Meet the Press

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meet_the_Press

 

Meet the Press
Also known as	Meet the Press with Chuck Todd
Genre	Public affairs/news analysis program
Created by	Martha Rountree Lawrence E. Spivak
Directed by	Rob Melick
Presented by	Chuck Todd
Narrated by	Fred Facey Bert Pence Dennis Haysbert
Theme music composer	John Williams
Opening theme	"The Pulse of Events" (fourth part of The Mission)
Country of origin	United States
Original language	English
No. of seasons	70
No. of episodes	3,600+
Production
Executive producer	John Reiss
Production locations	NBC News Washington Bureau, Capitol Hill, Washington, D.C.
Camera setup	Multi-camera
Running time	30 minutes (1947–1992) 52 minutes (1992–present)
Production company	NBC News Productions
Release
Original network	NBC
Original release	November 6, 1947 – present
External links
Website

Meet the Press is a weekly American television news/interview program broadcast on NBC. It is the longest-running program on American television, though the current format bears little resemblance to the debut episode on November 6, 1947. Meet the Press specializes in interviews with leaders in Washington, D.C., across the country and even the world on issues of politics, economics, foreign policy, and other public affairs, along with panel discussions that provide opinions and analysis. In January 2021, production moved to NBC's bureau on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

The longevity of Meet the Press is attributable in part to the fact that the program debuted during what was only the second official "network television season" for American television. It was the first live television network news program on which a sitting president of the United States appeared; this occurred on its broadcast on November 9, 1975, which featured Gerald Ford. The program has been hosted by 12 different moderators, beginning with creator Martha Rountree. The show's moderator since 2014 is Chuck Todd, who also serves as political director for NBC News.

Currently, the hour-long program airs in most markets on Sundays at 9:00 a.m. live in the Eastern Time Zone and on tape delay elsewhere. Meet the Press is also occasionally pre-empted due to network coverage of sports events held outside the U.S. The program is also rebroadcast on Mondays at 4:00 a.m. Eastern Time on MSNBC, whose audio feed is also simulcast on Sirius/XM Satellite Radio. The program is also syndicated by Westwood One to various radio stations around the United States, as well as on C-SPAN Radio as part of its replays of the Sunday morning talk shows.

Format

The program's format consists of an extended one-on-one interview with the host, and is sometimes followed by a roundtable discussion or one-on-two interview with figures in adversarial positions, either Congressional members from opposite sides of the aisle or political commentators. Originally a half-hour program for most of its history, the show expanded to 60 minutes starting with the broadcast on September 20, 1992.

The program also features in-depth examinations of facts behind political and general news stories (particularly as part of a segment called the "Data Download", introduced after Chuck Todd assumed duties as moderator, which is conducted on a touchscreen within the main set).

History

Meet the Press set, November 1975. On this broadcast, a sitting American president (Gerald Ford) was, for the first time, a guest on a live television network news program.

Meet the Press began on radio on the Mutual Broadcasting System in 1945 as American Mercury Presents: Meet the Press, a program to promote The American Mercury, a magazine that Lawrence E. Spivak purchased in 1935. Before the program aired, Spivak asked journalist Martha Rountree, who had worked in radio and had been employed by Spivak as a roving editor for the magazine, to critique the plans for the new radio show. Based on her advice, Rountree created a new radio program that she called The American Mercury, on October 5, 1945.

On November 6, 1947, while still on the Mutual Broadcasting System, the television rights to the program were purchased by General Foods, which began to air the show on the NBC television network with the title shortened to simply Meet the Press; the radio version also adopted the new name. Although some sources credit Spivak with the program's creation, Rountree developed the idea on her own, and Spivak joined as co-producer and business partner in the enterprise after the show had already debuted.

Meet the Press was originally presented as a 30-minute press conference with a single guest and a panel of questioners. Its first guest was James Farley, who served as Postmaster General, Democratic National Committee chairman and campaign manager to Franklin Delano Roosevelt under the first two terms of the New Deal Administration. Creator Rountree served as its first host, the program's only female moderator to date. She stepped down on November 1, 1953, and was succeeded by Ned Brooks, who remained as moderator until his retirement on December 26, 1965. Spivak became the moderator on January 1, 1966, moving up from his role as a permanent panelist. He retired on November 9, 1975, on a special one-hour edition that featured a sitting president as guest for the first time, in this case Gerald Ford. The next week, Bill Monroe, previously a weekly panelist like Spivak had been years before, took over as moderator and stayed until June 2, 1984.

For the next seven and a half years, the program then went through a series of hosts as it struggled in the ratings against ABC's This Week with David Brinkley. Roger Mudd and Marvin Kalb, as co-moderators, followed Monroe for a year, followed by Chris Wallace (who would later to go on to a much longer run as host of the rival program Fox News Sunday) from 1987 to 1988. Garrick Utley, then hosting Weekend Today, concurrently hosted Meet the Press from 1989 through December 1, 1991. All this occurred despite the increasing ratings of NBC News' other programs (and those of the network generally) during that period. The program originally aired at noon Eastern Time every Sunday, before moving to a 9:00 a.m. slot by the early 1990s.

Under Russert

Meet the Press logo used from September 10, 1995 to June 8, 2008.

 

Russert interviews General Peter Pace in 2006.

Network officials, concerned for the show's future, turned to Tim Russert, the network's bureau chief in Washington, D.C. He took over as moderator of Meet the Press on December 8, 1991, and remained with the program until his death on June 13, 2008, becoming the longest-serving moderator in the program's history.

Under Russert, the program was expanded to one hour and became less of a televised press conference, focusing more on Russert's questions and comments; Russert also engaged in longer in-depth interviews and hosted panels of experts to discuss the topics featured in that week's broadcast. Russert signed off each edition by saying, "That's all for today. We'll be back next week. If it's Sunday, it's Meet the Press."

