CNN: factual or fictitious?

CNN, also called Cable News Network, is an American 24-hour news channel. It is founded on the first of June 1980 by Ted Turner. Within the US, CNN reaches over 96.2 million households and over 890.000 hotel rooms. Internationally, they reach more than 373 million households. CNN claims that they are “the most honored brand in cable news, reaching more individuals on television, the web and mobile devices than any other cable news organization in the United States”. Besides this, according to CNN, they are the number one online news destination. (CNNPressRoom, n.d.; Mediabiasfactcheck, n.d.)

The CNN website has various editions, such as the U.S. edition, the international edition and even two editions in another language; the Spanish edition and the Arabic edition. There are various sections within the website. One could, for example, visit the ‘politics’ section, the ‘entertainment’ section or ‘health’ section. Recently there is even a section launched with Virtual Reality videos. (US.CNN, n.d.)

There are several reasons why we chose CNN as our medium for this assignment. First, the media bias fact check indicated that CNN is a left-biased news medium and their factual reporting is mixed (www.mediabiasfactcheck.com/cnn, n.d.). This confirmed our belief that CNN might not always stick to factuality and that they have a preference for the left-wing perspective regarding political issues.

Second, President Donald Trump has accused CNN of being Fake News who distort or misinterpret some of his statements and can therefore not be trusted. Trump’s continuous accusations on CNN being Fake News contributed in our interest to investigate whether CNN was indeed misinterpreting his words and was not reporting the factual truth.

Third, the titles of the articles we chose had an accusatory, exaggerated or even sensational undertone with the purpose to catch the reader’s’ attention and lure them into reading these articles. We wanted to investigate whether CNN’s reporting was inaccurate, incorrect, not factual and whether they indeed favored the left-winged political perspective. Therefore, we chose three political articles regarding Trump to uncover left-bias, one article regarding health to check whether they exaggerated statistic and incorrectly reported on research, and one article in the world news section which was comparable to other news mediums reporting on the same case.

Our fact-checking analysis demonstrated that CNN’s reporting is sloppy, vague, and pushy. CNN does base most of its statements on facts but mixes it with remarks, assumptions, or opinions that are so subtle, most readers won’t even notice it. We also noticed they hardly use in-text citations or references which indicates they are vague and non-transparent regarding their own sources. By pushy, we mean that CNN tries to steer people into a certain direction by leading them to a certain opinion or point of view. Our analysis confirmed that CNN uses numerous facts to substantiate their claims. This is exactly where the danger lies; these CNN reporters are so skilled that they are able to infuse these facts with opinions in such a subtle manner that it directs the reader to come to a certain conclusion that was actually premeditated by the reporter.

To illustrate how CNN reporters present their opinions as facts, exaggerate certain facts, remain vague about their sources, we will present several examples. For instance, “Here’s more of his eleventh-hour-not-happening campaign hits: he’ll force Republicans to support keeping pre-existing conditions for health plans” is a statement in which the reporter expresses her opinion on the matter in a subtle manner. The first sentence was considered a snide remark, whereas the second half of this sentence was in its essence correct.

In the article regarding “Freakshakes”, the reporter made a comparison between two products and the number of sugars it contained. However, this was not entirely true, as the comparison did not apply to the number of calories. Another example regards the article in the world news section, where they used phrases such as “authorities said” and “according to a police report” and thus remained vague and non-transparent on who those sources had been and whether we would consider them to be reliable.

In general, we agree that CNN reports facts but not the entire factual truth. There were some differences in the factuality of the articles per category. The world news item was the most factual and objective. Most of the statements and claims made in the articles checked out, but most facts are used to substantiate certain opinions or exaggerations that do not depict objective and factual reality. Moreover, we have tried to contact CNN and confront them with our findings in the hopes of receiving some comments on our analysis. However, we have yet to receive a response from them.

References

CNNPressRoom (n.d.). CNN fact sheet. Retrieved from http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/cnn-fact-sheet/

Fox 26 Houston (2018). Trump to CNN reporter: You are fake news. Retrieved from https://www.fox26houston.com/news/228543730-video

Media Bias Fact-check (n.d.). CNN. Retrieved from https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/cnn/

Mitchell, A., Gottfried, J., Stocking, G., Matsa, K., & Grieco, E. M. (2017). Covering President Trump in a Polarized Media Environment: During the Early Days of the Administration, Similar Storylines Covered Across Outlets, But Types of Sources Heard from and the Assessments of Trump’s Actions Differed. Pew Research Center.

