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Reporting reactions to the news, not the news

XKCD: Public OpinionI know I’m not alone in getting frustrated by the tendency, in all forms of mass media, to report on reactions to an event or debate rather than provide substantial detail on the event or debate.  I do realise that it’s because the drama of people’s reactions keeps the audience’s attention for longer, that most people aren’t actually interested in the finer points, that it bores them.

Jon Stewart lambasts America’s television news providers for providing anything but news, but for me the sharpest sense of frustration comes when I read a newspaper.  I don’t really blame the providers of news for being consumed by the desire to entertain when they have sound, colour and moving pictures at their command.  Well, okay, I do.  But the defence of the newspaper editor is far weaker.  Sure, there are technicolour tits on page three, but other than that and an over-sized font for the headlines, there’s not much the newspaper can do to distract you from the article itself.

Most people don’t read more than the first few paragraphs of an article.  That’s why papers like the NY Times put those delicious, tantalising nuggets on the front page for the vrapid browsers among us and then send the hungrier reader off to page Q13, or whatever, to finish the piece.  It’s not a practice we see in Britain, but I quite like it.  It gives a visual honesty to our collective consumption of news.  It lets me imagine, as I hunt through the paper for section Q, that the real meat of the article, the guts, the nitty gritty, the actual news, is available in there somewhere.  Sadly, it almost never is.

I don’t want to single out The Grey Lady.  There is no paper anywhere on earth that consistently lists out the facts in each article.  I don’t even need quality writing.  Just chop off the final paragraph and replace it with the facts in bullet point form.  Nobody reads that paragraph anyway, even if it is the one the journalist fought most with the editor to keep.  Leave the rest of the article peppered with Mr. and Mrs. Jones’s sob story and some politician’s outrage, but give me the facts quietly at the end, where it’s not hurting anyone.

Anyway, via Matt Yglesis, I see that a report has been written by Pew Research on the coverage of the health care debate in America.  You can see the full report here or a summary here.  I quite agree with Matt that the most telling aspect of the report is summarised in the following graph (although I disagree with his conclusion that this is not such a bad result):

Pew: Top Health Care StorylinesIt’s a terrible diagram, because 3D graphs make it near-impossible to read the actual numbers (I wonder if Pew Research sees any irony in trying to present these data in a snazzy format), so let me give them to you:

  • 41% : Politics and strategy
  • 23% : Descriptions of [proposed] plans
  • 9% : [Current] State of health care
  • 8% : Legislative process
  • 6% : Obama’s health care plan
  • 4% : Town hall protests

This is for all forms of media, though.  The then current state of health care featured more prominantly in newspapers, which gave it 18% of their coverage.  That’s better, but I suspect it’s deceptive.  That 18% will have included innumerable emotion-dripping sob stories about some old lady and her dodgy hip.  Disappointingly, online news sites, which have essentially zero marginal cost for an additional paragraph on the end of a story, gave only 8% of their coverage to describing the then current system.

Ah, well.  Go read the report.

Update:  Ezra Klein makes an excellent point:

It’s trite to say it, but the news business is biased toward, well, news. There are plenty of outlets that tell you what happened yesterday, but virtually no organizations that simply tell you what’s going on. Keeping up on the news is easy, but getting a handle on an ongoing situation that you’ve not really been following is hard. In recent years, we’ve seen the rise of outlets like FactCheck.org, which try and police lies that are relevant to the debate. But there’s really no one out there who is trying to give you the background to everything going in the debate. News organizations will write occasional pieces trying to sum up the legislation, but if you miss them, it’s hard to find them again, and they’re not comprehensive anyway. The fact that I still can’t direct people to one really good, really clear, really comprehensive online summary of the bill is an enduring frustration for me, and a real problem given the importance of the legislation and the number of questions there are about it.

If I edited a major publication — or even a medium-size one — I would begin each major legislative battle by detailing a few of my smartest, clearest writers to create a hyperlinked, fairly comprehensive, summary of the basic legislation. That summary would be updated throughout the process, and it would be linked in every single story written on the topic. As reader questions came in, and points of confusion arose, it would be expanded, so by the end, you’d have a document that was current, comprehensive, navigable and responsive to the questions people actually had about the legislation. Telling people what just happened is undeniably important, but given that most people aren’t following that closely, we in the media need to do a better job of telling people what’s been happening.

