This a question for Amber.
Thank you all for wonderful talks,
and Ive learned an awful lot in
the last hour, hour and a half.
So, this is a question about how
the demographics of being plugged in to
media outlets are distributed.
Because there's a skew,
I assume in the degree to which
different demographics actually,
are following the news.
So, that's sort of,
part a of the question.
And part b, is while you say,
the New York Times, and
main mainstream media is
fairly representative.
There is now an increasing tendency for
people to get their news from
the sources who's editorial viewpoint,
they most agree to, so there's a kind-
>> Hm,
>> Of balkanization, so
we have a fractionation
of public discourse,
because people who agree with each
other tend to hang out with each other.
There's a divisiveness because of not
crossing those lines in the common form,
and then there are many people who are not
plugged in to the news often
because it's so aversive.
And for some reason, if you watch the 11
o'clock news before you go to sleep,
you know, you don't have good dreams.
>> Hypothetically.
[LAUGH]
>> So, could you just comment on,
on all of that?
>> Yeah.
Well, I guess,
there are two layers to, to the answer.
And the first one is that, that these
particular patters that I looked at in my
books that, that media changes over
time in this explosive fashion, and
then that is skewed across policy topics.
These patterns really do hold across,
across different types of news outlets,
and specific news outlets.
It's just as true for Fox News, and MSNBC,
and, and just as new, as true, by the way,
for Twitter, and for Facebook.
There's a different layer
to your question, and
that is the ideological skew.
Is this microphone, okay?
[CROSSTALK] Yeah.
>> [INAUDIBLE] Turn it off,
until you need it.
>> Okay.
So, the second layer to your
question is about the ideology.
You know, what?
How about if I just turn it off?
[INAUDIBLE] [CROSSTALK] Sorry,
[LAUGH] the second layer to your
question is about the ideology.
And and I don't look at that but,
but I have in other areas,
and a lot of scholars have,
and you're exactly right that
as we increasingly turn to Niche News
outlets, we increasingly get
that ideological signal that we
sought out in the first place.
And this is very problematic
because it means,
that we get a narrowed view of the world,
and, and of course,
people who are younger are less likely
to get their news from a tradis,
traditional source like, like the New York
Times, or even like Fox News, or MSNBC.
They're much more likely to get
their news from YouTube, and
from Twitter, and even from Snapchat,
right, that's where they get their news.
And so, they're,
they're still going to see this explosive
patterns of coverage over time, but
they're gonna see an even higher degree of
skew, and more surface level reporting.
And so, that's a problem, but
we're in this really exciting,
uncharted territory of media, and
we're not sure where we're gonna land.
It's not clear at all, but it's certainly
the case that more diversification for
all of us would be better, and that the,
the direction of our media
marketplace is not facilitating that.
>> Nicole.
[LAUGH]
>> [INAUDIBLE]
>> [INAUDIBLE]
>> I have a question for you,
given your studies, have you thought about
UC Da, have you thought about UC Davis,
and our identity-
>> Mm-hm.
>> And what we might do to be
an authenticm and high status place.
>> Yeah, yeah.
>> [LAUGH] I, I, yes, I've a lot, and
I've talked to several chancellors,
and, and, and, and provosts about this.
I remem, my favorite quote from any
of them is from Virginia Hinshaw,
who always used to say,
we suffer from Midwest humility even
though we're in California, and
that we don't, our problem is
that we just don't blow our horn enough,
and so people don't know who we are.
Because we definitely,
have our own authentic identity, so
the, the identity of the place is
agricultural in, in historically,
but it's also an,
an incredibly diverse institution.
We've got 100 majors, and
85 departments, and it's,
we're more diverse than
any of the other UCs, and
that comes across pretty clear when
you talk to anybody from, from UC.
Our problem is not that we don't
have an authentic identity,
it's that nobody knows about it.
So I, I think that's, that's where Am,
Amber should answer this
question [LAUGH] actually.
[LAUGH] We need to create a media storm
around, around UC Davis in a good way.
[LAUGH] Because the only media storm that
ever happened around us was not good
recently at, at least.
And I think I think that's our problem mo,
more than that we don't have an identity,
it's just nobody knows what it is.
>> Ella?
>> So, I'd like to pick up
on that very point there,
one of the things I'd like to hear Amber
talk more about is how public relations,
or advertising shape media storms.
It seems that the second
two papers really highlight
the deliberate shaping of categories, and
of ways of thinking about things, and
while you were showing about how the media
storms shape consu, reader's perceptions.
