My Speech at the Cato Institute
Here you can see a speech I gave at the Cato Institute. Be sure to watch the last 15 minutes, where Alex Mooney gives a response. Mooney, I believe, is a rising star in the Republican Party. He is a former state senator from Maryland, and he is the current chairman of the Maryland Republican Party. He's also the executive director of the National Journalism Center, an organization that tries to steer conservative students into journalism. On the day of the speech, a rumor was circulating that Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.) would retire. That afternoon, in response, Mooney filed papers to form an exploratory committee to run for Bartlett's seat. At least part of the reason for the rumor was due to some phone calls that Bartlett's chief of staff had made. Bartlett quickly fired the chief of staff. Here's Roll Call's report of the events.
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Apr '11
Re: My Speech at the Cato Institute
Nice talk. Wish I could have seen the slides though. Guess I'll have to just read the book for all that. I have two comments, and a question, if you will indulge me.
I have always held to the belief that political science, sociology, all of the social sciences are not really "science". Not that this should be viewed as a slight against them, but rather a technical definition. The essence of science being experimentation with the inclusion of controls. So actually there are really a lot of scientific fields that don't do much science (at least in biology, I know a few).
So you can define the political slant of a published article on a particular political topic. Have you considered trying to rewrite slanted articles to either make them more or less conservative and then gauged how people are influenced. You could try using a mock ballot measure on something seemingly simple that conservatives and liberals would disagree on. Like what should be done with a particular property. You then get three groups of identical people whose average PQ is 50. Each group is provided with either a packet of liberal, moderate, or conservativenews articles on the issue (ranked by your SQ). After they have read the articles they vote on what to do with the property. One would predict that the slanted articles would push the group one way or another if bias has an effect. This is a rough experiment I know..
The last comment is on Mooney. He was talking about his sister visiting Cuba and bad mouthing Clinton to the amazement of the local children. Which reminded me of a Romanian joke from the ear of communism.
Q: "Is there a difference between Romanian and American journalists?"
A: "Not really. Both are free to write about anything they want in whatever way they want. Its just that the American journalist is still free after doing so."
Edited on Dec 7, 2011 at 8:01am