During the professional football season, Russert, a native of Buffalo, New York, and an avid fan of the Buffalo Bills, sometimes added, "Go Bills!," and occasionally would ask panelists, "How 'bout those Sabres?" if Buffalo's NHL hockey team was doing well. Spoofs of the show featured in a recurring sketch on Saturday Night Live often reflected his impromptu additions in support of the two professional sports franchises. By 2006, Meet the Press was the highest-rated program among the Sunday morning talk shows.

On June 13, 2008, Russert died of a sudden coronary thrombosis (caused by a cholesterol plaque rupture). Former NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw hosted a special edition of Meet the Press dedicated to the life of Russert on June 15, 2008, in which Russert's chair was left empty as a tribute.

Guest moderators

• Andrea Mitchell (August 15, 2004)

After Russert

Mark Whitaker was named by NBC News as the division's Washington D.C. Bureau Chief and was given "executive oversight" of Meet the Press.

Interim Brokaw era

NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams acted as moderator of the first show following the tribute to Russert on June 15, 2008, with the same guests and subject matter that Russert was planning for when he died.

Following Russert's death, Tom Brokaw was named the interim moderator through the 2008 general elections. Brokaw followed Russert's tradition by signing off with "We'll be back next Sunday because if it's Sunday, it's Meet the Press" (a sign-off that would continue to be used by his successors as moderator). In September of that year, the show was presented with limited commercial interruption.

On August 10, 2008, David Gregory moderated the panel discussion during the second half-hour of the broadcast, while Brokaw anchored the first half-hour from the site of the Summer Olympics in Beijing. The following week on August 17, 2008, he moderated the entire broadcast. On December 1, 2008, it was also reported that the December 7 broadcast would be Brokaw's last, with Gregory becoming the new permanent host the following Sunday.

Under Gregory

David Gregory began his tenure as moderator on December 14, 2008. Four days after Gregory's first regular broadcast, on December 18, 2008, NBC News political director Chuck Todd was named contributing editor of Meet the Press. Throughout Gregory's tenure as moderator, Meet the Press experienced significant ratings declines. In the final three months of 2013, the program placed third among the Sunday morning talk shows in total viewership, behind CBS's Face the Nation and ABC's This Week for the first time since 1992, it also experienced the lowest ratings in the show's entire history among the key 25-to-54 age viewing demographic during this period. NBC management became uncertain as to the future direction of the program.

A new set was introduced on May 2, 2010, featuring video screens and library-style bookshelves; Gregory would preview the guests to be featured during each week's broadcast using a large video screen. Different, modified intro music was also introduced, with the Meet the Press theme music in a shorter "modernized [style]... the beginning repeated with drum beats" (see "High-definition broadcasting" below for additional information).

Under Todd

Meet the Press logo used from May 2, 2010 (introduced under former moderator David Gregory) to November 5, 2017.

 

Senator Chris Murphy on Meet the Press

 

U.S. President Barack Obama participates in an interview with Todd in the Cabinet Room of the White House, September 6, 2014.

In response to declining viewership, rumors surfaced in August 2014 that Gregory would be replaced as the program's moderator. NBC News President Deborah Turness apparently had held discussions with Jon Stewart (then-host of Comedy Central's news comedy program The Daily Show) to replace Gregory, which Stewart later confirmed in a Rolling Stone interview, saying, "My guess is they were casting as wide and as weird a net as they could. I'm sure part of them was thinking, 'Why don't we just make it a variety show?'"

On August 14, 2014, Turness announced that Chuck Todd, NBC's chief White House correspondent, would take over the role of moderator on September 7, 2014. Because of Todd's Dodger fanhood, a Los Angeles Dodger poster became part of the physical format.

MTP Daily

On September 28, 2015, MSNBC premiered MTP Daily, a new weekday spin-off also hosted by Todd. It formally replaced The Ed Show as MSNBC's early-evening program after a transitional period following its cancellation. MSNBC explained that the program is meant to "bring the insight and power of Meet the Press to our air every day of the week".

Disinformation overtaking media

In a December 2019 interview with Rolling Stone, Todd discussed how disinformation overtook the media during the Trump administration. However, PressThink, a project of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, took Todd to task for failing to address the issue as it unfolded, in a very detailed discussion of Todd's remarks.

High-definition broadcasting

The set utilized from March 17, 1996, to April 25, 2010, had been designed as an experimental set for high-definition broadcasting; several editions of the program (including the first broadcast of a regular series on a major television network in HD) had aired in the format in the 1990s over experimental HD station WHD-TV in Washington, D.C. Despite this, the program continued to be transmitted in NTSC over the NBC network itself. On May 2, 2010, Meet the Press became the last NBC News program to convert to high definition, and unveiled a new set consisting of large video screens mostly used to display Washington scenery, satellite interview subjects and moderator and subject talking points, along with graphics produced for the format.

In January 2021, production of the program moved from WRC-TV facilities in Tenleytown to a ground floor studio in NBC's new Washington D.C. bureau on Capitol Hill. The move included a new set.

