\t\t\t\t— For the past few days, I’ve been doing some tit-for-tat in e-mail with Geoff Nunberg over his quick survey of elected-official labeling in newspapers. Numberg’s major errors are the most obvious ones: Goldberg said the Big Three nightly newcasts identify conservatives as out-of-the-mainstream more than liberals. Nunberg’s survey, while interesting, doesn’t address the charge, because he examined print media instead of the Big Three. The language of television is very different from the language of print, and you don’t learn much about one by studying the other. He also limited the published study to a handful of elected officials with very well-established ideological credentials, people for whom labelling is redundant.
In a more extensive survey on his web site<\/a>, Nunberg publishes results on Supreme Court justices and lobbying groups that support Goldberg’s claim. It seems to me that the effects of labeling are most pronounced when the media labels or doesn’t label the people that it interviews as experts on various political subjects. Most of these people — and I’m one of them, with a long list of interview credits in print and broadcast — are partisan lobbyists and consultants. It was my experience that the L. A. Times always identified me as a “fathers’ rights lobbyist” while identifying people who lobbied for the other side as “child support analyst” or some similarly neutral-but-authoritative-sounding-title. I have examples<\/a>. There are no neutral parties in the political process, but you wouldn’t know that from watching network news.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" — For the past few days, I’ve been doing some tit-for-tat in e-mail with Geoff Nunberg over his quick survey of elected-official labeling in newspapers. Numberg’s major errors are the most obvious ones: Goldberg said the Big Three nightly newcasts identify conservatives as out-of-the-mainstream more than liberals. Nunberg’s survey, while interesting, doesn’t address the charge, … Continue reading “Tit for Tat with Nunberg”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbifyw-81","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}