#public opinion and election polling market segments

[tbrcresearchreport]

The Business Research Company offers public opinion and election polling market research report 2023 with industry size, share, segments and market growth

[mariacallous]

In September, Meduza published an investigation into a nonprofit called Dialogue, which has been pivotal in spreading pro-Kremlin disinformation since its creation in 2019. Now, the organization has reportedly spun off its polling division, which for years has conducted shoddy online surveys and billed the results as meaningful public opinion data, into a separate entity that its leaders hope will aid their ambitions of becoming a one-stop shop for the government’s PR needs. Meduza special correspondents Svetlana Reiter and Andrey Pertsev explain.

In August 2023, Russia’s government-backed and pro-Kremlin media outlets began reporting on Internet surveys from a previously unknown company called Weber. The surveys covered a wide variety of topics. Among other things, they purported to have found that:

89 percent of Russians consider “family” to be a “primary value,” while 93 percent said the same about “security,” and 94 percent about “health”;

72 percent of Russians met their “first love” in school;

66 percent of Russians have a favorable view of bargain sales and believe in the “reality of the discounts” offered to them; and

64 percent of Russians do not believe that artificial intelligence will be able to replace teachers.

According to articles that cite Weber’s surveys, the company was created by a nonprofit organization called Dialogue and its subsidiary Dialogue Regions. A past investigation by Meduza found that these entities are responsible for thousands of government social media accounts, Defense Ministry PR campaigns, and countless fake news stories about Ukraine.

A source close to the Putin administration previously told Meduza that Internet polling is an integral part of Dialogue’s work and that reports on the results of the organization’s surveys sometimes reach Putin himself.

However, even the president’s team is skeptical of the results’ accuracy. Because the surveys are conducted exclusively online and are distributed through government social media pages, they provide only “a specific snapshot of a certain segment [of the population], not thorough studies,” said a source close to the Kremlin.

According to Meduza’s sources, Dialogue CEO Vladimir Tabak has been “called out” numerous times for the quality of his “research.” “He has quite a few detractors: the Federal Protective Service (FSO) has its own surveys, the security forces prefer VTsIOM [the Russian Public Opinion Research Center], and the presidential envoys and governors need real surveys, not Internet ones,” one source said.

Multiple sources close to the Kremlin and one source close to the Russian government told Meduza that Weber was explicitly created to “counter this criticism” and ensure that Dialogue can keep working with the president’s administration and other government agencies: “The idea is to say, what else could you guys need? We have an entire separate structure that’s constantly asking questions and measuring things.”

A Dialogue employee told Meduza that Weber is essentially Dialogue’s surveying branch spun off into a separate company. According to the employee, the firm is overseen by economist and former VTsIOM employee Yelena Udalova, who is also the head of the corresponding department at Dialogue.

Additionally, one of Meduza’s sources close to the Kremlin said the heads of Dialogue have “plans or dreams to become the main player in the [Russian] political-strategy market,” and they hope Weber will help them with this:

There’s such a thing as vertically integrated enterprises, including in the PR and political-strategy sectors. Dialogue wants to handle elections, PR, and government relations for major companies. Now they’ll be able to go to a governor and say, look, not only do we have media and social media specialists — we also do polling.

They’ve even tried to offer their own “field specialists” [to handle operations on the ground] during elections. Apparently, they have their own teams, but our comrades at the top [from the presidential administration] quickly put a stop to it. There are other people for that.

According to a source close to the Putin administration, Dialogue’s pollsters are currently trying to distance themselves from Internet surveys and focus instead on higher-quality polling, focus groups, and public opinion interviews. Weber is also one of the agencies organizing “It Runs in the Family,” a family-themed competition and giveaway intended to “create a positive backdrop” ahead of the 2024 presidential election. “The competition is a brilliant way to show off the new project,” one source said, referring to the public opinion “statistics” frequently included in promotional materials for the initiative.

“It’s very comfortable sociology. Teachers, bargain sales, family — no hot-button issues. It’s a different level of optimism [compared to surveys about the war, sanctions, or political leaders],” said a source close to the Kremlin.

