Why Eric Alterman's Still Wrong

Whoops! Taking aim at lazy punditry yesterday, I'm afraid I committed some of my own. I'm taking a mulligan.

I dissected a column by The Nation's Eric Alterman, who claimed that media outlets are shoving tabloid news and conservative opinion down an unwilling public's throat. To back up his thesis, Alterman cited, at face value, a Pew poll in which respondents claimed to have little interest in gossip or demagoguery. I argued that he was misreading the poll by ignoring the built-in response bias created when survey-takers try to answer in ways that make them look smart, rather than answering honestly.

So far, so good -- only, as Ankush Khardori points out, Pew considered and rejected the possibility that response bias had skewed its finding. And I would know that, if I'd read the whole report. Busted.

The good news is that I still don't think Alterman's argument holds up. First of all, the reasons cited by Michael Robinson, the report's author, for discounting bias are pretty weak. For instance, Robinson says the respondents were honest about liking weather stories and not liking foreign affairs, so why should they lie about the other stuff? I don't buy it. From a social-acceptability point of view, there's a huge difference between saying "I'm interested in knowing what hurricanes are headed my way and don't much care whether Turkey gets admitted to the E.U." and saying "More bald-headed Britney, please."

But let's say, for the sake of argument, that Robinson is right, or at least that Alterman considered the possibility of bias and rejected it for the same reasons Robinson did. What then?

In that case, you're still left with the question: If most people don't want scandal or opinion in their news, why do cable news ratings spike for wall-to-wall coverage of Anna Nicole Smith or Michael Jackson, and why do Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity rule the roost in primetime?

Here's how Robinson explains it: "While tabloid stories do not engage the avid attention of large audiences, recent data indicate that such stories do generate intense interest among their core followers."

In other words, trash has a niche audience, and that audience is able to produce ratings spikes for CNN or Fox News because their viewership numbers are tiny compared to the networks.

That's a defensible position. I don't agree with it -- I still think there's plenty of social-acceptability bias evident in Pew's data, and I think an awful lot of people pay at least some attention to astronaut love triangles and the like -- but it holds water.

Even if you accept it, however, Alterman's argument still doesn't make sense. The demand for trash may be small, but it's still real, and the people who consume it are passionate about it. No one's "giving people junk they don't even desire"; some of us do desire it, even if it's just a tiny fraction. To wonder why trash persists in the media marketplace when it's a minority taste is like wondering why you can still find Mr. Pibb at the grocery store when most people would rather drink Coke: because someone's making money from it. Duh.

UPDATE: After posting this, I saw that Alterman has offered his own critique of my earlier piece. I'm pleased to say that I don't feel the need to add anything, having anticipated all of his points. I do, however, admire the "I have a book deal and you don't" jeer as a means of ending an argument.

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