For those of you who don't know Conservapedia: they call themselves the "trustworthy encyclopedia". This is what they say about Wikipedia
( Read more... )
Conservapedia is an almost-literally awesome illustration of the problems around the idea of "bias". Many people seem to use the word "biased" to mean that they don't agree with something (and, by implication, "objective" or in this case "trustworthy", to mean that they do). It's similar to the Hostile Media Effect, I suppose. One interesting thing about the original Vallone, Ross and Lepper study on this phenomenon is that they found that the more knowledgeable people were more likely to perceive generic news footage as biased against their own position, apparently because they had more facts to find discrepancies with.
In other news, Conservapedia's front page image today is pretty awesome in a non-literal way.
I'd never read about the Hostile Media Effect before! (I also think it's awesome that the link is to Wikipedia. Heee!) But HME makes a lot of sense from a psychological perspective: it's hard to be objective about anything one is emotionally worked-up about. Incidentally, you may be interested to know that when I took Sociology, it was pointed out that Ottawa's media is Right-Center bias; the only paper with a Left bias being the free Metro. Ottawa Sun is Right, Ottawa Citizen is Right-Center and the other free paper (whose name escapes me at the moment) is also Right. I believe the Ottawa News TV programs were all Right or Right-Center if memory serves me correctly. Or maybe I'm suffering from Hostile Media Effect myself...
Wikipedia has a truly amazing selection of articles on various sorts of bias. (In particular, check out the subcategory cognitive biases. HME is presumably a result of various cognitive biases - the interesting thing to me is how dramatically wrong people will be when assessing totally measurable, objective things like how much screen time is given to a subject, or how many people a news spot interviews from each side of a conflict.
I personally test out (on, e.g. the political compass) as just about spot in the centre on left/right issues (which frankly seem to me to mostly be red herrings - and I'm a serious extremist on the libertarian/authoritarian axis). I mention this because I tend to agree that most big newspapers' editorial positions in Canada are indeed right-of-centre, even though (to the extent you can tell), the actual journalists are closer to the centre, or in some cases slightly left of it. There are a couple of mildly left-of-centre papers in Britain, but in Canada the closest thing we have is the Toronto Star
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Who just spent over an hour on Wikipedia reading about biases? Me!
I would love to sit down and talk with you about Israel/Palestine. I just read two books on the history of the Arab peoples and need to hear more from the Israeli viewpoint.
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:P
My favorite page so far was the one on liberals.
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My bet is that the kids whose right-wing nutter parents send them to Conservapedia for school projects do really poorly in science classes...
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In other news, Conservapedia's front page image today is pretty awesome in a non-literal way.
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Incidentally, you may be interested to know that when I took Sociology, it was pointed out that Ottawa's media is Right-Center bias; the only paper with a Left bias being the free Metro. Ottawa Sun is Right, Ottawa Citizen is Right-Center and the other free paper (whose name escapes me at the moment) is also Right. I believe the Ottawa News TV programs were all Right or Right-Center if memory serves me correctly. Or maybe I'm suffering from Hostile Media Effect myself...
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I personally test out (on, e.g. the political compass) as just about spot in the centre on left/right issues (which frankly seem to me to mostly be red herrings - and I'm a serious extremist on the libertarian/authoritarian axis). I mention this because I tend to agree that most big newspapers' editorial positions in Canada are indeed right-of-centre, even though (to the extent you can tell), the actual journalists are closer to the centre, or in some cases slightly left of it. There are a couple of mildly left-of-centre papers in Britain, but in Canada the closest thing we have is the Toronto Star ( ... )
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I would love to sit down and talk with you about Israel/Palestine. I just read two books on the history of the Arab peoples and need to hear more from the Israeli viewpoint.
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