“Dialogue” did not respond to Meduza’s request for comment.

[lokishatbrc]

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The global marketing research and analysis services market is expected to grow from $71.86 billion in 2020 to $75.66 billion in 2021 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.3%. The growth is mainly due to the companies rearranging their operations and recovering from the COVID-19 impact, which had earlier led to restrictive containment measures involving social distancing, remote working, and the closure of commercial activities that resulted in operational challenges. The market is expected to reach $90.79 billion in 2025 at a CAGR of 5%.

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[patriotsnet]

How Are Republicans And Democrats Different

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/how-are-republicans-and-democrats-different/

How Are Republicans And Democrats Different

What If The Republicans Win Everything Again

Democrats Vs Republicans | What is the difference between Democrats and Republicans?

Total victory for the G.O.P. would mean Trump unleashed.

By David Leonhardt

Opinion Columnist

The end of Robert Muellers investigation. The loss of health insurance for several million people. New laws that make it harder to vote. More tax cuts for the rich. More damage to the environment. A Republican Party molded even more in the image of President Trump.

These are among the plausible consequences if the Republicans sweep the midterm elections and keep control of both the House and Senate. And dont fool yourself. That outcome, although not the most likely one, remains possible. The last couple of weeks of polling have shown how it could happen.

Voters who lean Republican including whites across the South could set aside their disappointment with Trump and vote for Republican congressional candidates. Voters who lean left including Latinos and younger adults could turn out in low numbers, as they usually do in midterm elections. The Republicans continuing efforts to suppress turnout could also swing a few close elections.

No matter what, Democrats will probably win the popular vote in the House elections, for the first time since 2012. Trump, after all, remains unpopular. But the combination of gerrymandering and the concentration of Democratic voters in major cities means that a popular-vote win wont automatically translate into a House majority.

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Republican Vs Democratic Demographics

Interesting data about how support for each party broke down by race, geography and the urban-rural divide during the 2018 mid-term elections are presented in charts here.

The Pew Research Group, among others, regularly surveys American citizens to determine party affiliation or support for various demographic groups. Some of their latest results are below.

What Does Republican Mean

The word republicanmeans of, relating to, or of the nature of a republic. Similarly to the word democratic, the word republican also describes things that resemble or involve a particular form of government, in this case the government in question is a republic. A republic is a government system in which power rests with voting citizens who directly or indirectly choose representatives to exercise political power on their behalf.;

You may have noticed that a republic sounds a lot like a democracy. As it happens, most of the present-day democracies are also republics. However, not every republic is democratic and not every democratic country is a republic.

For example, the historical city-state of Venice had a leader known as a doge who was elected by voters. In the case of Venice, though, the voters were a small council of wealthy traders, and the doge held his position for life. Venice and other similar mercantile city-states had republican governments, but as you can see, they were definitely not democratic. At the same time, the United Kingdom is a democratic country that has a monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, and so it is not a republican country because it is not officially a republic.;

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What Were The Main Aim Of The Chicano Mural Movement

This art, the Chicano Murals created as part of el Movimiento in San Diego, California was intended primarily as a didactic communication medium to reach into the barrios and marginalized neighborhoods for the primary purpose of carrying a resistance message to the semiliterate mestizo population within.

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Widest Perception Gap At Political Extremes

In one of the largest national studies of Americas polarization ever conducted, More in Commons Hidden Tribes report identified seven political tribes:

The Hidden Tribes of America

The Perception Gap study builds on these insights. It finds that the most partisan, politically active Americans a group we call the Wings have deeply distorted perceptions of the other side. The two groups with the widest Perception Gaps are the Progressive Activists and the Devoted Conservativesthe most ideological and committed groups of Democrats and Republicans.

And which is the most accurate segment? Surprisingly, its the Politically Disengaged. They are fully three times more accurate in their estimates of political opponents than members of either of these Wing groups. The V-shaped Perception Gap shows that the less invested you are in politics today, the less distorted your perception of politics.

