# Posted 8:51 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

THE POWER OF MASS MEDIA: In my periodic ruminations about the role of mass media in public life, one of the questions I often return to is the question of whether one-sided coverage of a given issue actually influence its audience, or whether readers intuitively know how to filter out editorial bias.

I returned to this question today, in fact, after an interesting exchange on the Rhodes Scholar e-mail list. It all began with a brief message from a physicist, who provided a link to a Guardian dispatch on Paul Wolfowitz, simpy noting that it might be of interest.

In short, the dispatch reported that Wolfowitz had finally admitted, in public, that the American motive for invading Iraq was the possession of its oil. The "evidence" cited by the Guardian consisted of an artilce in the German-language Tagesspiegel as well as the already-distorted statements Wolfowitz made in an interview with Vanity Fair.

Not long after the physicist's missive, OxFriend Steve Sachs sent a brief note to the list providing a link to the full transcript of the Vanity Fair article so that his fellow Scholars could see how the Guardian took Wolfowitz's words out of context.

Next up came a message from a Scholar inclined to trust the Guardian, who pointed out that Steve had done nothing to discredit the account provided by the German press. Guessing that it wouldn't be hard to finish what Steve had started, I decided to discredit the German press myself.

As it turns out, doing so required no effort at all, since Greg D. over at Belgravia Dispatch kindly let me know that he had just put up an in-depth exposing the fundamental dishonesty of the German press in this instance.

Yet before I could even let Steve know what I'd found, OxBlog's own Josh Chafetz sent an e-mail to the Rhodes list which linked to an ABC news story with the correct version of Wolfowitz's remarks.

So what's the moral of this story? Well, one moral is that the proliferation of transcripts online makes it much more dangerous for journalists to quote anyone out of context.

Another moral is that even those of us thought to be most educated are prone to manipulation by the press. Consider this counterfactual: What if Josh, Stephen and myself weren't news junkies who had the wherewithal to fisk the Guardian with a few keyboard strokes? My guess is that hundreds of Rhodes Scholars would now believe (if they didn't already) that Wolfowitz had confessed to invading Iraq for its oil.

Would it be their fault for believing this lie? Of course not. For most of the Oxbridge set, the Guardian has the same credibility that the Washington Post has in the United States. In fact, there are probably tens of thousands of Britons who still believe what the Guardian had to say about the Deputy Secretary of Defense.

(Full disclosure: I myself have been suckered by the media, so I do not place myself above any of my fellow Scholars with regard to this matter.)

Perhaps the more important question is what long-term impact this event might have had on the political beliefs of the Scholars in question. One might hypothesize that those who already have negative attitudes towards either the GOP or the US as a whole might be more likely to remember what Wolfowitz said, whereas the less critical might soon forget it.

Yet even if that rule applies in general, what if a small but definite percentage of those who read the article converted from an uncommitted to a highly negative approach to either the GOP or the United States? Given that the Guardian publishes such articles on a regular basis, how long before all those who think of it as political gospel come to share its cynical view of American motives?

Weighing against such considerations is the possibility that articles in other publications might reverse the effect had by the Guardian. The problem is, of course, how it could ever be possible to measure the impact of any article or publication on a given audience.

While I obviously don't have an answer to that question, I would like to describe one broad approach to it which I find compelling. According to this approach, humans are "online" thinkers who retain only small amounts of relevant information in their accessible memory.

Yet rather than "forgetting" information when it disappears from active memory, the mind updates any concepts which might be affected by the information in question. For example, before forgetting the details of the Guardian's attack on Wolfowitz, one might increase one's distrust of Wolfowitz, the Bush administration, the United States and possibly even all government officials.

If, later on, one asked why one distrusts such persons or categories of persons, one will not be available to refer to the Guardian article as evidence, since one will have forgotten it.

While it should be evident that the "online" paradigm doesn't resolve the issue of measurement, it does explain one of the most mystifying aspects of public opinion, i.e. how hundreds of millions of citizens can have firm views on so many different political issues without having any information at their fingertips with which to back such opinions up.

Until recently, scholars presumed that the average citizens was simply so prejudiced and closed-minded that he or she reached his opinions in the absence of information. With the aid of the online paradigm, however, one can understand how the average citizens forms opinions without devoting a tremendous amount of memory to political information storage.

Is there any neuroscientific evidence to back up the online paradigm? I don't know. My knowledge of the literature isn't great. But someone probably is working on it. Still, the online approach does have common sense working in its favor. While there aren't too many specific conclusions to be drawn from it, it does give us a helpful way of thinking about how media bias fits on to the lives of the vast majority of those who don't have all day and all night to spend worrying about politics.
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