Moderators

The following is the list of moderators for Meet the Press:

Moderator	Date
Martha Rountree	1947–1953
Ned Brooks	1953–1965
Lawrence E. Spivak	1966–1975
Bill Monroe	1975–1984
Roger Mudd and Marvin Kalb (co-moderators)	1984–1985
Marvin Kalb	1985–1987
Chris Wallace	1987–1988
Garrick Utley	1989–1991
Tim Russert	1991–2008
Tom Brokaw	2008
David Gregory	2008–2014
Chuck Todd	2014–present

Notable guests and events

Whittaker Chambers's very first answer on the August 27, 1948, helped move Meet the Press from radio to television

Guests transformed certain episodes into historical events, including:

• First guest: James A. Farley, the former Postmaster General of the United States and former Democratic National Committee Chair.
• Whittaker Chambers states Alger Hiss was a communist on the radio broadcast on August 27, 1948, which leads to libel suit from Hiss, the Pumpkin Papers, and Justice's indictment of Hiss by December 1948.
• First female guest: Elizabeth Bentley, a courier for a Communist spy ring, on September 12, 1948.
• An interview with Fidel Castro aired April 19, 1959.
• An interview with Martin Luther King Jr., about the civil rights movement in the United States.
• Every U.S. president since John F. Kennedy has appeared on Meet the Press, although not necessarily during their presidency. Jimmy Carter used his appearance on January 20, 1980, to announce the United States' boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics. Ronald Reagan appeared seven times before being elected president, but did not appear during his presidency. Bill Clinton was the guest for the 50th anniversary broadcast on November 9, 1997. The interview with George W. Bush was conducted in the Oval Office at the White House on February 8, 2004. The interview was held with then President-elect Barack Obama on December 7, 2008. Donald Trump has appeared on the program a number of times, most recently in June 2019.
• The first live communications satellite television interview occurred on Meet the Press on September 19, 1965, with the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson.

Distribution

In addition to its broadcasts on NBC, Meet the Press also airs on various other NBCUniversal-owned channels domestically and internationally, including MSNBC, CNBC in the United States and Canada, CNBC Europe in Europe and CNBC Asia in Asia. It is also broadcast in Australia on the Seven Network and in the Philippines on 9TV.

Meet the Press is also available as an audio or video podcast, and is simulcast on radio stations by Westwood One (which also handles distribution of all other NBC-produced radio programming, including NBC News Radio).

Propaganda model

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model 

The propaganda model is a conceptual model in political economy advanced by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky to explain how propaganda and systemic biases function in corporate mass media. The model seeks to explain how populations are manipulated and how consent for economic, social, and political policies, both foreign and domestic, is "manufactured" in the public mind due to this propaganda. The theory posits that the way in which corporate media is structured (e.g. through advertising, concentration of media ownership or government sourcing) creates an inherent conflict of interest and therefore acts as propaganda for anti-democratic elements.

First presented in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, the propaganda model views corporate media as businesses interested in the sale of a product—readers and audiences—to other businesses (advertisers) rather than the pursuit of quality journalism in service of the public. Describing the media's "societal purpose", Chomsky writes, "... the study of institutions and how they function must be scrupulously ignored, apart from fringe elements or a relatively obscure scholarly literature". The theory postulates five general classes of "filters" that determine the type of news that is presented in news media. These five classes are: ownership of the medium, the medium's funding sources, sourcing, flak, and anti-communism or "fear ideology".

The first three are generally regarded by the authors as being the most important. In versions published after the 9/11 attacks on the United States in 2001, Chomsky and Herman updated the fifth prong to instead refer to the "War on Terror" and "counter-terrorism", which they state operates in much the same manner.

Although the model was based mainly on the media of the United States, Chomsky and Herman believe the theory is equally applicable to any country that shares the basic economic structure and organizing principles that the model postulates as the cause of media biases. Their assessment has been confirmed by a number of scholars and the propaganda role of the media has since been empirically assessed in Western Europe and Latin America.

Filters

Ownership

The size and profit-seeking imperative of dominant media corporations create a bias. The authors point to how in the early nineteenth century, a radical British press had emerged that addressed the concerns of workers, but excessive stamp duties, designed to restrict newspaper ownership to the 'respectable' wealthy, began to change the face of the press. Nevertheless, there remained a degree of diversity. In post World War II Britain, radical or worker-friendly newspapers such as the Daily Herald, News Chronicle, Sunday Citizen (all since failed or absorbed into other publications), and the Daily Mirror (at least until the late 1970s) regularly published articles questioning the capitalist system. The authors posit that these earlier radical papers were not constrained by corporate ownership and therefore, were free to criticize the capitalist system.

A table of six big media conglomerates in 2014, including some of their subsidiaries.

Herman and Chomsky argue that since mainstream media outlets are currently either large corporations or part of conglomerates (e.g. Westinghouse or General Electric), the information presented to the public will be biased with respect to these interests. Such conglomerates frequently extend beyond traditional media fields and thus have extensive financial interests that may be endangered when certain information is publicized. According to this reasoning, news items that most endanger the corporate financial interests of those who own the media will face the greatest bias and censorship.

It then follows that if to maximize profit means sacrificing news objectivity, then the news sources that ultimately survive must be fundamentally biased, with regard to news in which they have a conflict of interest.

Advertising

The second filter of the propaganda model is funding generated through advertising. Most newspapers have to attract advertising in order to cover the costs of production; without it, they would have to increase the price of their newspaper. There is fierce competition throughout the media to attract advertisers; a newspaper which gets less advertising than its competitors is at a serious disadvantage. Lack of success in raising advertising revenue was another factor in the demise of the 'people's newspapers' of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The product is composed of the affluent readers who buy the newspaper—who also comprise the educated decision-making sector of the population—while the actual clientele served by the newspaper includes the businesses that pay to advertise their goods. According to this filter, the news is "filler" to get privileged readers to see the advertisements which makes up the content and will thus take whatever form is most conducive to attracting educated decision-makers. Stories that conflict with their "buying mood", it is argued, will tend to be marginalized or excluded, along with information that presents a picture of the world that collides with advertisers' interests. The theory argues that the people buying the newspaper are the product which is sold to the businesses that buy advertising space; the news has only a marginal role as the product.