Teuwissen, L. (2018). Ruzie tussen Trump en CNN wat ging er mis. Retrieved fromhttps://nos.nl/artikel/2258595-ruzie-tussen-trump-en-cnn-wat-ging-er-mis.html

US CNN (n.d.). Homepage CNN. Retrieved from https://us.cnn.com/

Did you like this Blog? Yes/I did/It was great

The title of this blog is a little misleading. You probably spotted right away that you can’t give a negative answer, and that it’s also a bit premature to ask you what you think of a blog before you’ve had a chance to read it. Sadly these and other types of questions actually exist in real-world surveys. Although it’s often disguised a little better. To illustrate this, let’s do a quick survey.

“Do you think the government should allow public speeches against democracy?”

Yes / No / Don’t know

Do you think your answer is dependent on how this question is asked? Maybe it isn’t, but it might be. Donald Rugg (1941) found that if the question stated above* was asked, 62% of people responded with “No”. That’s a pretty clear majority of people who think that public speeches against democracy should not be allowed, right? So what happens if you change the question to: “Do you think the government should forbid public speeches against democracy?”. Just one word, but the answers differed drastically. To this question, the response was only 46% “Yes”. What happened to the clear majority? According to Rugg: “Evidently the forbid phrasing makes the implied threat to civil liberties more apparent, and fewer people are willing to advocate suppression of anti-democratic speeches when the issue is presented in this way”. So giving people the idea that you’re taking something away from them, “forbidding”, makes them less likely to support it.

The big no-nos of question making.

“Do not frame a question for a headline you hope to write” (Meyer, 2002). Like what seems to be the case with this question from Peil.nl, a Dutch pollster. A little bit of backstory is required, a couple of hospitals went bankrupt and in their weekly survey of the electorate, Peil.nl asked whose fault people thought that was (question 1) and what the government should have done about it (question 2).

( Image 1: Peil.nl)

On question 2, “What should the government have done about it?”, there were 4 answers possible.

“Make sure the hospitals kept existing”
“Announce that the hospitals will be closed in 6 months and in the meantime finance them to give time to patients and personnel”
“The way it happened now”
“Don’t know / no answer”

Does anything seem off about these answers? Well, there should. One of the answers is layered, answer 2 to be precise. “Announce that the hospitals will be closed in 6 months”, is already an answer, but it adds “In the meantime finance them”, which is also an answer on its own. But it gets even worse: “To give time to patients and personnel”, which adds a destination for the money with which the hospitals will be financed. Answer 2 is just bad.

This is problematic because the results of this survey could be framed as “37% of citizens wanted to keep the hospitals open for 6 more months…”. Which is simply misleading, because the answers to the question simply don’t match.

Leading the participant to the answer you want

Leading questions are questions which either in form or content “lead” someone to the desired answer (Loftus, 1975). A great example comes from CNN (2018). The US midterm elections took place on Tuesday, November 6, 2018, and CNN did an exit poll survey, that’s a survey conducted on citizens directly after they voted. One of the questions + answer possibilities you can see in the image below.

(Image 2: CNN.com)

U.S. House stands for the United States House of Representatives, which you could compare with the Second Chamber (Tweede-Kamer der Staten Generaal) in the Netherlands or the House of Commons in the UK. There are only 3 answer possibilities and, I hope you agree with me, the question leads people to either the answers of support or oppose Trump. The answer “Trump not a factor” isn’t even a grammatically correct answer to the question. Aren’t there any other reasons for someone to vote? Maybe you dislike Trump and it’s part of the reason why you voted a certain way, but this makes it seem like it was the only reason. Do you think the result should be taken seriously?

So a headline based on bad data… So what?

There’s more sketchy news, so does it really matter? Maybe not as much. But what if a policy is based on the answers on such “bad” questions? The government does a survey and bases new laws on it. What if the questions were leading? Or too negatively or positively framed, like in the “Speeches against democracy” example. Or what if the questions contribute to the outcome of a referendum like Brexit? Suddenly how “good” the questions are matters a great deal.

In the end what’s important is that a survey, and thus a question, measures what you want it to measure. And if the researcher isn’t attentive to all the aspects of question and answer process where measurement can go wrong. If he/she isn’t attentive, it’s highly likely that the result of a survey simply isn’t valid (Fowler & Cosenza, 2008).

To hell with Surveys!