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A Division Of Power In Government Is Common In The Us With The Republicans And The Democrats Often Splitting Control Of The White House And Congress

Joe Biden may have been announced as President Elect but there are still some crucial decisions to be made on how America will be governed for the next four years. The presidential election appears to have been a pretty resounding win for the Democrats but the picture is less clear in the Senate, when both parties retain hope of having a majority when the Upper House reconvenes next year.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer released a statement after Bidens victory was called, saying: âA Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate would be the biggest difference maker to help President-elect Biden deliver for working families across the country.

Sen. Chuck Schumer: âThere has been no evidence of any significant or widespread voter fraud. Joe Biden won this election fair and square. The margins of his victory are growing by the day.â

The Hill

All elections in Georgia, not just those for the Senate, require the winning candidate to pick up over 50% of the votes cast. This year neither of the states two Senate races had a majority winning so a run-off will be held on 5 January, with both the Democrats and the Republicans holding out hope of securing the vital seats needed to give them a majority in the Senate.

Why is control of the Senate so important?

Although President Elect Biden will be the head of the government, he would rather govern by concensus than executive order. Therefore most large-scale bills will need to pass Congress before they can be signed into law.

The New Deal Coalition

The countrys third critical election, in 1932, took place in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929 and in the midst of the Great Depression. Led by Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democrats not only regained the presidency but also replaced the Republicans as the majority party throughout the countryin the North as well as the South. Through his political skills and his sweeping New Deal social programs, such as social security and the statutory minimum wage, Roosevelt forged a broad coalitionincluding small farmers, Northern city dwellers, organized labour, European immigrants, liberals, intellectuals, and reformersthat enabled the Democratic Party to retain the presidency until 1952 and to control both houses of Congress for most of the period from the 1930s to the mid-1990s. Roosevelt was reelected in 1936, 1940, and 1944; he was the only president to be elected to more than two terms. Upon his death in 1945 he was succeeded by his vice president, Harry S. Truman, who was narrowly elected in 1948.

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The Plausible Solution: Just Win More

Whether the public sees Democratic demands for these structural changes as overdue or overreaching, the key point is that they are currently exercises in futility. The only plausible road to winning their major policy goals is to win by winning. This means politics, not re-engineering. They need to find ways to take down their opponents, and then be smarter about using that power while they have it.

They certainly have issues to campaign on. In the few weeks, we have learned that some of Americas wealthiest people have paid only minimal or no federal income tax at all. Even as the Wall Street Journal editorial writers were responding to a Code Red emergency , the jaw-dropping nature of the reportfollowed by a New York Times piece about the impotence of the IRS to deal with the tax evasions of private equity royaltyconfirmed the folk wisdom of countless bars, diners, and union halls: the wealthy get away with murder.

Of course this is a whole lot easier said than done. A political climate where inflation, crime and immigration are dominant issues has the potential to override good economic news. And 2020 already showed what can happen when a relative handful of voices calling for defunding the police can drown out the broader usage of economic fairness.

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What Is The Difference Between Republicans And Democrats

Democrats and Republicans prepare vastly different election campaigns

Republicans and Democrats are the two main and historically the largest political parties in the US and, after every election, hold the majority seats in the House of Representatives and the Senate as well as the highest number of Governors. Though both the parties mean well for the US citizens, they have distinct differences that manifest in their comments, decisions, and history. These differences are mainly ideological, political, social, and economic paths to making the US successful and the world a better place for all. Differences between the two parties that are covered in this article rely on the majority position though individual politicians may have varied preferences.

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Obama And Trump Healthcare Policies Compared

There could not be a more radical divide between administrations than there is between these two. The Obama administration worked against almost insurmountable opposition from the GOP in order to pass the ACA. The Trump Administrations quest is to dismantle everything the Obama Administration has done. They even have court cases pending in order to do so.