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An astonishing victory for the Liberal Democrats

Well, I am impressed.  The Lib Dems have obtained everything and more that I predicted yesterday.  I couldn’t be happier.  I’m astounded that the Lib Dems have achieved so much or that the Conservatives were prepared to concede so much.  Congratulations are due to both Cameron and Clegg.  This is a sensible, grown-up result.  Full details of the coalition agreement are yet to be released (they will at 2pm London time), but it looks like:

The Cabinet

  • Lib Dems to have five (!) seats in the cabinet, including deputy PM for Clegg.

Electoral Reform

  • Fixed term (five year) parliament, with the next election to be held on the first Thursday of May, 2015 [Lib Dems].
  • Adjustments to electoral boundaries to equalise the constituency sizes [Tories].
  • A referendum on Alternative Vote — a.k.a. Preferential Voting — for the House of Commons [Lib Dems].
  • Proportional Representation for the House of Lords! [Lib Dems]

Fiscal Policy

  • An emergency budget within 50 days [Tories].
  • A reduction in spending of six billion pounds for the 2010/2011 year [Tories].
  • A gradual raising of the tax-free threshold to £10,000 [Lib Dems].
  • Capital Gains Tax increased to match income tax, [Lib Dems] with lower rates for entrepeneurial business investments [Tories].
  • Inheritance tax to remain unchanged [Lib Dems].
  • The rise in employers’ National Insurance will be scrapped [Tories].
  • The rise in employees’ National Insurance will remain to partially fund the increase in the tax-free threshold [Lib Dems].
  • Tax cut for married couples will go ahead [Tories].

Europe

  • No adoption of the Euro [Tories].
  • Referendum on any future treaties that would cede any power to Brussels [Tories].

Immigration

  • A limit on non-EU immigrants to the UK [Tories].

Security

  • Trident gets replaced [Tories].

Financial Regulation

  • Macroprudential regulation to be at the Bank of England [Tories].
  • Microprudential regulation to be decided later (i.e. the FSA may not be dismantled) [Lib Dems].
  • An independent commission to consider breaking up the biggest banks [Lib Dems].

Energy

  • No agreement on nuclear power, but a Lib Dem will be secretary of state for the environment [Lib Dems].
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15:17 I predict a Conservative-LibDem coalition

The Labour and Liberal Democrat negotiating teams finished a session around 13:30.  The Conservative negotiation team then sat down with the Lib Dems at 14:00.  Ever since then, there has been a steady stream of increasingly-senior Labour figures arguing against a Lab-Lib coalition, which suggests to me that they’re softening up the ground for a Tory-led government.

From the BBC Live stream:

14:26 Labour MP and former minister Michael Meacher says his party should go into opposition and “renew itself”.

14:30 The first Labour minister has openly expressed the feeling that a Lab-Lib coalition is not viable.

14:36 “We must NOT enter a deal with Labour,” writes Keith Nevols, former Lib Dem parliamentary candidate, on his blog.

14:43 The London Evening Standard’s Paul Waugh claims that in last night’s cabinet meeting Health Secretary Andy Burnham “broke ranks to give an ominous warning of the dangers of trying to concoct such an unstable alliance” between Labour and the Lib Dems.

15:12 Labour MP for Batley and Spen Mike Wood says “David Cameron should be PM”.

My prediction:

A Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, with major points along the lines of:

  • Strong support for Tory spending (cut) plans;
  • Freedom for the Lib Dems to oppose the Tory line on Europe and Trident, at the least;
  • Some mechanism to equalise the size of constituencies (which would help the Tories);
  • A referendum on Alternative Vote — a.k.a. Preferential Voting — for the House of Commons (which would help the Lib Dems);
  • No agreement on reform of the House of Lords;
  • The Lib Dems getting one mid-to-high level cabinet position (something like Home Secretary); and
  • An intention to keep the new parliament for at least two years.

The Lib Dems will desperately want two things:

  1. to have electoral reform enacted (presuming that they succeed in the referendum) before the next election; and
  2. to have an opportunity to be seen to be actively influencing policy in their favour.

Of course, the Liberal Democrats have their Southport resolution.  Any coalition must obtain 75% support amoung Lib Dem MPs, members of the House of Lords and executives of the party.  Nevertheless, I think that they’ll pull it through.  If nothing else, the prospect of the first Lib Dem cabinet position in a century will awaken the real politik in their MPs.