Sourcing

The third of Herman and Chomsky's five filters relates to the sourcing of mass media news: "The mass media are drawn into a symbiotic relationship with powerful sources of information by economic necessity and reciprocity of interest." Even large media corporations such as the BBC cannot afford to place reporters everywhere. They concentrate their resources where news stories are likely to happen: the White House, the Pentagon, 10 Downing Street and other central news "terminals". Although British newspapers may occasionally complain about the "spin-doctoring" of New Labour, for example, they are dependent upon the pronouncements of "the Prime Minister's personal spokesperson" for government news. Business corporations and trade organizations are also trusted sources of stories considered newsworthy. Editors and journalists who offend these powerful news sources, perhaps by questioning the veracity or bias of the furnished material, can be threatened with the denial of access to their media life-blood - fresh news. Thus, the media has become reluctant to run articles that will harm corporate interests that provide them with the resources that they depend upon.

This relationship also gives rise to a "moral division of labor", in which "officials have and give the facts" and "reporters merely get them". Journalists are then supposed to adopt an uncritical attitude that makes it possible for them to accept corporate values without experiencing cognitive dissonance.

Flak

The fourth filter is 'flak' (not to be confused with flack which means promoters or publicity agents), described by Herman and Chomsky as 'negative responses to a media statement or [TV or radio] program. It may take the form of letters, telegrams, phone calls, petitions, lawsuits, speeches and Bills before Congress and other modes of complaint, threat and punitive action'. Business organizations regularly come together to form flak machines. An example is the US-based Global Climate Coalition (GCC), comprising fossil fuel and automobile companies such as Exxon, Texaco and Ford. The GCC was started up by Burson-Marsteller, one of the world's largest public relations companies, to attack the credibility of climate scientists and 'scare stories' about global warming.

For Chomsky and Herman "flak" refers to negative responses to a media statement or program. The term "flak" has been used to describe what Chomsky and Herman see as efforts to discredit organizations or individuals who disagree with or cast doubt on the prevailing assumptions which Chomsky and Herman view as favorable to established power (e.g., "The Establishment"). Unlike the first three "filtering" mechanisms—which are derived from analysis of market mechanisms—flak is characterized by concerted efforts to manage public information.

Anti-Communism and fear

So I think when we talked about the "fifth filter" we should have brought in all this stuff -- the way artificial fears are created with a dual purpose... partly to get rid of people you don't like but partly to frighten the rest. Because if people are frightened, they will accept authority.

— Noam Chomsky

The fifth and final news filter that Herman and Chomsky identified was 'anti-communism'. Manufacturing Consent was written during the Cold War. Chomsky updated the model as "fear", often as 'the enemy' or an 'evil dictator' such as Colonel Gaddafi, Paul Biya, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, or Vladimir Putin. This is exemplified in British tabloid headlines of 'Smash Saddam!' and 'Clobba Slobba!'. The same is said to extend to mainstream reporting of environmentalists as 'eco-terrorists'. The Sunday Times ran a series of articles in 1999 accusing activists from the non-violent direct action group Reclaim The Streets of stocking up on CS gas and stun guns.

Anti-ideologies exploit public fear and hatred of groups that pose a potential threat, either real, exaggerated or imagined. Communism once posed the primary threat according to the model. Communism and socialism were portrayed by their detractors as endangering freedoms of speech, movement, the press and so forth. They argue that such a portrayal was often used as a means to silence voices critical of elite interests. Chomsky argues that since the end of the Cold War (1991), anticommunism was replaced by the "War on Terror", as the major social control mechanism: "Anti-communism has receded as an ideological factor in the Western media, but it is not dead... The ‘war on terror’ has provided a useful substitute for the Soviet Menace." Following the events of September 11, 2001, some scholars agree that Islamophobia is replacing anti-communism as a new source of public fear. Herman and Chomsky themselves conceded, in an interview given in 2009, that the popularity of ‘anti-communism’ as a news filter is slowly decreasing in favor of other more contemporary ideologies such as ‘anti-terrorism’.

Case examples

Following the theoretical exposition of the propaganda model, Manufacturing Consent contains a large section where the authors seek to test their hypotheses. If the propaganda model is right and the filters do influence media content, a particular form of bias would be expected—one that systematically favors corporate interests.

They also looked at what they perceived as naturally occurring "historical control groups" where two events, similar in their properties but differing in the expected media attitude towards them, are contrasted using objective measures such as coverage of key events (measured in column inches) or editorials favoring a particular issue (measured in number).

Coverage of "enemy" countries

[The polls] show that all of the opposition parties in Nicaragua combined had the support of only 9 percent of the population, but they have 100 percent of Stephen Kinzer.

—Noam Chomsky

Examples of bias given by the authors include the failure of the media to question the legality of the Vietnam War while greatly emphasizing the Soviet–Afghan War as an act of aggression.

Other biases include a propensity to emphasize violent acts such as genocide more in enemy or unfriendly countries such as Kosovo while ignoring greater genocide in allied countries such as the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. This bias is also said to exist in foreign elections, giving favorable media coverage to fraudulent elections in allied countries such as El Salvador and Guatemala, while unfavorable coverage is given to legitimate elections in enemy countries such as Nicaragua.

A study found that in the lead up to the Iraq War, most sources were overwhelmingly in favor of the invasion.

Chomsky also asserts that the media accurately covered events such as the Battle of Fallujah but because of an ideological bias, it acted as pro-government propaganda. In describing coverage of raid on Fallujah General Hospital he stated that The New York Times, "accurately recorded the battle of Fallujah but it was celebrated... it was a celebration of ongoing war crimes". The article in question was "Early Target of Offensive Is a Hospital".

Scandals of leaks

The authors point to biases that are based on only reporting scandals which benefit a section of power, while ignoring scandals that hurt the powerless. The biggest example of this was how the US media greatly covered the Watergate Scandal but ignored the COINTELPRO exposures. While the Watergate break-in was a political threat to powerful people (Democrats), COINTELPRO harmed average citizens and went as far as political assassination. Other examples include coverage of the Iran–Contra affair by only focusing on people in power such as Oliver North but omitting coverage of the civilians killed in Nicaragua as the result of aid to the contras.