Regulating The Economy Democratic Style

The Democratic Party is generally considered more willing to intervene in the economy, subscribing to the belief that government power is needed to regulate businesses that ignore social interests in the pursuit of earning a return for shareholders. This intervention can come in the form of regulation or taxation to support social programs. Opponents often describe the Democratic approach to governing as “tax and spend.”

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Republicans Vs Democrats: Where Do The Two Main Us Political Parties Stand On Key Issues

After an impeachment, a positive coronavirus test and an unforgettable first presidential debate rounded out the final months of Donald Trump’s first term, it seems fair to say the past few years have been a roller-coaster ride for US politics.

On November 3, Americans will decide which candidate will win the 2020 presidential election, sparking either the beginning, or end, for each nominee.

But how does it all work?

Well, the US political system is dominated by two main parties the Democrats and the Republicans and the next president will belong to one of those two.

Just how different are their policies?

Here’s what you need to know, starting with the candidates.

Tip : Remember You Arent Trying To Change Minds But Promote Discussion

Of course, you want to get someone else to share your beliefs. Thats human nature. But remember they share the same desire. When you talk politics, dont try to change their opinion.;

Try to understand where theyre coming from. This will make you more informed about your own opinions, and it will open more space where we can share our ideas.;

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Main Difference Between Democrats And Republicans In Point Form

Democratic Party was founded in 1828 while the Republican Party in 1854

The Democratic Party has about 15 presidents while the Republican Party has about 19 presidents since independence

Republican Party voters are older generation while Democratic Party voters are the younger generation

The voters of Republicans are conservatives while democrats are liberal

The main color of republicans is red while that of democrats is blue

The party symbol of democrats is a donkey whereas that of republicans is an elephant

The Democrats party was founded on the basis of anti-federalism whereas republican party on the basis of anti-slavery and agent of modernity

The Democrats party has a larger membership subscription whereas republican has a lower membership subscription

Democrats applaud same-sex marriage whereas republicans condemn same-sex marriage

Democrats want the elderly medical program to be allowed while republicans reject suggestions of elderly medical care program

Tip : Listen To Understand Not Respond

Most of the time when we argue, we listen to respond. If youre planning your response while the other person talks, youre listening to respond.;

Instead, let your conversational partner finish their point. Then repeat their ideas to show youre listening. Most likely, this action will catch them off guard.;

When people feel listened to and respected, theyre more likely to reciprocate.;

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Key Takeaways: Republic Vs Democracy

Republics and democracies both provide a political system in which citizens are represented by elected officials who are sworn to protect their interests.

In a pure democracy, laws are made directly by the voting majority leaving the rights of the minority largely unprotected.

In a republic, laws are made by representatives chosen by the people and must comply with a constitution that specifically protects the rights of the minority from the will of the majority.

The United States, while basically a republic, is best described as a representative democracy.;;

In a republic, an official set of fundamental laws, like the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, prohibits the government from limiting or taking away certain inalienable rights of the people, even if that government was freely chosen by a majority of the people. In a pure democracy, the voting majority has almost limitless power over the minority.;

The United States, like most modern nations, is neither a pure republic nor a pure democracy. Instead, it is;a hybrid democratic republic.

The main difference between a democracy and a republic is the extent to which the people control the process of making laws under each form of government.

Founding Father James Madison may have best described the difference between a democracy and a republic:

Gold If Democrats Win The Election

Missouri Republicans and Democrats offer different legislative solutions to St. Louis crime

If Democrats win the election and especially take both the presidency and Senate, Oliver expects the gold price to soar. He said if the pendulum swings all the way to the left, it means even more money printing than what has already been going on with a mixed government.

He noted that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are promising a $7 trillion spending problem. That doesnât include the trillions in additional stimulus to deal with the pandemic, which he believes âwill include bailouts of urban centers turned into war zones by Democrat mayors and governors) or reparations.â

Oliver also noted that Democrats want to fund their âmad spendingâ with taxes partially. Biden wants to increase income taxes, corporate taxes and taxes on capital. However, he said federal, state and local taxes are already so high that he believes higher taxes may not boost tax revenue much.