I wonder about kind of the active role
of PR, or advertising in shaping what
becomes a media storm, and, and
how that media storm takes shape.
>> Yeah, well, media storms come in,
yeah, oh, Jesus.
I'll get it.
[LAUGH]
>> Media storms come in a number of
different forms, there big media storms,
there's small media storms.
The ones that we tend to think of are the
ones that relate to news, but we can think
of plenty of them that relate to either
products, or to university campuses.
Media storms tend to be negative in,
in nature, and that's because we pay more
attention to, to negative information
than to positive information.
Allison will talk a lot more
about that next session.
But, but, yeah, so,
my read on it is that there are a whole
bunch of different factors that are all
necessary to produce a media storm,
but none of them by itself is sufficient.
And so, if you think of, of market
people trying to push a product or
to push a particular product or
a particular identity of a product,
there's going to be able to do that,
but that's all,
only going to produce a level of media
attention if other things come into play.
If it's a slow news cycle,
if there's nothing else to talk about,
if there's some interesting
new twist on it,
it has to be new information
that has to be fresh.
It has to be surprising, there was
a study recently about, you know,
if you go to whatever news source,
you go to often you can click on,
what stories not are the top stories,
but which stories were most emailed.
The most emailed stories tend
not to be the biggest stories,
as we would identify them
by nature of the event, but
those stories that are most
surprising in nature.
That's what we pay attention to,
and so for
people who are trying to market
something like a university.
That's a tough challenge because,
because part of your identity is,
is being stable, and solid.
And in order to get a buzz around you,
you would have to come up with,
I don't know, a new institute, right?
[LAUGH] And if you do that,
then maybe you can get some media play.
[LAUGH]
>> [INAUDIBLE]
>> I have a question for Kimberley.
One of the things talking about when
you identify with a particular company,
or organization, or
things like that is The values they have.
And one thing that I've been
noticing a lot in recent years
is because maybe the internet and you have
access to who they're giving donations to.
What their values are maybe
in their personal life, that,
that starts to come into the company.
So you might agree with 80% of
what that company stands for.
But what is the tipping point of like the
one thing that person donated to someone
who's against gay marriage, therefore
that organization should be boycotted?
You see these like, knee jerk
reactions going all the time now.
>> Yeah, that's a,
that's a really interesting question
about what the tipping point is, and
my answer is, I don't know what the
tipping point is, but I do know that it,
it does affect people personally and
I think that the, the, their,
that it has it has to reach a certain
level personal significance or salience.
One of the studies that I did that relates
to this is on the Augusta National golf
club, which holds the Master's Tournament.
And a few years ago there was a big uproar
about getting them to have a woman member.
And they'd never had
a woman member before.
>> And I recall that several
very high profile members,
who were members of congress, or who were,
CEOs of big companies said, I gotta,
I, I gotta help them get a woman member
just to get my daughter off my back.
And so for these people the,
it sorta became very personal and
it was affecting their home life and
then that's, that was at the point where,
you know, they started to pressure
the company to do something different.
So so there clearly, [COUGH] clearly is
there clearly is a different point for
different people but that was one
example of, it became personal.
>> [INAUDIBLE]
>> Hi, this is for Christina.
So, I really liked the presentation.
In fact, I liked it so
much, I bought the book.
>> [LAUGH]
>> It's a good book.
You should get it and read it.
I don't know her.
>> This is our first time ever talking.
>> [LAUGH]
>> Nice to meet you.
>> Yeah.
But, you know, your thesis is so which I,
I agree with is that for, basically for
strategic or mercantile reasons
the hispanic category was, was developed.
And so I think it has some interesting
implications in the following sense.
Among Latinos obviously the recognition of
inter-group differences are pretty clear.
And so the differences that kind of get
swept away in the Hispanic category
are recognized among Latinos, or
at least some subset of them.
But, I guess getting to my question,
I wonder if you could talk
about the implications of your result for
outgroup derogation.
That is, that is negative stereotyping of,
of Latinos, because, you know, the way
Latinos are portrayed in the media, well,
they're portrayed as Latinos oftentimes.
And so this undifferentiated mass, even
though there's this differentiation within
the community coupled with the fact that
a lot of the media coverage of Latinos and
Latino issues is highly negative,
or negatively framed,
it seems like your thesis would
have some implications for
stereotyping, discrimination,
towards Latinos.
I'm wandering if you could
talk a bit about that.
>> Sure, thanks.