In a 2010 interview, Chomsky compared media coverage of the Afghan War Diaries released by WikiLeaks and lack of media coverage to a study of severe health problems in Fallujah. While there was ample coverage of WikiLeaks there was no American coverage of the Fallujah study, in which the health situation in Fallujah was described by the British media as "worse than Hiroshima".

Applications

See also: Media coverage of the Iraq War and Media coverage of climate change

Since the publication of Manufacturing Consent, Herman and Chomsky have adopted the theory and have given it a prominent role in their writings, lectures and theoretical frameworks. Chomsky has made extensive use of its explanative power to lend support to his interpretations of mainstream media attitudes towards a wide array of events, including the following:

• Gulf War (1990), the media's failure to report on Saddam's peace offers.
• Iraq invasion (2003), the media's failure to report on the legality of the war despite overwhelming public opinion in favor of only invading Iraq with UN authorization. According to the liberal watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, there was a disproportionate focus on pro-war sources while total anti-war sources only made up 10% of the media (with only 3% of US sources being anti-war).
• Global warming, the media gives near equal balance to people who deny climate change despite only "about one percent" of climate scientists taking this view. Chomsky commented that there are "three sides" on climate change (deniers, those who follow the scientific consensus, and people who think that the consensus underestimates the threat from global warming), but in framing the debate the media usually ignore people who say that the scientific consensus is unduly optimistic.

Reception

On the rare occasions the propaganda model is discussed in the mainstream media there is usually a large reaction. In 1988, when Chomsky was interviewed by Bill Moyers there were 1,000 letters in response, one of the biggest written reactions in the show's history. When he was interviewed by TV Ontario, the show generated 31,321 call-ins, which was a new record for the station. In 1996, when Chomsky was interviewed by Andrew Marr the producer commented that the response was "astonishing". He commented that "[t]he audience reaction was astonishing... I have never worked on a programme which elicited so many letters and calls".

In May 2007, Chomsky and Herman spoke at the University of Windsor in Canada summarizing developments and responding to criticisms related to the model. Both authors stated they felt the propaganda model is still applicable (Herman said even more so than when it was introduced), although they did suggest a few areas where they believe it falls short and needs to be extended in light of recent developments.

Chomsky has insisted that while the propaganda role of the media "is intensified by ownership and advertising" the problem mostly lies with "ideological-doctrinal commitments that are part of intellectual life" or intellectual culture of the people in power. He compares the media to scholarly literature which he says has the same problems even without the constraints of the propaganda model.

At the Windsor talk, Chomsky pointed out that Edward S. Herman was primarily responsible for creating the theory although Chomsky supported it. According to Chomsky, he insisted Herman's name appear first on the cover of Manufacturing Consent because of his primary role researching and developing the theory.

Harvard media torture study

From the early 1930s until...2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and the Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27). By contrast, from 2002‐2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture.

—Desai et al.

In April 2010, a study conducted by the Harvard Kennedy School showed that media outlets such as The New York Times and Los Angeles Times stopped using the term "torture" for waterboarding when the US government committed it, from 2002 to 2008. It also noted that the press was "much more likely to call waterboarding torture if a country other than the United States is the perpetrator." The study was similar to media studies done in Manufacturing Consent for topics such as comparing how the term "genocide" is used in the media when referring to allied and enemy countries.

Glenn Greenwald in response said that "We don’t need a state-run media because our media outlets volunteer for the task..." and commented that the media often act as propaganda for the government without coercion.

Studies of media outside the United States

Chomsky has commented in the "ChomskyChat Forum" on the applicability of the Propaganda Model to the media environment of other countries:

That's only rarely been done in any systematic way. There is work on the British media, by a good U[niversity] of Glasgow media group. And interesting work on British Central America coverage by Mark Curtis in his book Ambiguities of Power. There is work on France, done in Belgium mostly, also a recent book by Serge Halimi (editor of Le Monde diplomatique). There is one very careful study by a Dutch graduate student, applying the methods Ed Herman used in studying US media reaction to elections (El Salvador, Nicaragua) to 14 major European newspapers. ... Interesting results. Discussed a bit (along with some others) in a footnote in chapter 5 of my book "Deterring Democracy," if you happen to have that around.

For more than a decade, a British-based website Media Lens has examined their domestic broadcasters and liberal press. Its criticisms are featured in the books Guardians of Power (2006) and Newspeak in the 21st Century (2009).

Studies have also expanded the propaganda model to examine news media in the People's Republic of China and for film production in Hollywood.

News of the World

Main article: News of the World phone hacking affair

In July 2011, the journalist Paul Mason, then working for the BBC, pointed out that the News International phone hacking scandal threw light on close links between the press and politicians. However, he argued that the closure of the mass-circulation newspaper News of the World, which took place after the scandal broke, conformed only partly to the propaganda model. He drew attention to the role of social media, saying that "large corporations pulled their advertising" because of the "scale of the social media response" (a response which was mainly to do with the newspaper's behaviour towards Milly Dowler, although Mason did not go into this level of detail).

Mason praised The Guardian for having told the truth about the phone-hacking, but expressed doubt about the financial viability of the newspaper.

One part of the Chomsky doctrine has been proven by exception. He stated that newspapers that told the truth could not make money. The Guardian...is indeed burning money and may run out of it in three years' time.

Criticism

The Anti-Chomsky Reader

Eli Lehrer of the American Enterprise Institute criticized the theory in The Anti-Chomsky Reader. According to Lehrer, the fact that papers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have disagreements is evidence that the media is not a monolithic entity. Lehrer also believes that the media cannot have a corporate bias because it reports on and exposes corporate corruption. Lehrer asserts that the model amounts to a Marxist conception of right-wing false consciousness.

