Media

The information age has bought both bounty and pestilence. Today, we are deluged with both correct and incorrect information. If we knew how to tell apart correct claims from incorrect, we would have inched that much closer to utopia. But the lack of nous in telling apart generally ‘obvious’ incorrect

With Daniel Weitzel. The US government is a federal system, with substantial domains reserved for local and state governments. For instance, education, most parts of the criminal justice system, and a large chunk of regulation are under the purview of the states. Further, the national government has three co-equal branches:

It used to be that searches for ‘Fox News Bias’ were far more common than searches for ‘CNN bias’. Not anymore. The other notable thing—correlated peaks around presidential elections. Note also that searches around midterm elections barely rise above the noise.

I assessed PolitiFact on: 1. Imbalance in scrutiny: Do they vet statements by Democrats or Democratic-leaning organizations more than statements by Republicans or Republican-leaning organizations? 2. Batting average by party: Roughly n_correct/n_checked, but instantiated here as mean Politifact rating. To answer the questions, I scraped the data

The median Democrat referred to in television news is to the left of the House Democratic Median, and the median Republican politician referred to is to the left of the House Republican Median. Click here for the aggregate distribution. And here’s a plot of top 50 politicians cited in