âIn short, the economy must suffer , and the deficit will explode further,â he wrote. âThe Federal Reserve will be forced either to monetize the spendings or watch as soaring interest rates cause the financial system to implode along with the stateâs ability to finance itself. The credit bubble that has been growing since 1971 , will crash onto the rocks of progressive politics.â

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Ideological Differences Between Republicans And Democrats

1. Ideological Differences between Republicans and DemocratsIn addition to the decline in competition, American politics today is characterized by a growing ideological polarization between the two major political parties. Thomas E. MannPolitical party affiliation is a viable way to find out the philosophy of a certain competing candidate, may he be Republican or Democratic. This in turn reflects upon his core beliefs. Republicans believe that each citizen is responsible for his/her position

The Parties Change Course

After the war, the Republican Party became more and more oriented towards economic growth, industry, and big business in Northern states, and in the beginning of the 20th;century it had reached a general status as a party for the more wealthy classes in society. Many Republicans therefore gained financial success in the prosperous 1920s until the stock market crashed in 1929 initiating the era of the Great Depression.

Now, many Americans blamed Republican President Herbert Hoover for the financial damages brought by the crisis. In 1932 the country therefore instead elected Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt to be president.

The Democratic Party largely stayed in power until 1980, when Republican Ronald Reagan was elected as president. Reagans social conservative politics and emphasis on cutting taxes, preserving family values, and increasing military funding were important steps in defining the modern Republican Party platform.

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Republican And Democrats Similarities

Americans identify as Democrats and 26% of Americans identify as Republicans excluding the 42% who identify as Independent. Bump, P. . Have you ever wondered what makes the percentage of Democrats and Republicans so close? Have you ever wondered what sets apart a Democrat from a Republican? This following essay will compare and contrast Democrats and Republicans explaining the key similarities and differences.There are basic facts that sets apart a Democrat from a Republican. For example,

Difference Between Republican And Democrats

One of the differences between democrats and republicans lies in their views towards social issues. The Republicans tend to be conservative on social issues. They tend to oppose gay marriage and promote marriage being between a man and a woman. They also oppose abortion and promote the right of gun ownership. Have you ever actually took time to think about politics? Not just hearing it on the news then changing the channel or having a little small conversation then moving on but actually really

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[finance-expert]

State of Crypto: The SEC Takes on DeFi

The SEC is reportedly investigating decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms and the parties behind them. While not unexpected, this is a new phase in the crypto-regulatory landscape. We may be able to predict how these investigations will proceed by looking at prominent historical examples.

You’re reading State of Crypto, a CoinDesk newsletter looking at the intersection of cryptocurrency and government. Click here to sign up for future editions.

DeFi investigation

The narrative

News broke Friday that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is conducting a probe into Uniswap Labs and other DeFi platforms. It’s unclear whether these investigations are still primarily for information-gathering purposes or whether there will be enforcement actions coming. Regardless, this is a pivotal, if expected, development in the regulator’s oversight of the crypto market.

Why it matters

How the SEC approaches DeFi might determine how well DeFi platforms survive in the coming years, particularly as the agency’s investigations mature. There are few details about the SEC’s investigations that are publicly available at this time, but we can look to the past to guesstimate how these investigations may proceed.

Breaking it down

The SEC has signaled for a few weeks now that it’s going to be taking a look at DeFi. I’ve written about this at least twice now, so news stories that the agency is actively looking into this segment of the crypto market are absolutely not a surprise.

To sum up what we do know: The SEC is reportedly investigating Uniswap Labs, the developer behind Uniswap, the leading decentralized exchange (DEX) on Ethereum. What’s a DEX, you may ask? Consider it a robot on the internet routing trades through various pools of funds, no middleman (beyond the software) needed. Other (unnamed) DeFi platforms may also be in the SEC’s crosshairs.

While we don’t yet know what the regulator is specifically looking for, we can find some clues in recent history that point to how the agency might approach DeFi and enforcement actions.

