90% true: Broken news

This post is only 90% true. Among these ten items, one was deliberately made-up. Each items includes links to sources, so you can easily check if they are true. Can you find the fake item? (More information about the series here.)

Answer for the previous episode, “Agriculture from the future”: #5 was false.

1. The mainstream media is clearly biased against your political group. At least, that’s what you think. This called the “hostile media effect” – people from both sides of any issue consistently believe that the media is biased against their side. And the more involved they are, the stronger the effect.

2. Is it possible to measure the political bias of a journal objectively? Researchers at Stanford and Cornell came up with a clever solution: they compared the full transcript of politicians’ speeches to the parts that were quoted in the media. As it turns out, different journals will put the emphasis on different parts of the speech. This allowed the researchers to make a map of many media outlets based on their bias. They also have a fascinating interactive tool where you can look at Barack Obama’s speeches and color the different phrases according to the political leaning of journals that cited them – right-wing media in red, left-wing media in blue. Color-coded Obama speech

3. Another approach to quantify media bias is simply to ask journalists who they vote for, and compare them to the rest of the population. To put it simply, journalists tend to be considerably more left-wing than the average person. According to a series of large surveys of American journalists spanning several decades, the share of Republicans shrunk from 25% in the 1970s to 7% in 2013 – making them outnumbered 4 times by Democrats. Other recent analyses found similar results.

4. Over the last thirty years, the media has become measurably more subjective and emotional. A large lexical analysis of media from the USA found that journalists report less and less about facts and context, and more and more about emotions and advocacy. But, to their defense, it’s not just journalists. Speeches of politicians themselves become less analytic and more clout-based. This did not start with Donald Trump – it has been happening gradually since 1900.

5. Terrorist attacks receive unequal coverage from the media. An analysis of 136 terror attacks in the USA found that the number of victims, the nature of the target and whether the perpetrator was arrested all influence the coverage. But the most important predictor was the religion of the perpetrator: if it was done by a Muslim, it received 357% more media coverage.

6. Speaking of terrorism, there is evidence that abundant coverage of mass shootings by the media causes future mass shootings in the following days. To detect causality, this study used natural disasters as an instrument. If a natural disaster happens around the same time as a mass shooting, the later receives less coverage – and we can see there are fewer mass shootings in the next few days.

7. Criminals tend to receive longer sentences when television talks a lot about criminal events. This effect is not due to the overall amount of crime, but specifically to media exposure.

8. Native advertising is the practice of including advertisement that blends in the native style of the journal. This is not only used by companies to insidiously praise their products, but also by authoritarian governments from other countries to publish their political propaganda. China Daily, an English-language publication controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, has paid millions to American journals such as the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times to publish propaganda disguised as regular articles1Native advertising is usually disclosed with a little label, like “sponsored content”..

9. The protozoan Toxoplasma gondii, which infects about one third of the population in asymptomatic form, is known to alter behavior and increase impulsivity and aggression. A 2018 study from University of Colorado found that students who tested positive for Toxoplasma were 1.4 times more likely to major in journalism. In addition, they were 1.7 times more likely to select courses specifically on political journalism.

10. Does the political bias of the news you read affect what you think in a causal way? Researchers offered free subscriptions to either the left-wing Washington Post or the right-wing Washington Times, in a randomized way. They also had a control group who received no free subscription. One month later, Virginia held gubernatorial elections and the researchers asked the subjects of the experiment who they voted for. Those who received the Post were 11% more likely to vote Democrat. But those who received the Times were also 7.4% more likely to vote Democrat, compared to the group that received nothing. Apparently, reading a print journal makes you more likely to vote Democrat, regardless of the journal’s political orientation.

Could you find the false item? Feel free to discuss about it in the comment section. The answer will be given in the next episode.


  1. Ok, I’m genuinely unsure on this one. But the toxoplasma study said nothing about being a journalist, and those infected were 1.4x as likely to major in business, not journalism

    Please keep this series up! I play the game with my roommates!

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