Herman and Chomsky have asserted that the media "is not a solid monolith" but that it represents a debate between powerful interests while ignoring perspectives that challenge the "fundamental premises" of all these interests. For instance, during the Vietnam War there was disagreement among the media over tactics, but the broader issue of the legality and legitimacy of the war was ignored (see Coverage of "enemy" countries). Additionally, Chomsky has said that while the media are against corruption, they are not against society legally empowering corporate interests which is a reflection of the powerful interests that the model would predict. The authors have also said that the model does not seek to address "the effects of the media on the public" which might be ineffective at shaping public opinion. Edward Herman has said "critics failed to comprehend that the propaganda model is about how the media work, not how effective they are".

Inroads: A Journal of Opinion

Gareth Morley argues in an article in Inroads: A Journal of Opinion that widespread coverage of Israeli mistreatment of protesters as compared with little coverage of similar (or much worse) events in sub-Saharan Africa is poorly explained. This was in response to Chomsky's assertion that in testing the Model, examples should be carefully paired to control reasons for discrepancies not related to political bias. Chomsky himself cites the examples of government mis-treatment of protesters and points out that general coverage of the two areas compared should be similar, raising the point that they are not: news from Israel (in any form) is far more common than news from sub-Saharan Africa. Morley considers this approach dubiously empirical.

The New York Times review

Writing for The New York Times, the historian Walter LaFeber criticized the book Manufacturing Consent for overstating its case, in particular with regards to reporting on Nicaragua and not adequately explaining how a powerful propaganda system would let military aid to the Contra rebels be blocked. Herman responded in a letter by stating that the system was not "all powerful" and that LaFeber did not address their main point regarding Nicaragua. LaFeber replied that:

Mr. Herman wants to have it both ways: to claim that leading American journals "mobilize bias" but object when I cite crucial examples that weaken the book's thesis. If the news media are so unqualifiedly bad, the book should at least explain why so many publications (including my own) can cite their stories to attack President Reagan's Central American policy.

Chomsky responds to LaFeber's reply in Necessary Illusions:

What is more, a propaganda model is not weakened by the discovery that with careful and critical reading, material could be unearthed in the media that could be used by those that objected to "President Reagan's Central American policy" on grounds of principle, opposing not its failures but its successes: the near destruction of Nicaragua and the blunting of the popular forces that threatened to bring democracy and social reform to El Salvador, among other achievements.

Social physics

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_physics 

Social physics or sociophysics is a field of science which uses mathematical tools inspired by physics to understand the behavior of human crowds. In a modern commercial use, it can also refer to the analysis of social phenomena with big data.

Social physics is closely related to econophysics which uses physics methods to describe economics.

History

The earliest mentions of a concept of social physics began with the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. In 1636, Hobbes traveled to Florence, Italy, and met the astronomer Galileo Galilei, of whom was well-known for his contributions to the sciences, namely, the ideas of motion. It was here that Hobbes began to outline the idea of representing the "physical phenomena" of society in terms of the laws of motion. In his treatise De Corpore, Hobbes sought to relate the movement of "material bodies" to the mathematical terms of motion outlined by Galileo and similar scientists of the time period. Although there was no explicit mention of "social physics", the sentiment of examining society with scientific methods began before the first written mention of social physics.

Later, French social thinker Henri de Saint-Simon’s first book, the 1803 Lettres d’un Habitant de Geneve, introduced the idea of describing society using laws similar to those of the physical and biological sciences. His student and collaborator was Auguste Comte, a French philosopher widely regarded as the founder of sociology, who first defined the term in an essay appearing in Le Producteur, a journal project by Saint-Simon. Comte defined social physics as

Social physics is that science which occupies itself with social phenomena, considered in the same light as astronomical, physical, chemical, and physiological phenomena, that is to say as being subject to natural and invariable laws, the discovery of which is the special object of its researches.

After Saint-Simon and Comte, Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet, proposed that society be modeled using mathematical probability and social statistics. Quetelet's 1835 book, Essay on Social Physics: Man and the Development of his Faculties, outlines the project of a social physics characterized by measured variables that follow a normal distribution, and collected data about many such variables. A frequently repeated anecdote is that when Comte discovered that Quetelet had appropriated the term 'social physics', he found it necessary to invent a new term 'sociologie' (sociology) because he disagreed with Quetelet's collection of statistics.

There have been several “generations” of social physicists. The first generation began with Saint-Simon, Comte, and Quetelet, and ended with the late 1800s with historian Henry Adams. In the middle of the 20th century, researchers such as the American astrophysicist John Q. Stewart and Swedish geographer Reino Ajo, who showed that the spatial distribution of social interactions could be described using gravity models. Physicists such as Arthur Iberall use a homeokinetics approach to study social systems as complex self-organizing systems. For example, a homeokinetics analysis of society shows that one must account for flow variables such as the flow of energy, of materials, of action, reproduction rate, and value-in-exchange. More recently there have been a large number of social science papers that use mathematics broadly similar to that of physics, and described as “computational social science”.

In the late 1800s, Adams separated “human physics” into the subsets of social physics or social mechanics (sociology of interactions using physics-like mathematical tools) and social thermodynamics or sociophysics, (sociology described using mathematical invariances similar to those in thermodynamics). This dichotomy is roughly analogous to the difference between microeconomics and macroeconomics.

Examples

Ising model and voter dynamics

A 5x5 representational grid of an Ising model. Each space holds a spin and the red bars indicate communication between neighbors.

One of the most well-known examples in social physics is the relationship of the Ising model and the voting dynamics of a finite population. The Ising model, as a model of ferromagnetism, is represented by a grid of spaces, each of which is occupied by a spin (physics), numerically ±1. Mathematically, the final energy state of the system depends on the interactions of the spaces and their respective spins. For example, if two adjacent spaces share the same spin, the surrounding neighbors will begin to align, and the system will eventually reach a state of consensus. In social physics, it has been observed that voter dynamics in a finite population obey the same mathematical properties of the Ising model. In the social physics model, each spin denotes an opinion, e.g. yes or no, and each space represents a "voter". If two adjacent spaces (voters) share the same spin (opinion), their neighbors begin to align with their spin value; if two adjacent spaces do not share the same spin, then their neighbors remain the same. Eventually, the remaining voters will reach a state of consensus as the "information flows outward".