So, it's, so, in writing the book, I, you
know, I started with, I started this book
thinking about, I'm, I'm from Los Angeles,
and my parents are of Mexican descent.
And I went to grad school on
the East Coast, and when I was you know,
when I hung around New York or,
you know, would go out to Philadelphia,
everyone would think I was Puerto Rican.
And I said, oh, well,
you know, I'm so different.
We're so different.
You know, the food is different,
the accent is different.
Why is this the same category?
And I started thinking, pondering
about this a lot in grad school, and
then I thought, well, you know let's try
to figure out where, how this evolved.
And one thing that was always clear is
you know, what I'm talking about is
the institutionalization of the category,
not necessarily just the construction.
There's always been a tendency,
perhaps because of the Spanish language of
just saying sort of grouping
a Spanish speaking.
If you look at, sort of, The earliest,
articles in the New York Times,
for example, would say,
sort of, the Spanish people.
But that didn't mean that that
meant that Puerto Ricans and
Mexicans were getting
together to create an agenda.
It didn't mean that the census bureau was
actively considering these groups as,
as part of one.
And, so, to say that, to say that,
I think that what was going on was
that this is one way that activists,
in some ways activists that become
elites within the community.
Because over time, you know, the discourse
about who hispanics are within
the community becomes taken
over by level of elites, right?
Owners of television stations,
journalists people that have the ear of
the executive office, things like that.
Those are the people that start creating
reports on, on who Latinos are.
So, on one hand, this becomes almost a way
of sort of taking back that homogenization
that was sort of in the air already,
and putting their own narrative to it.
So, for example, part of
the research I did a lot of a lot of
interviews with owners of media stations
who were also their own PR persons.
There were no independent Latino
advertising agencies at the,
at the same time.
I mean, I remember I did an interview
with a newscaster that was
the head of Univision news for a very
long time and he said, half of my day was
trying to create sales, trying to
generate sales and things of the sort.
And then there they really had to create a
narrative that's spins sort of a positive,
and part of the positive unfortunately
becomes based around money,
about what we contribute to the market,
who we are.
To some extent it also becomes
a narrative about our civic life
Latinos are not these foreigners.
Latinos together are people
that contribute to the nation,
people that raise their families here, so
there becomes a sense of you know,
Hispanic Americans.
This is an American constituency
that tries to combat sort of,
what we had already been there for a long
time, sort of this Spanish speaking, and
sort of this negative aspect.
The positive aspect of that is that
you get this sort of broad narrative
about sort of, if you want to say the good
stuff, you know, people that sign up and
enlist in the armed forces,
people that raise their families here,
people that wanna learn English,
people that have good family values.
People that go and buy diapers and
contribute to your economy.
The offside,
the bad part to that is sort of twofold.
One is, it continues the narrative
of lumping everybody together.
Even though on an everyday basis I
can still go and say, these are all
the differences I have with who, you know,
why are we still in this same category.
The second thing that, you know,
that happens and that the book explains,
is that, it, it, tramps down or shuts off
a lot of the alternative narratives about,
and especially in the 1970's,
about nationalism,
about sort of Chicano power,
about Puerto Rican pride.
It champs down on us because sort of
these individualist arguments based on
sort of colonialism or
oppression get taken away and
replaced with these sort of commercial
narratives, and civic narratives.
So it's got, it's, you know, it's got its,
you know, the positives, but
also sort of these
negative outcomes as well.
>> Hello.
Okay.
It will be loud.
Hi Christina.
I have a question for you as well.
>> I'm of Chilean descent, I guess,
well, really, born and raised in Chile.
And somehow the category of being
Latino or Hispanic, became true for
people like me when you
actually crossed the border.
So I'm wondering more, my question is more
connected to self-identification because
with the other friends from different
nationalities or have been born here or,
and raised in the United States,
is this idea of like,
do you identify yourself as Hispanic or
do you identify yourself as Latino?
Do you see any differences among
the communities in terms of which label
we ascribe to and
what might be the reasons behind that?
For example, as a Chilean,
it's really hard for us to identify, for
some of us, as Latinos, because we see
that as more of a Central American,
kind of a hot weather kind of thing and
it's really cold in Chile, so
it's a little bit different right there.
So I'm wondering about what your research
shows about why we choose one label or
another among the different communities.
So one of my big arguments is that what,
is you know,
Hispanic is by nature ambiguous,
so is Latino.
Ambiguous by nature and
they made it this way in order so
they could encompass so much diversity,
not only of the people,
but more importantly of
the interests involved, right?