Previously on the UK electoral system:

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British vs. Australian electoral systems

How the Australian electoral system is better than the British

  • Mandatory voting
  • A democratically elected upper house
  • Preferential voting in the lower house, proportional in the upper (no first-past-the-post)
  • The electoral commission adjusts the electoral boundaries every cycle
  • Elections are always on a Saturday so that everyone has time to get to the polling stations
  • Elections in all seats are administratively run by the Electoral commission

How the British electoral system is better than the Australian

  • The electoral cycle is longer.  Australia’s 2-to-3 years is too short.

How they both suck

  • Variable term limits.  There should be fixed term limits.  4 years in the lower house, 8 years in the upper (half re-elected each time).
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Why electoral boundaries favour Labour and why electoral reform would favour the Liberal Democrats

Brief answers to three questions about elections in the United Kingdom:

  • Why do electoral boundaries favour Labour?
  • Why would moving to Proportional Representation favour the Liberal Democrats?
  • Why would moving to Alternative Vote/Instant Runoff/Preferential Voting favour the Liberal Democrats?

Why the current seat allocation is biased towards Labour
Two reasons:

Firstly, it’s because of demographics, migration and the timing of boundary changes.  There’s a long-term trend across most of the country (excluding London) for people to be moving away from inner city areas and towards suburban, semi-rural and rural areas.  On average, that represents a movement of Labour-party supporters into Conservative seats.  As a result, the inner city areas remain staunchly pro-Labour, but the suburban and semi-rural areas become contested.  Under British law, electoral boundaries are only updated very rarely.  Quoting ukpollingreport.co.uk:

Because the effect of boundary changes is one way, any delay in keeping the boundaries up to date with population movements tends to be to the advantage of the Labour party and the disadvantage of the Conservatives.Currently, Parliamentary boundary reviews are based on the electorates at the time the boundary review commences (unlike local authorities boundaries, which are based on projections of the future electorate). In the case of the boundaries which will be used for the next election, the review began in 2000, so by the time the boundaries are first used in 2009/10 they will already be a decade out of date. By the time they are replaced by the next boundary review, due to report between 2014 and 2018, they will be close to 20 years out of date.

Secondly, there are different rates of turnout across different seats.  The poor and poorly educated correlate positively with Labour support and negatively with turning out to vote.

To appreciate what this means, suppose that you had two seats with equal numbers of people living in them (contrary to the demographics mentioned above); one generally pro-Labour and the other generally pro-Tory.  Let’s say that they each win 60-40.  On election day only 25% of eligible voters turn up in the pro-Labour seat, but 75% of eligible voters turn up in the pro-Conservative seat.  That will produce one Labour MP and one Tory MP (50% each), but when combined, the Conservatives will have received 60%*75% + 40%*25% = 55% of all the votes cast.

When combined with the demographic changes, this adds up to a significant advantage for Labour.  Obviously the second distortion (but not the demographic one) vanishes if you introduce compulsory voting like we have in Australia.

How Proportional Representation would help the Lib Dems

This one is easy to explain:

  • In 1992, the Lib Dems received 17.8% of the total vote, but only 3.1% of the seats in parliament.
  • In 1997, the Lib Dems received 16.8% of the total vote, but only 7.0% of the seats in parliament.
  • In 2001, the Lib Dems received 18.3% of the total vote, but only 7.9% of the seats in parliament.
  • In 2005, the Lib Dems received 22.6% of the total vote, but only 9.5% of the seats in parliament.
  • According to the fivethirtyeight.com forecast, this week the Lib Dems will receive 28.7% of the total vote, but only 18.4% of the seats in parliament

How Alternative Vote/Instant Runoff/Preferential Voting would help the Lib Dems
Two reasons:

Firstly, with first-past-the-post, Lib Dem supporters have an incentive to vote for someone else so that their vote “counts”.  This effect is particularly strong in contests that are perceived to be close (so it’s less of a concern this time).

Secondly, the Lib Dems do well when you ask people to rank their preferences – they’re rarely 1st, but they’re frequently 2nd.  To really understand how this would affect things, have a look at the transition matrix fivethirtyeight.com uses in their prediction.  This is their matrix for how they believe people have changed relative to 2005 (e.g. of previous Labour voters, 62% remain with Labour, 9% have switched to the Tories, 13% to the Lib Dems, etc):

It is therefore not really a matrix of average preferences, but it gives an idea of what it might be.

