Biased News vs. Biased Reader--A Telltale of Findings from a Double Blind Study

The recent Gallup Survey shows that Americans are becoming more distrustful of the media for potential bias in the news content. However, they should be also worried about their consumption habit and their own bias that distort their ratings of news content. In fact, people who are the most distrustful of the news media tend to be the most biased readers, according to a research in which Knight Foundation has partnered with the Gallup in 2017. That throws us to an equally vexing questions: how to study bias?

Data Scientists and Social Scientists have devised a number of ways to study, research and understand bias which is notoriously hard to measure. A well-renowned study conducted by economists Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse showed that the woman admittance rate to city orchestras had increased significantly when participants auditioned behind a curtain and evaluators were not allowed to see the auditioning musicians. The lesson from this and other similar studies is that to evaluate solely on the "quality" of auditioning musicians, the experiment needs to be double blind.

In the context of biased news, Gallup and Knight Foundation have partnered in 2017 to create an experimental news platform as part of a larger research endeavor. The platform pulled news content and related articles from diverse media outlets and invited a random sample of Americans who had taken Gallup surveys to participate in the rating the trustworthiness of the content. Half of the participants (Experimental Group) were not allowed to see the source of the content and news article, while the remaining half (Control Group) were allowed to see the source as they would do on a typical website. A total of 3,081 participants provided ratings of 1,645 different articles originally published by one of seven well-known sources.

The findings from the Gallup-Knight experiment were startling. Participants in the Experimental Group who identified themselves Republicans rated content from The New York Times and Vox more trustworthy than the self-identified Republicans in the Control Group who read the identical content knowing their sources. Ditto for the self-identified Democrats: participants in the Experimental Group rated content from Fox News more trustworthy than those in Control Group. Now, consider a reader's trustworthiness score as a sum of quality of article, reader's personal view and brand bias. Since Experimental Group and Control Group take into account the first two sources of variability--quality of the article and reader's personal view--as both groups are alike, leaving only the brand bias as the factor getting reflected in the score variability. An individual's (in Control Group) brand bias is thus estimated as the absolute difference in the her or his trustworthiness score and the mean trustworthiness score of the blind group, or Experimental Group, for the same article. On a scale of 1 to 5, 35 percent exhibit large bias, implying that their average trustworthiness score vary as high as 1.5 points on a scale of 1 to 5 compared to the respective participants in the blind group, or Experimental Group. Throw the names of Clinton and Trump, the trustworthiness ratings gap significantly jumps between Experimental Group and Control Group.

The bias is not a one way street. It's complex, and for a Data Scientist or a Social Scientist, to measure and interpret it becomes more of an art than science.

Chopping Helen Keller Does Disservice to Texas Students

The September 2018 decision of the Texas State Board of Education to drop Helen Keller from social studies curriculum in Texas public schools was a political stabbing at the Texas students as it was another of continuing actions of SBE to dilute the historic importance of public figures whose political and social bent might not sit well with the policymakers.

Among the public figures chopped off the curriculum were Hillary Clinton, Barry Goldwater and Helen Keller, one could identify the rationale--however specious it is--behind dropping Clinton and Goldwater. But, there is no basis for dropping Keller off the social studies curriculum. Helen Keller's (1880-1968) iconic life was--and is still continuing to be--an inspiration to millions of people worldwide as Keller, struck blind and deaf by illness before the age 2--was the first blind and deaf American to graduate from college in 1904. Hellen Keller's disabilities instilled a sense of determination in herself that propelled her--after graduating from Radcliffe College--to author 12 books, lecture in 35 countries and help change world's perception on blind and deaf. Her autobiography, The Story of My Life, was published in 1903, and had become a literary gem in the years since. Helen Keller's high school life chronicles another heroic figure's novel approach and dedication: that of her teacher, Anne Sullivan, who lifted a young Keller out of silence into a more outspoken advocate of millions of deaf and blind at the very early age. Anne taught her the sign language, first starting with water, and subsequently, teaching her how to read in Braille.

Helen Keller's articles and speeches are some of the most memorable ever that have inspired a generation of people all over the world, and her charitable work through the American Foundation for the Blind and other organizations has helped a broad section of people on the margin. She was a self-proclaimed "Democratic Socialist" who had fought hard for workers' right and free speech. She was also a co-founder of American Civil Liberties Union and a lifelong supporter of NAACP. But it is not for her politics that she has been recognized by the Time magazine as the one of the most influential people of the 20th century, it's her philanthropic work that changed the way world had come to perceive people with disabilities.

SBE may not be willing to restore Helen Keller into the social studies curriculum by scoring her 7 out of 20 on whether she had so called "watershed contribution" and essentially failing her on the impact on people's lives as an "essential" figure, I am confident that Texas educators will carve out time and space to illuminate our state's children with the exemplary life of Helen Keller. As Hellen Keller wrote in a 1933 article for The Home magazine that "A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships", and "the simplest way to be happy is to do good". That's a message worth hundreds time repeating, especially in this all-too-cynical age.

Make Workers Great Again

Labor Day weekend is not only a reminder of a beginning of fall sales blitz in retail industry, it also marks the reinforcement of workers' contribution to the fabric of American dreams. So, it's noteworthy to trace back the roots of Labor Day and how it has all started.

The first Labor Day was celebrated on September 5, 1882 in New York City and organized by the Central Labor Union, a predecessor of AFL-CIO. However, it's still unclear whose idea it was to mark the Labor Day as a Holiday. Historians are a divided lot, with some saying that it was an idea of American Federation of Labor co-founder Peter J. McGuire while others think that it came from Matthew Maguire, a machinist. Either way, Labor Day and International Workers' Day, marked on May 1, are historic in advancing the labor rights movement. Labor Day Holiday was first marked a federal Holiday in 1892. Many of the today's demands such as $15 an hour wage and also regulations at the state and federal levels have spawned directly from the workers' struggle in the late 19th- and early 20th century.

However, today's business challenges such as globalization and technological revolution pose both the risks and opportunities to our workforce. According to a 2017 McKinsey Global Institute report, "by 2030, 75 million to 375 million workers (3 percent to 14 percent of the global workforce) will need to switch occupational categories". To address this sort of disruption, governments and private enterprises need to provide enhanced training to the workforce on continuous basis and healthcare options need to be decoupled from specific employers. With the advent and dominance of AI, ML and dominance, "cobotics"--humans working alongside their new robotic colleagues--will be the foundation of work ecosystem. Policymakers and government officials need to hew their policies toward smoothing out the process of massive disruptions to be brought about by the technology of future and help workforce to adopt and adapt to automation without significant pains.