The Internet, TV, talk radio and newspapers recently pushed at readers, viewers and listeners the fact that Kathleen Sebelius, Obama's pick for Secretary of Health and Human Services, paid more than $7,000 in back taxes. A mistake, she and her husband said, representing an error related to charity contributions over the past three years. I don't doubt that.
Yet, the first four newspapers I skimmed on Monday, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune, plus CNN online, all gave the error attention. They positioned the issue according to their bias, and each made something of it. I understand media enough to know that in order to sell their services they have to create a conflict, stir the waters and get a bit of attention. On Thursday, when NPR announced that she was being interviewed by the relevant committe all that was said had to do with her tax error.
All this was over $7,000. Chump change. Chicken feed. It demonstrates the power of the media to take an irrelevancy, and create a profitable conflict. Any way you look at it, the audience is being suckered.
FYI: The role of the news industry is to do business with business. After all, the media stand to profit from the success of their clients and customers whether their clients are MercedesBenz or the classified ad placer.
Does news manipulation really occur or am I overly sensitive the power of media? Any answer to that question leads to debate between between those who espouse a free press and free speech, and those who denouce the profit system. I don't intend to go there.
A better way to react to the question is to say that the news is manipulated, selected, shaped, and massaged to attract the largest share of the audience--to please the most and offend the fewest.
How do you read the news?
First, don't get suckered by the use of numbers and statistics. Numbers with either dollar signs ($) in front of them, or percentage (%) signs behind them are not to be readily trusted. Instead. ask not only questions about the accuracy of the numbers, but also their importance strategically. Is it really wise to reject the candidacy of a talented person that made a $7,000 error over a three year period?
Furthermore, you always want to know the size of the sample when a person uses percentages. If you say that "20% of people believe that . . . .," but you've only sampled 20 people, you're telling me that four people believe. . . . That's meaningless. Nobel prize winner, Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky, showed that in making judgments people have little appreciation for sampling size. The "law of large numbers" refers to the fact that the larger the sample, the more likely it is that it will faithfully reflect the values of the population at large. You need a background in statistics as well as knowledge of a subject to know how large a sample size is necessary to draw any realistic conclusions.
To wit, the fact that less than ten of the candidates nominated by President Obama made tax errors tells you nothing. Yet, talk radio would have you believe that, based on the four candidates with tax errors, politicians cannot be trusted. The only conclusion possible with that small sample is "nonsense."
Second, don't get suckered by vivid, exciting examples or illustrations. As a general rule, anecdotes can be dug up or created to support most any political, social or cultural position. Ronald Reagan came to power on a popular backlash against the welfare state. Repeating an anecdote about a "welfare queen" from Chicago's South Side, who was arrested for welfare fraud, he said,
She has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran's benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She's got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names.
Reagan never named the woman and the story was found to be baseless. The anecdote was told more than 80 times and was used to inflame the public, and support his election.
Back to the $7,000 tax error. We live in a highly persuasive, media-rich envirnoment. There's no way to filter out all the manipulative messages. But we can become responsible consumers, able to make wise decisions, looking beyond surface meanings to challenge vivid anecdotes and question the meaning of statistics and numbers.