DeFi tea leaves

SEC Chair Gary Gensler has helpfully explained his views in detail a few times now. Most recently, he told the European Parliament that a lack of regulated brokers and clear-cut investor protection rules leaves “the investing public … vulnerable,” particularly to scams or other forms of abuse.

In the past he has also pointed to “promoters and sponsors” who write the software behind DeFi platforms and create their governance mechanisms. The theme that’s emerging so far is a focus on the centralized players that might help create or power DeFi projects (or even engage in what my colleague David Morris calls “decentralization theater”).

The SEC therefore doesn’t appear to be looking at the decentralized parts of DeFi, even if the projects themselves are adequately decentralized after launch. If a project isn’t fully decentralized in its earliest development stage, its backers may soon receive an inquiry.

This would explain why the SEC is investigating Uniswap Labs at any rate.

In a statement emailed to CoinDesk, an external spokesperson for Uniswap Labs said, “We are committed to complying with the laws and regulations governing our industry and to providing information to regulators that will assist them with any inquiry.”

Looking further back, the SEC may also look at how a DeFi platform actually operates – whether it provides a marketplace for tokens that the SEC considers securities and uses its own orderbook.

Past cases

The agency’s precedent here would be EtherDelta, the decentralized trading platform the SEC brought charges against in 2018 on allegations it acted as a securities trading platform.

At the time, the agency pointed to EtherDelta’s smart contract, order book, order display website and marketplace as evidence it was supporting illicit securities transactions.

The SEC also specifically brought charges against Zachary Coburn, who founded the platform but left over a year before the charges were filed.

So just because a platform is decentralized doesn’t mean the SEC won’t file charges against a centralized party with a significant role in setting it up.

It is worth noting here that there may be lines drawn between decentralized finance platforms generally and decentralized exchanges specifically, but the role of centralized developers or founders is salient to both types of entities.

In short, what the SEC is likely considering includes:

Investor protection concerns;

The role of centralized parties in these decentralized platforms;

Whether the tokens are securities in the SEC’s view.

Watch this space.

Bitcoin’s litmus test

Guest essay by Andrés Engler

Finally, the speculation on the use of bitcoin in El Salvador will end, and a real analysis can begin on whether the cryptocurrency is useful or not in a country in need of financial tools for its population.

Knowing like no other the power of social networks, President Nayib Bukele was extremely adept at joining an explosive tribe in search of state legitimacy. The Salvadoran case study was a win-win for both parties.

Still, Bukele had to back down in early battles against the financial establishment. The first stumbling block was the International Monetary Fund, which quickly issued a statement naming “a number of macroeconomic, financial and legal issues” that bitcoin would generate in that country, in the midst of negotiations for a $1 billion loan for the country.

Bukele, without much leeway in the international arena, made several concessions. The most striking was to desist from applying Article 7 of the law, which stipulated that all economic agents must accept bitcoin as a form of payment when offered by the person acquiring goods or services. In August, the president said the use of bitcoin as legal tender would not be mandatory, and the resulting question was obvious. If businesses are not forced to accept it, can bitcoin be considered legal tender?

The second concession, more symbolic but no less important, was saying the measure of the economy would be in dollars, and that salaries would be paid in that currency. It is worth remembering that although El Salvado has a central bank, the country does not issue its own currency but uses the U.S. dollar.

Despite the changes, bitcoin could have concrete benefits for El Salvador. It could save them $400 million that Salvadorans abroad send as remittances to their country, boost tourism and even create a mining industry if Bukele effectively makes available volcanic energy as promised.

On a continent-wide scale, the success of bitcoin in El Salvador – demonstrated in massive adoption and savings in remittances – could mean a domino effect of adoption in Latin America and developing countries in other continents.

So far, Bukele’s strategy has led different politicians in the region – from the North in Mexico to the far South in Argentina – to present bills to regulate the sector and, in some cases, promote it. Either way, bitcoin bills have been a gold mine for officials in search of votes and fame, and an important step in putting cryptocurrencies on the discussion table.

