Hidden agendas: how journalists influence the news
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hidden Agendas: How Journalists Influence the News. Lydia Miljan and Barry Cooper. Vancouver, British Columbia: UBC Press, 2003. 212 pp. $24.95 pbk. The debate over media bias is largely driven by political perspective. Those on the far right tend to see liberal media promoting special interests and dedicated to the perpetuation of Big Government. Those on the far left are just as convinced that the media are cheerleaders for unregulated capitalism on behalf of Big Business. Hidden Agendas, offering empirical research on this controversy from Canada, obviously comes from the far right politically. In making their case that left-leaning journalists influence the news, however, its authors engage less in scholarship than in ideology. Worse, they practice questionable science in order to make their political points. As result Hidden Agendas amounts to little more than polemic and makes little worthwhile contribution to the debate. The authors are political scientists-Miljan teaches at the University of Windsor and Cooper at the University of Calgary. Unlike the journalists they accuse of harboring ulterior motives, they make their agenda obvious from the outset. They believe it is journalists, not owners, who inject bias into the news, and they see that bias as invariably left-leaning, even Marxist. The study's findings, however, can be largely understood in the context of the authors' own perspectives. Miljan has been director since 1987 of the National Media Archive, division of the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute, which is often described as right-wing th ink tank. The survey research relied on was gathered for Miljan's 2000 dissertation in the department where Cooper teaches. Cooper is the author of Sins of Omission, 1994 study of CBC television that found much relevant information to be suppressed by the government broadcaster. Not surprisingly, CBC journalists suffer worst of all from accusations of bias in Hidden Agendas. There are two major problems with this study that render it suspect. The first is that the authors set out with the objective of proving point, and they gathered data designed to do just that. Given the undisguised mission on which the authors embarked, with little pretence of disinterested inquiry, it is fair to conclude that their findings may have largely been determined by their method. In particular, the loaded nature of their survey questions possibly resulted in skewed data. For example, their survey of 270 journalists and 804 members of the general public included such questions as whether communism was evil and unworkable or a good idea but wrecked by bad leadership. Another equated capitalism with both free markets and the right to own private property. …
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it