Or maybe not? Surveys are still a great way to measure what people think about certain topics. But what they think can be influenced by the questions, how we phrase them, in what way the questions are ordered and even things like how far apart the answer options are (Tourangeau, Couper & Conrad, 2004) or what pictures are displayed with the questions (Couper, Conrad & Canyon, 2004). That’s why I put that neat picture of a cheering man on a mountain at the top. An image that looks “great” might make you more inclined to answer my blog “is great”.

Thoughts

People can be influenced in many ways. To combat this we should be critical of every survey result we see. Instead of only looking at the results, let’s look at the questions. Maybe it should be mandatory for surveyors to give respondents a crash course in survey methodology, so people know what they’re getting into. Because if a question makes you give an answer which differs from the answer you would like to give, that’s someone stealing your opinion and using it for their own benefit, and that’s just wrong, right?

References:

Fowler, F.J., & Cosenza, C. (2008). Writing effective questions. In E.D. de Leeuw, J.J. Hox, & D.A. Dillman (Eds.), International Handbook of Survey Methodology (pp.136-160).

Image 1, Retrieved from https://www.noties.nl/v/get.php?a=peil.nl&s=weekpoll&f=2018-11-4+rdg.pdf

Image 2, Retrieved from https://edition.cnn.com/election/2018/exit-polls

Loftus, E. & Zanni, G. (1975). Eyewitness Testimony: The Influence of the Wording of a Question. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, Vol.5 86-88.

Meyer, Ph. (2002). Surveys. In Precision Journalism. A reporter’s introduction to social science methods (pp. 99-130).

Rugg, D. (1941). Experiments in wording questions: II. The Public Opinion Quarterly, 5(1), 91-92.

Tourangeau, R., Couper, M. & Conrad, F. (2004). Spacing, Position, and Order: Interpretive Heuristics for Visual Features of Survey Questions, Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 68, Issue 3, Pages 368–393, https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfh035

Frame the Debate, Win the Election

I have to take you back to the 2004 US presidential election. John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, is seen as an over-serious guy and his campaign team comes up with the idea to capture him windsurfing to make him seem more fun and sporty. Conservative blogs quickly attack this “elitist sport” (Zernike, 2004) and then the campaign team of incumbent President George W. Bush, the Republican running for reelection, comes up with the attack-add you can see below. The add paints Kerry as a man who can’t make a clear decision, who changes his opinion often and then ends with the killer phrase “John Kerry, whichever way the wind blows”.

Windsurfing Kerry

The Bush team carefully crafted a frame of Kerry flip-flopping and inconsistency against him. Research shows that the use of flip-flop and inconsistency against a political candidate had never been used to such a degree and success as in the 2004 election (Verdon, 2008). Morin & Dean (2004) reported that a majority of independents, not registered as either a Democrat or Republican, said they were unsure of what John Kerry stood for, and John Kerry went on to lose the election. So, frame successful right?

Now this ad alone didn’t bring about his loss and probably neither did the inconsistency frame that was so carefully crafted by the Bush campaign, but it did help. Framing John Kerry as a man who’s position you can’t be sure of in a time when stability is needed.

But what is Framing exactly?

According to Entman (1993) ”To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described.”

Scheufele (2014) gives a slightly easier definition: “Framing effects refer to communication effects that are not due to differences in what is being communicated, but rather to variations in how a given piece of information is being presented (or framed) in public discourse”

In the case of John Kerry, the perceived reality of him being a flip-flop is made much more salient and even though he did, in fact, do all the things the ad accuses him of, it’s doubtful he would present the information in the same way. So he was in fact, Framed.

We don’t have to stray far from home to find these tactics

In 2006 Jan-Peter Balkenende from the Christian Democratic party (CDA) and Wouter Bos from the Labour party (PvdA) battle over who will become the next prime minister of the Netherlands. Labour is leading in the polls by a decent margin and the CDA is internally surveying citizens about their opinions about Bos and Balkenende. What they find is not what they had hoped, Bos is beating Balkenende in almost every category, citizens like him more, think he is more capable, a better public speaker and would prefer him as prime minister. There is, however, one category in which Balkenende defeats Bos, trustworthiness. These findings are later backed up by a survey of over half a million citizens (Trouw, 2006). So Balkenende’s campaign team decides to make trustworthiness the central issue of the campaign and attack Bos vigorously on it, culminating in the now renowned phrase uttered by Balkenende in the first debate: “U draait en u bent niet eerlijk”, which roughly translates to: “You are twisting and being dishonest”.

You are dishonest!