The bitcoin experiment will not only be a litmus test for Bukele but also for bitcoin itself and the discourse that proposes this cryptocurrency as a financial solution for underbanked territories.

The adoption of bitcoin in El Salvador will mean something unprecedented: the first state educational policy on crypto assets, with different offices where locals will learn to use the official digital wallet Chivo and gain knowledge about how bitcoin works and its usages, such as remittances.

Bitcoin is political

The adoption of bitcoin in El Salvador comes at a tumultuous political moment for the country. On Friday, the country’s Supreme Court – which has a pro-government tilt – declared it constitutional for the president to be reelected after his five-year term, generating pushback from the entire political opposition.

It is not the only issue. At least three opinion polls published last week showed the majority of Salvadorans do not agree with the use of bitcoin as legal tender in the country, with an average of between 65% and 70% of El Salvador’s population against it. Such a level of rejection was crystallized in some small marches that took place with only hundreds of people and unions opposed to Bukele, which could have political interests beyond bitcoin itself.

Thus, Bukele expressed days ago his frustration against those who criticized the use of bitcoin in the country for remittances.

“If you don’t want to, you can always go to Western Union and pay a commission. No problem at all,” he wrote on his Twitter account.

El Salvador’s political spectrum is on the lookout for any Bukele misstep, and has criticized the Bitcoin Law in different ways. Both the FMLN party (left) and Arena (right) are unforgiving of a president who wears a backwards cap, has broken with the status quo, entered Congress with the military to try and force the legislature to approve more military and police funding, and won the last legislative elections with a supermajority that gave him a majority in parliament.

“Some will prefer to believe the thieving opponents who have done nothing but loot our country, destroy it and pay for them to murder our people. Others will choose to believe the government. But in the end, everyone will realize the reality on Sept. 7,” Bukele wrote last week.

Tether’s reserves

In May, I filed a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request with the New York Attorney General’s Office asking for the documents detailing Tether’s reserve composition breakdown. My goal was to verify that Tether submitted similar documents to the NYAG that the company published when revealing its breakdown to the public (the pie charts, as Twitter has taken to calling them).

The NYAG FOIL officer who saw the request initially denied it, tying the request to a similar FOIL request made by another individual. CoinDesk appealed, and a different FOIL officer agreed with our appeal.

Procedurally, Tether had an opportunity to push back against the second officer’s decision, which it did in the form of a petition filed last week. I imagine we’re still close to the beginning of this process, so obviously more to come on this front.

Here’s more context on how we got here, including Tether’s full statement after filing.

You can follow the court filings here.

Biden’s ruleChanging of the guard

Emory University School of Law Professor Kristin Johnson might become President Joe Biden’s next nominee to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Bloomberg reported last week.

Elsewhere:

El Salvador Police Releases Bitcoin Law Critic Arrested for Alleged Bank Fraud: Police in El Salvador arrested Mario Gomez, an activist who has criticized the country’s Bitcoin Law, without a warrant on allegations of possible bank fraud. Police released Gomez hours later.

‘Crypto Dad’ Giancarlo to Quit BlockFi’s Board After 4 Months: Former CFTC Chair Chris Giancarlo has stepped down from BlockFi’s board of directors, though the company says he will remain an adviser. BlockFi is in the middle of a legal fight with five different state regulators over whether its interest accounts product violates securities laws.

BitConnect’s Top US Promoter Pleads Guilty to Fraud Charge: Glenn Arcaro, a U.S.-based promoter for BitConnect, pled guilty to a fraud charge from the U.S. Department of Justice on the same day the SEC filed charges against him, his company and BitConnect itself.

Outside CoinDesk:

(The Atlantic) Australia seems to be pioneering some new grounds in lockdown enforcement. Some of these measures include apps that require quarantined individuals to verify their location within 15 minutes of receiving a notification, for example. What could go wrong?

(Human Rights Watch) El Salvador’s legislature passed new laws that would allow local officials to fire any judges or prosecutors over the age of 60 or extend the term of judges and prosecutors at the government’s discretion, actions which could threaten judicial independence, according to the Human Rights Watch.