Example of social validation in the Sznajd model. If two neighbors agree (top), then their neighbors agree with them. If two neighbors disagree (bottom), their neighbors begin to disagree as well.

The Sznajd model is an extension of the Ising model and is classified as an econophysics model. It emphasizes the alignment of the neighboring spins in a phenomenon called "social validation". It follows the same properties as the Ising model and is extended to observe the patterns of opinion dynamics as a whole, rather than focusing on just voter dynamics.  

Potts model and cultural dynamics

The Potts model is a generalization of the Ising model and has been used to examine the concept of cultural dissemination as described by American political scientist Robert Axelrod. Axelrod's model of cultural dissemination states that individuals who share cultural characteristics are more likely to interact with each other, thus increasing the number of overlapping characteristics and expanding their interaction network. The Potts model has the caveat that each spin can hold multiple values, unlike the Ising model that could only hold one value. Each spin, then, represents an individual's "cultural characteristics... [or] in Axelrod’s words, 'the set of individual attributes that are subject to social influence'". It is observed that, using the mathematical properties of the Potts model, neighbors whose cultural characteristics overlap tend to interact more frequently than with unlike neighbors, thus leading to a self-organizing grouping of similar characteristics. Simulations done on the Potts model both show Axelrod's model of cultural dissemination agrees with the Potts model as an Ising-class model.

Recent work

In modern use “social physics” refers to using “big data” analysis and the mathematical laws to understand the behavior of human crowds. The core idea is that data about human activity (e.g., phone call records, credit card purchases, taxi rides, web activity) contain mathematical patterns that are characteristic of how social interactions spread and converge. These mathematical invariances can then serve as a filter for analysis of behavior changes and for detecting emerging behavioral patterns.

Recent books about social physics include MIT Professor Alex Pentland’s book Social Physics or Nature editor Mark Buchanan’s book The Social Atom. Popular reading about sociophysics include English physicist Philip Ball’s Why Society is a Complex Matter, Dirk Helbing's The Automation of Society is next or American physicist Laszlo Barabasi’s book Linked.

Econophysics

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Econophysics 

Econophysics is a heterodox interdisciplinary research field, applying theories and methods originally developed by physicists in order to solve problems in economics, usually those including uncertainty or stochastic processes and nonlinear dynamics. Some of its application to the study of financial markets has also been termed statistical finance referring to its roots in statistical physics. Econophysics is closely related to social physics.

History

Physicists' interest in the social sciences is not new (see e.g.,); Daniel Bernoulli, as an example, was the originator of utility-based preferences. One of the founders of neoclassical economic theory, former Yale University Professor of Economics Irving Fisher, was originally trained under the renowned Yale physicist, Josiah Willard Gibbs. Likewise, Jan Tinbergen, who won the first Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1969 for having developed and applied dynamic models for the analysis of economic processes, studied physics with Paul Ehrenfest at Leiden University. In particular, Tinbergen developed the gravity model of international trade that has become the workhorse of international economics.

Econophysics was started in the mid-1990s by several physicists working in the subfield of statistical mechanics. Unsatisfied with the traditional explanations and approaches of economists – which usually prioritized simplified approaches for the sake of soluble theoretical models over agreement with empirical data – they applied tools and methods from physics, first to try to match financial data sets, and then to explain more general economic phenomena.

One driving force behind econophysics arising at this time was the sudden availability of large amounts of financial data, starting in the 1980s. It became apparent that traditional methods of analysis were insufficient – standard economic methods dealt with homogeneous agents and equilibrium, while many of the more interesting phenomena in financial markets fundamentally depended on heterogeneous agents and far-from-equilibrium situations.

The term "econophysics" was coined by H. Eugene Stanley, to describe the large number of papers written by physicists in the problems of (stock and other) markets, in a conference on statistical physics in Kolkata (erstwhile Calcutta) in 1995 and first appeared in its proceedings publication in Physica A 1996. The inaugural meeting on econophysics was organised in 1998 in Budapest by János Kertész and Imre Kondor. The first book on econophysics was by R. N. Mantegna & H. E. Stanley in 2000.

The almost regular meeting series on the topic include: ECONOPHYS-KOLKATA (held in Kolkata & Delhi), Econophysics Colloquium, ESHIA/ WEHIA.

In recent years network science, heavily reliant on analogies from statistical mechanics, has been applied to the study of productive systems. That is the case with the works done at the Santa Fe Institute in European Funded Research Projects as Forecasting Financial Crises and the Harvard-MIT Observatory of Economic Complexity

If "econophysics" is taken to denote the principle of applying statistical mechanics to economic analysis, as opposed to a particular literature or network, priority of innovation is probably due to Emmanuel Farjoun and Moshé Machover (1983). Their book Laws of Chaos: A Probabilistic Approach to Political Economy proposes dissolving (their words) the transformation problem in Marx's political economy by re-conceptualising the relevant quantities as random variables.

If, on the other hand, "econophysics" is taken to denote the application of physics to economics, one can consider the works of Léon Walras and Vilfredo Pareto as part of it. Indeed, as shown by Bruna Ingrao and Giorgio Israel, general equilibrium theory in economics is based on the physical concept of mechanical equilibrium.