If you were gonna say
there were consumers and
you had to sort of make this fit with an
argument also about their disadvantage and
sort of you bubble it up
by pointing to culture.
When they were discussing or
deciding about labels,
it really was just
a matter of elimination.
It was almost as if there, there were
several meetings at the Census Bureau
about whether we would pick Hispanic or
Latino.
Latino, in many ways, sort of sounded
to many people at the table as still
foreign because still Latin American,
and this was part of an agenda of making
Hispanics seen like as an American
constituency, like African Americans.
Things like that.
And so, but if you're not sort of creating
an exact definition, what happens is you
still have all these sort of labels that
can still come into play and I think
about with individual identification, one
of the biggest factors is not necessarily,
to some extent nationality, but one of
the bigger things is sort of urbanness.
So in urban areas, we're more likely to
use phrases like Latino versus Hispanic.
In rural areas,
especially around Texas, New Mexico,
things like that Hispanic runs the day.
Most people, though, will tell
you when they've run surveys, and
now these surveys are all
much more contemporary.
I mean,
first you have to create the category,
then you ask people if they
[LAUGH] like it or not, right?
So, we don't have the first surveys
about whether people like the category
until the early 1990s, and
this stuff was happening in the 70s.
Most people display no difference or
no preference, right?
I'm sure if you sort of sliced it up by
you know, cultural capital or SES as well,
you'd probably see academics on the Latino
side you know, depending on these
academic arguments about the role of
Hispanic culture but for the most part,
there's no preference, which speaks
to me a lot more about the ambiguity.
Most people don't have a preference, and
they don't even know the difference, and
they'll go between one and the other.
In fact, this is so prominent that
organizations then capitalized on this.
So In the early 1990's, the activist
groups that had been at the table,
had lobbied for Hispanic,
had called themselves Hispanic,
suddenly started going in and
redlining their mission statements and
instead of just sort of putting,
we represent the Hispanic people,
they would say,
we represent the Hispanic/Latino people.
Right, in order to capture on this, but
I think the difference is still sort of
ambiguous and
part of sort of small pocket discussions.
>> Thanks very much.
I have a question for Amber,
which is about and I think it goes back
to one of the, the very first questions,
which is about how your model might kind
of deal with the political economy or
institutional architecture of
the media landscape today and
also the kind of the background political
context that it, that it kind of
feeds into, and I'm thinking of
two things to, that are related.
One is the kind of the slow death
of investigative journalism.
You talk a lot about the New York Times
but from my understanding,
the New York times is really the only
one with the resources to actually do
that sort of in depth journalism.
I'm thinking at the moment they're
doing some very interesting stuff on
the Clinton Foundation and
what the architecture does is to, actually
only one outlet can actually really do
that sort of investigative journalism.
Most of the time it's just kind of
idle talk that gets recirculated
via Twitter and things and
the second thing that I wondered
whether your model can capture is the
the political leanings of these things.
So we know that
The New York Times is lefty,
Twitter is full of academics who
are also sort of naturally lefties, so
it's not for nothing that Ferguson
on is the one that kind of gets so
much play and also going back
to the investigative journalism,
it popped to mind that Woodward and
Bernstein were Washington Post reporters,
and from my understanding even
the Washington Post even doesn't do that
sort of investigative journalism anymore.
So, I just wondered how that kind of
plays in or If it kind of is a separate,
a separate issue?
>> Yeah, the institutional structure of,
of the media system and
the media marketplace and
how individual news outlets operate,
that's exactly why we should be concerned
about the slow death, or maybe quick death
of investigative journalism, but also why
I think that we shouldn't be so concerned.
I think that maybe by accident
it will be saved and here's why.
So my understanding is that I know it
seems like it's an endangered species, and
certainly it is but The New York Times,
and The Washington Post, and
the Wall Street Journal, and
even The Sac Bee continues to,
to designate some portion of their
resources toward investigative journalism.
It's a narrowing portion of resources,
we would, of course,
want it to be bigger but we still have
many news outlets across the country and
even some online sources, right?
If you look at the Huffington Post and,
and Politico,
a lot of the stories that you get are
gonna be just those echo chamber stories
that are bounced around but some stories,
you're gonna get are gonna be because
a reporter decided to look at
something and to dig deep.
Even if there wasn't some
particular event to look at.
There's a classic example in a policy in
California where we have required for
years, just up until a couple years ago,
to put flame retardants into our
furniture and our baby clothes.
