is that the powers that be, the oligarchs and their media servants, were more afraid of Bernie Sanders than they were of Donald Trump. That interpretation explains all the data in the study better than does Patterson’s own analysis.