When Labour supporters switch, they favour the Lib Dems over the Tories 13/9 = 1.44
When Tory supporters switch, they favour the Lib Dems over Labour 6.5/3 = 2.17
When Lib Dem supporters switch, they narrowly favour the Tories over Labour 5/4 = 1.25

So, with preferential voting and pretending that there are only the three parties contesting each seat:

If a Lib Dem candidate is in the top two after the first round of voting, they can be confident of receiving the majority of the preferences of the supporters of the 3rd ranked candidate, no matter who they were.

But that can’t be said for the other two parties.  If a Labour or Tory candidate is in the twop two after the first round, whether they get a majority of the 3rd-place candidate’s preferences crucially depends on the identity of that 3rd-place candidate.  If it was Lib Dem in 3rd place, it’s a flip of the dice.  If it was the other big party in 3rd place, they’ll typically get only a minority of the preferences.

On average — over many seats and over several elections — that skewing of preference ranking will act in the Lib Dems’ favour with preferential voting.

Alternative Vote/Instant Runoff/Preferential Voting would help the Lib Dems
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I am Britralian

… being both British and Australian.  It only took seven and a half years of living in Ol’ Blighty to do it.  The ceremony took place in the chambers of the Camden Council Hall — all dark timber and green leather.  There were about 30 of us in the ceremony.  Roughly half chose to swear their allegence by God, and half to affirm it without any religious reference.  Now I get to wait six weeks before getting my British passport.

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What were Hoon and Hewitt thinking?

I don’t understand the (failed) attempt by Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon to inspire a leadership challenge in the Labour Party here in the UK.  Any serious contender for the job (i.e. Milliband) would surely recognise that the chance of a Labour victory in this year’s general election is miniscule, no matter who leads the party, and to lose an election three or four months into your leadership would hardly make for a sterling start.

If one takes a Tory victory as given, it would be far better to let Brown take the full hit for the loss.  Keep him on as a figurehead to take all the bile, spit, rage and blame for the state of the country as a whole and the state of the government’s finances and the electoral loss in particular.  Let the voting public gorge themselves in a cathartic spasm of kicking the Blair/Brown pairing and then shuffle Brown off, declare that there will be no return to Old Labour and start observing loudly at every opportunity that now it’s the Tories that are all about spin.

Brown’s job at this point is not so much to put out the fire — that can no longer be done — but to save the furniture.  So why did Hewitt and Hoon do this?  It was never going to work and it only serves to further lessen the probability of Labour retaining some of their seats.

The obvious answer is that they don’t consider a Tory victory to be a foregone conclusion and somehow think that simply getting rid of Brown will help the broader party separate itself from the Blair/Brown brand.  The first part of that sentence may indeed be true (afterall, the Tories need an average swing of 7% to win), but the second is utterly false.  Labour will not escape the Blair/Brown brand until they’ve spent some time in opposition for the simple reason that the public needs to kill it before they will forget about it.

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Food stamps in America

Here is a NY Times article doing what the NY Times does well, this time looking at the use of food stamps across America.  Here are the basic details (emphasis is all mine):

With food stamp use at record highs and climbing every month, a program once scorned as a failed welfare scheme now helps feed one in eight Americans and one in four children.

It has grown so rapidly in places so diverse that it is becoming nearly as ordinary as the groceries it buys. More than 36 million people use inconspicuous plastic cards for staples like milk, bread and cheese
[…]
the program is now expanding at a pace of about 20,000 people a day. There are 239 counties in the United States where at least a quarter of the population receives food stamps
[…]
Nationwide, food stamps reach about two-thirds of those eligible, with rates ranging from an estimated 50 percent in California to 98 percent in Missouri. Mr. Concannon urged lagging states to do more to enroll the needy, citing a recent government report that found a sharp rise in Americans with inconsistent access to adequate food.
[…]
Unemployment insurance, despite rapid growth, reaches about only half the jobless (and replaces about half their income), making food stamps the only aid many people can get — the safety net’s safety net.

Support for the food stamp program reached a nadir in the mid-1990s when critics, likening the benefit to cash welfare, won significant restrictions and sought even more. But after use plunged for several years, President Bill Clinton began promoting the program, in part as a way to help the working poor. President George W. Bush expanded that effort, a strategy Mr. Obama has embraced.