The Chicago Tribune hung onto the story
and did this deep investigative
report on it, and it was just mind
blowing on how the chemical company and
big tobacco, if you can believe it, had,
had really pushed this policy that then
affected the level of flame retardants,
and that's the chemicals in our body,
across the country.
This investigative journalism,
my point is, is still happening.
We're maybe removed from it because
we are more likely to get our,
our news in quick data
bites on our phones, right?
So, again, not to put blame but
the consumers are really driving
the investigative journalists to
pay more of their attention to
shorter stories but here's why I think we
shouldn't be as concerned as we might be.
I'm very concerned but It's because,
it's because the nature of this dynamic
reporting that I've talked about,
this hybrid model where news outlets,
even, even small resource
news outlets online will lurch
into covering some alarm item but
then in those rare cases,
will shift into that watchdog mode.
In that case, you've got news outlets all
across the country reporting on things,
and they're reporting on it in this echo
chamber kind of fashion but at some point,
the public is gonna get bored of hearing
the same things day after day, and
so just by virtue of having
to come up with something new
to think about on the issue- We're
gonna get, maybe even by accident.
Reporters who normally do service level
reporting having to dig down deep and
give us more information.
The separate question is one of ideology.
And that really is concerning.
You're right that every newspaper has a,
a slight, a slant.
And every TV source,
including the New York Times.
Although it's, it's I mean,
objectively it's not as, as bad as.
As we might think.
But but the real problem again is with
the consumer relationship now
to this interactive media.
It's not only that we tend to pick
whatever single news source is gonna give
us the view of the world.
The view of reality that
we want it to give us.
But it's also that when
you go onto Facebook for
example, there's something
called a filter bubble.
Where you don't get all your news
feed in chronological order.
You get it ranked by,
by the number of times you've
liked similar news reports
from that friend before.
The same thing happens when
you do a Google search.
And so we're, and so
these algorithms have tailored themselves
towards making our lives more convenient,
towards getting us more quickly
to the type of news that we want.
That means that our interactive processes,
meaning that we're increasingly getting
not just a narrowed number of
stories about a few issues.
But about a few issues presented in
the way that we want to see the world.
So read more diverse stories,
>> [LAUGH]
>> including newspapers.
>> Do we have time for
another one or two questions?
>> Hi, i'm interested in the way that the,
the language that we use,
shapes the issues.
And, you know, this is kind of
implicit in all of the presentations.
But I, I'm think about, thinking about it
especially in terms of, of news media.
And, for example, the, the way that
the emergence of the theme or the.
Even just the term of income and
equality has suddenly allowed
us to talk about something that we really
have not been talking very much about.
And I, I sort of saw this
peak with Piketty's book.
And then people pulling some
very in depth journalism and
very interesting editorial pieces.
And, and some people really, repeating
that over, I mean, Paul Krugman for
example, has taken this on, as a,
as a, a theme of his editorials.
And but I, and not to say that the,
that the term income inequality
hasn't existed for a very long time.
But just the,
the prominence of it in Piketty's books
seems to have made this explosion happen.
And I'm mean it's not a,
a media storm in quite the sense you
were using it with these huge stories.
But, I think it's, it has persisted for
a very long time now.
>> Yeah, I, I agree.
And I, I think that, again, there are a
number of different factors that have made
that possible, and
it's hard to point to any single one.
But but I think that
the discussion of income equal,
inequality when, when we had the Romney,
Obama campaign in 2012.
That helped to soften the ground for
us all to think about income distribution.
And then we have had this push of the
raising of the floor of, of minimum wage.
Which has been really interesting, and
that's probably only been made
possible by the recovering economy.
And so so I think that a lot
of the stage has to be set for
some kind of conversation
like that to happen.
And there needs to be nothing else
dramatic that is pulling our attention
away.
So, the question is during this brief
window of time when we have the bandwidth,
the mental bandwidth and
the media bandwidth to,
to think about income inequality.
How are there policies that
will be pushed through?
There that makes it, that gives room for
news coverage of for
example, this,
this Silicone Valley organization.
That just decided to give what $70,000,
salaries to everyone across
the board no matter who you were.
That gets media attention because
we've already been talking about it.
Because the public is primed to think
about this and because there isn't,
thankfully, there aren't any, right,
current natural disasters in the U.S.
to pay attention to instead.
>> Okay,
we're gonna have to break now, for.
>> Yeah, so we'll have a 15
minute break in the library.
And thank you to the panelists.
[APPLAUSE]