This is not just framing, it’s also agenda setting and priming on behalf of the CDA. They framed Bos as untrustworthy and dishonest, but this idea already lived in the minds of many citizens. By talking about it constantly you can put a particular issue at the forefront of people’s minds and they are more likely to attribute importance to it (Scheufele, 2014), that’s agenda setting. Because the debate and the phrase were covered extensively, making it more salient in people’s minds it now becomes more likely to be used as a standard to judge candidates for political office on (Scheufele, 2014), which is called priming. Since Balkenende was already perceived as more trustworthy, that was a battle he couldn’t lose. And he didn’t, winning the election comfortably.

(Image 1: showing the polling in the weeks before the election and the eventual outcome)

Frame your ideals

I’ve shown you that people can be framed in a certain way that makes them lose elections. Not because of their opinions, but of how they are perceived. Is it possible though to change a person’s opinion through framing?

A study by Feinberg & Willer (2015) found that both liberals and conservatives, we’re in the US again, composed persuasive messages that reflected their own moral values, not values unique to those who typically would oppose the political stance. This makes sense right? If I would ask you to give me arguments about why you feel a certain way about a certain topic, it’s likely you would give me arguments that would work on you. The study found that by framing a message by using moral values of your target audience, the message became significantly more persuasive.

To cite a Guardian article: “Environmental issues are often framed in terms of the harm pollution wreaks on the environment. However, when environmental issues are reframed in terms of the conservative value of purity – emphasizing the importance of keeping our forests, drinking water, and skies pure – conservatives are much more likely to support this cause.” (Rathje, 2017)

So yes, it’s possible to frame and change how not only people but even opinions you may have held for a very long time are perceived.

How far is too far?

In the 1988 presidential election between Republican George H. W. Bush (yes the dad), and Democrat Michael Dukakis, a group aligned to the Bush campaign released a now infamous ad about a criminal named Willie Horton.

Willie Horton

A strong personal attack on Dukakis, linking him to a violent murderer. But the ad is now infamous because according to African-American Democrats like Jesse Jackson, the ad played on racial fears (Sides, 2016). Is that taking framing too far?

How about this frame of “Crooked Hillary” used extensively by Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election. Or this image of Dutch Socialist Party leader Emile Roemer in Quote, a magazine focused on business and wealth, where it looks like he’s covered in blood whilst holding a chainsaw symbolizing what would happen to the Netherlands if he became prime minister. The picture is fake of course. Is this taking it too far?

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In this blog, I have tried to show you that with the right kind of framing you can destroy your opponents and win elections. Even though almost none of the frames used were about substance or ideological differences, they were purely attacks on character. That is why I’m going to make a bold statement: “Framing in Political Communication is bad for Democracy”. And I’d love to hear what you think.

You’ve been framed

Yeah. The beauty of framing is that almost everyone does it almost all the time, and so did I in this very blog post. Ask yourself this: How many nuances did I give about the effects of framing on the outcome of elections? How many examples did I give of frames that were ineffective in changing the outcomes of elections? There are plenty, but that’s not the story I wanted to tell, so I cherry picked and thus framed my own message.

The moral of the story is this: be critical, very critical. Because if you try and see the frames that are constantly thrown at you, they might still affect you but at least you know it’s happening.

References

Entman, R. M. (1993). Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication, 43(4), 51-58.

Feinberg, M., & Willer, R. (2015). From Gulf to Bridge: When Do Moral Arguments Facilitate Political Influence? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41(12), 1665–1681. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167215607842

Morin, R., & Deane, C. (2004, July 27) Voters want more specifics about Kerry. TheWashington Post, p. AOL

Rathje, S. (2017). The power of framing, it’s not what you say it’s how you say it. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2017/jul/20/the-power-of-framing-its-not-what-you-say-its-how-you-say-it

Scheufele, D., & Iyengar, S. (2014).The State of Framing Research: A Call for New Directions.The Oxford Handbook of Political Communication. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199793471.013.47

Trouw. (2006). Kieskompas: Balkenende klopt Bos op betrouwbaarheid, Trouw. Retrieved from https ://www.trouw.nl/home/kieskompas-balkenende-klopt-bos-op-betrouwbaarheid~a934f1e8/

Verdon, T. (2008). Attacking Ethos: The Rhetorical Use of Uncertainty in the 2004 Election. Dissertations. 1195. https://aquila.usm.edu/dissertations/1195

Zernike, K. (2004). Who among us does not love windsurfing?, The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/05/weekinreview/who-among-us-does-not-love-windsurfing.html