The revival was crowned last year with an upbeat change of name. What most people still call food stamps is technically the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.
[…]
Now nearly 12 percent of Americans receive aid — 28 percent of blacks, 15 percent of Latinos and 8 percent of whites. Benefits average about $130 a month for each person in the household, but vary with shelter and child care costs.
[…]
Use among children is especially high. A third of the children in Louisiana, Missouri and Tennessee receive food aid. In the Bronx, the rate is 46 percent. In East Carroll Parish, La., three-quarters of the children receive food stamps.

A recent study by Mark R. Rank, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, startled some policy makers in finding that half of Americans receive food stamps, at least briefly, by the time they turn 20. Among black children, the figure was 90 percent.

I’m not sure how I feel about food stamps.  The classically-trained economist in me wants to point out that money is fungible, so that:

  • for people that, if they were given the equivalent amount of cash, would have bought the same amount of food,  the program largely serves to impose unnecessary administrative costs over a simple cash transfer and places a stigma on the recipients; and
  • for people that, if they were given the equivalent amount of cash, would have bought less food, the program (arguably) willfully deprives them of welfare in addition to the administrative costs and stigma.

On the other hand, we have that:

  • for the (presumed) minority of recipients that have problems with drug or alcohol abuse or have a family member that has problems, receiving aid in the form of food stamps helps ensure that there’s still food on the table (although I do assume that there is a secondary market in food stamps, not to mention in food itself);
  • for the recipients living in high-crime areas, the incentive to steal food stamps is lower than that to steal cash (even if there is a secondary market, it’ll be annoying to deal with and won’t give 100 cents on the dollar), so receiving food stamps is safer;
  • by giving people food stamps instead of cash, you reduce the possibility of a sense of entitlement emerging (one of the major problems in countries, like Britain, with comprehensive welfare systems is that recipients can come to consider the aid they receive as their right and not just (hopefully temporary) assistance); and
  • America, for some reason that is mostly beyond me, has always had trouble facing up to the moral imperative to assist those in genuine need and presenting that assistance as food stamps seems to have granted it some political cover.

Anyway, the NY Times piece comes with some more fantastic graphics.  Here are two snapshots (click-through on either of them to get to the good stuff on the NY Times website):

NYTimes_Foodstamps

NYTimes_Foodstamps_Change

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Well, that didn’t take long (Trafigura)

About an hour ago I wrote about an article in The Guardian about how they had been prevented from writing about parliamentary proceedings via a court injunction.  In particular, they weren’t allowed to write about this question put before parliament:

(292409)

Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme): To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.

The story became a Twitter sensation.  Trafigura and Carter-Ruck have been the hottest trending topics on Twitter for the last few hours, the Liberal Democrats sought an urgent debate on press freedom and now, as their journalists write furiously in the background with their editors looking over their shoulders to save time, The Guardian is reporting on their front page:

Breaking news: * LATEST: Guardian can reveal that parliamentary question from Paul Farrelly MP subjected to reporting ban was related to Trafigura toxic waste scandal. More details soon ..

Which is to say that the gag has been lifted in under (?) 24 hours.

This has all been a tremendous example of the Streisand effect, named for Barbara Streisand’s catastrophically backfiring attempt to prevent a picture of her house being made available on the internet.  While attempting to surpress attention, Trafigura and Carter-Ruck have only managed attract a huge amount of attention to themselves.

It’s a PR nightmare for them and a happy day for The Guardian.

Update 1: Here is confirmation from the Guardian.

Update 2: Here is the BBC on the matter.  By way of explaining why they did not cover the story despite not being expressly mentioned in the injunction, they say:

No injunction was served on the BBC, but ever since the Spycatcher case in the 1980s news organisations which knowingly breach an injunction served on others are in contempt of court, so the corporation too felt bound by the Guardian injunction.

Which is the equivalent of “once bitten, (forever) twice shy.”  The Beeb finishes by quoting Steven Fry’s tweet from when he discovered the good news:

Can it be true? Carter-Ruck caves in! Hurrah! Trafigura will deny it had anything to do with Twitter, but we know don’t we? We know! Yay!!!

Update 3: BBC Newsnight will have a special on Trafigura and their chemical disposals tonight.