Econophysics has nothing to do with the "physical quantities approach" to economics, advocated by Ian Steedman and others associated with neo-Ricardianism. Notable econophysicists are Jean-Philippe Bouchaud, Bikas K Chakrabarti, J. Doyne Farmer, Tiziana Di Matteo, Diego Garlaschelli, Dirk Helbing, János Kertész, Rosario N. Mantegna, Matteo Marsili, Joseph L. McCauley, Enrico Scalas, Didier Sornette, H. Eugene Stanley, Victor Yakovenko and Yi-Cheng Zhang. Particularly noteworthy among the formal courses on econophysics is the one offered by Diego Garlaschelli at the Physics Department of the Leiden University. From September 2014 King's College has awarded the first position of Full Professor in Econophysics (Tiziana Di Matteo).

Basic tools

Basic tools of econophysics are probabilistic and statistical methods often taken from statistical physics.

Physics models that have been applied in economics include the kinetic theory of gas (called the kinetic exchange models of markets), percolation models, chaotic models developed to study cardiac arrest, and models with self-organizing criticality as well as other models developed for earthquake prediction. Moreover, there have been attempts to use the mathematical theory of complexity and information theory, as developed by many scientists among whom are Murray Gell-Mann and Claude E. Shannon, respectively.

For potential games, it has been shown that an emergence-producing equilibrium based on information via Shannon information entropy produces the same equilibrium measure (Gibbs measure from statistical mechanics) as a stochastic dynamical equation which represents noisy decisions, both of which are based on bounded rationality models used by economists.  The fluctuation-dissipation theorem connects the two to establish a concrete correspondence of "temperature", "entropy", "free potential/energy", and other physics notions to an economics system. The statistical mechanics model is not constructed a-priori - it is a result of a boundedly rational assumption and modeling on existing neoclassical models. It has been used to prove the "inevitability of collusion" result of Huw Dixon in a case for which the neoclassical version of the model does not predict collusion. Here the demand is increasing, as with Veblen goods, stock buyers with the "hot hand" fallacy preferring to buy more successful stocks and sell those that are less successful, or among short traders during a short squeeze as occurred with the WallStreetBets group's collusion to drive up GameStop stock price in 2021.

Quantifiers derived from information theory were used in several papers by econophysicist Aurelio F. Bariviera and coauthors in order to assess the degree in the informational efficiency of stock markets. Zunino et al. use an innovative statistical tool in the financial literature: the complexity-entropy causality plane. This Cartesian representation establish an efficiency ranking of different markets and distinguish different bond market dynamics. It was found that more developed countries have stock markets with higher entropy and lower complexity, while those markets from emerging countries have lower entropy and higher complexity. Moreover, the authors conclude that the classification derived from the complexity-entropy causality plane is consistent with the qualifications assigned by major rating companies to the sovereign instruments. A similar study developed by Bariviera et al. explore the relationship between credit ratings and informational efficiency of a sample of corporate bonds of US oil and energy companies using also the complexity–entropy causality plane. They find that this classification agrees with the credit ratings assigned by Moody's.

Another good example is random matrix theory, which can be used to identify the noise in financial correlation matrices. One paper has argued that this technique can improve the performance of portfolios, e.g., in applied in portfolio optimization.

There are, however, various other tools from physics that have so far been used, such as fluid dynamics, classical mechanics and quantum mechanics (including so-called classical economy, quantum economics and quantum finance), and the path integral formulation of statistical mechanics.

The concept of economic complexity index, introduced by the physicist Cesar A. Hidalgo and the Harvard economist Ricardo Hausmann and made available at MIT's Observatory of Economic Complexity, has been devised as a predictive tool for economic growth at Harvard Growth Lab's "The Atlas of Economic Complexity". According to the estimates of Hausmann and Hidalgo, the ECI is far more accurate in predicting GDP growth than the traditional governance measures of the World Bank.

There are also analogies between finance theory and diffusion theory. For instance, the Black–Scholes equation for option pricing is a diffusion-advection equation (see however  for a critique of the Black–Scholes methodology). The Black–Scholes theory can be extended to provide an analytical theory of main factors in economic activities.

Influence

Papers on econophysics have been published primarily in journals devoted to physics and statistical mechanics, rather than in leading economics journals. Some Mainstream economists have generally been unimpressed by this work. Other economists, including Mauro Gallegati, Steve Keen, Paul Ormerod, and Alan Kirman have shown more interest, but also criticized some trends in econophysics.

Econophysics is having some impacts on the more applied field of quantitative finance, whose scope and aims significantly differ from those of economic theory. Various econophysicists have introduced models for price fluctuations in physics of financial markets or original points of view on established models. Also several scaling laws have been found in various economic data.

Main results

Presently, one of the main results of econophysics comprises the explanation of the "fat tails" in the distribution of many kinds of financial data as a universal self-similar scaling property (i.e. scale invariant over many orders of magnitude in the data), arising from the tendency of individual market competitors, or of aggregates of them, to exploit systematically and optimally the prevailing "microtrends" (e.g., rising or falling prices). These "fat tails" are not only mathematically important, because they comprise the risks, which may be on the one hand, very small such that one may tend to neglect them, but which - on the other hand - are not negligible at all, i.e. they can never be made exponentially tiny, but instead follow a measurable algebraically decreasing power law, for example with a failure probability of only ${\displaystyle P\propto x^{-4}\,,}$ where x is an increasingly large variable in the tail region of the distribution considered (i.e. a price statistics with much more than 10⁸ data). I.e., the events considered are not simply "outliers" but must really be taken into account and cannot be "insured away". It appears that it also plays a role that near a change of the tendency (e.g. from falling to rising prices) there are typical "panic reactions" of the selling or buying agents with algebraically increasing bargain rapidities and volumes. The "fat tails" are also observed in commodity markets.

As in quantum field theory the "fat tails" can be obtained by complicated "nonperturbative" methods, mainly by numerical ones, since they contain the deviations from the usual Gaussian approximations, e.g. the Black–Scholes theory. Fat tails can, however, also be due to other phenomena, such as a random number of terms in the central-limit theorem, or any number of other, non-econophysics models. Due to the difficulty in testing such models, they have received less attention in traditional economic analysis.