Off the Grid

After hours of planning my media analysis, I stumbled across this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Essentially, I realized the quantitative benchmarking of satirical news and network news already happened… 9 years ago… in Indiana. There it was, in all its glory—pretty much the exact deliverable I intended to create, conducted by someone with a Ph.D. in Communications and more academic resources than I will ever obtain. I mean, sure, I thought about trying to reevaluate the findings from 2006, but I also didn’t want to turn in a final project that consisted of an academic book-review.

 

In essence, the methodology of the study involved sampling 2004 presidential election coverage from popular mainstream broadcasts (ABC’s World News Tonight, CBS’s Evening News, NBC’s The Nightly News, etc), and comparing these broadcasts with samplings from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. These broadcasts were “coded” to determine the following:

 

"Story length (in seconds) was recorded for each story in each program in the study sample. In addition, the amount of time (in seconds) in the audio and video messages devoted to horse race, hoopla, campaign issues, candidate qualifications, joking, and laughter was also coded for stories about the presidential election" 

 

This coding allowed the researchers to produce quantitative benchmarks to compare each show’s level of “substance” vs. “hype”. An example of this output can be seen below:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reading this got me thinking—what does 'substance' even mean?  It's not as if Fox doesn't define this term in her paper; she formally defines substance as 'concepts' related to campaign issues [the economy, the environment, national security, etc] or candidate qualifications [relevant candidate experiences or previous positions held]. But are these defintions even useful or telling?

 

Certainly, it might be true that trained coders can identify substance consistently—in other words, when presented with the same segment, most coders reported a very similar diagnosis of substance. But what about the quality of this ‘substance’? The results of this study state that The Daily Show and network news feature a similar concentration of ‘substance’—but what does this even mean? This doesn’t say much about the quality of substance, and how effectively each show delivers that substance. Furthermore, how can one even determine the ‘quality’ of substance? In other words, this article made no attempt to evaluate the actual content within the portions labeled ‘substance’, and I’m not even sure such an evaluation is possible. I'm not implying that there's an easy way that Fox could have designed her experiment better. Instead, I'm implying that it seems like comparing two very different genres like this on a very slippery topic like ‘knowledge of current events’ cannot actually be done without gross oversimplifications

 

Therefore, in addition to undermining my entire goal at this point, this study opened my eyes to the difficulty in quantitatively measuring how one person uses words and sentences to convey ideas. And sure, while news isn’t poetry or abstract art, there’s obviously a ridiculous amount of creative expression involved in reporting the news, whether through John Oliver’s absurd metaphors or Anderson Cooper’s interview questions. It doesn’t take an art student to realize that assigning standardized values to an expression of creativity can never be done without fault. Even Julia Fox couldn’t accomplish this task without heavy criticism from myself, a person molded by higher education to blindly accept academic articles and cite them without second-thought. And while it's true that I’m writing a class project—not an academic journal—I found it extremely overwhelming that I faced a task similar to Julia Fox’s, but without the army of freshmen willing to work for free that she likely commands. So now what?