(The New York Times) The Times published an interesting interactive graphic explainer on crypto energy use. It’s worth taking a look at this.

[mideastsoccer]

Playing US politics: Saudi Arabia targets Middle America

By James M. Dorsey

Amid Washington chatter about the future of US-Saudi relations, the kingdom has launched an unprecedented public diplomacy campaign to marshal business and grassroots support beyond the Beltway to counter anti-Saudi sentiment in the Biden administration and Congress.

To do so, the Saudi embassy in Washington has hired a lobbying and public relations firm headquartered in the American heartland rather than the capital. Iowa-based Larson Shannahan Slifka Group (LS2 Group) was contracted for US$126,500 a month to reach out to local media,  business and women’s groups, and world affairs councils in far-flung states. “We are real people who tackle real issues,” LS2 Group says on its website.

Embassy spokesman Fahad Nazar told USA Today in an email that "we recognize that Americans outside Washington are interested in developments in Saudi Arabia and many, including the business community, academic institutions and various civil society groups, are keen on maintaining long-standing relations with the kingdom or cultivating new ones."

Prince Abdul Rahman Bin Musai’d Al Saud, a grandson of the kingdom’s founder, King Abdulaziz, businessman and former head of one of Saudi Arabia’s foremost soccer clubs, framed US interests, particularly regarding human rights, in far blunter terms.

Saudi Arabia “carries significant economic weight and it influences the region. The world cannot do without Saudi moderation. Because of its economy, its moderation, and its cooperation in the war on terror... the truth is that you need us more than we need you,” Prince Abdul Rahman said.

To boost the Saudi public diplomacy effort, the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies (KFCRIS) in Riyadh this month armed LS2 Group with a 32-page report, entitled ‘The US-Saudi Economic Relationship: More than Arms and Oil,’ that highlights the kingdom’s investments in the US, commercial dealings, gifts to universities, and purchase of US Treasury securities.

The report noted that US$24 billion in US exports to Saudi Arabia in 2019, $3.1 billion of which were arms sales, supported 165,000 jobs in the United States. US companies were working on Saudi projects worth $700 billion. The report said the kingdom held $134.4 billion in US Treasury securities and $12.8 billion in US stocks at the end of 2020 while US investment in Saudi Arabia in 2019 totaled $10.8 billion. It touted future investment opportunities in sectors such as entertainment where US companies have a competitive advantage.

In reaching out to the American heartland, Saudi Arabia hopes to garner empathy among segments of society that are less focused on foreign policy and/or the intricacies of the Middle East than politicians in Washington and the chattering classes on both coasts of the United States.

US President Joe Biden criticized Saudi Arabia during his election campaign in stark terms, calling the kingdom a “pariah.” Mr. Biden, since coming to office has halted the sale of offensive arms to Saudi Arabia that could be deployed in the six-year-old war in Yemen, released an intelligence report that pointed fingers at Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and said he would “recalibrate” relations with the Gulf state.

The Saudi public diplomacy campaign comes as Mr. Biden is under pressure from liberals and left-wing Democrats to sanction Prince Mohammed for the Khashoggi killing, define what he means by offensive arms sales, and potentially maneuver to prevent the crown prince from becoming king.

Prominent among the speakers LS2 Group rolls out is Saudi Arabia’s glamorous ambassador to the United States, Princess Reema bint Bandar, the kingdom’s first ever woman foreign envoy, a great granddaughter of its founder, and the US-raised daughter of Prince Bandar bin Sultan who was ambassador in Washington for 22 years.

Long active in the promotion of women’s sport, Princess Reema hopes to convince her interlocutors that Saudi Arabia as a pivotal global player is an asset to the United States that has embarked on far-reaching economic and social liberalization, including the institutionalization of women’s rights.

It is a message that is designed to put the kingdom’s best foot forward and distract from the kingdom’s abominable human rights record symbolized by the Khashoggi killing and the Yemen war.

Houthi rebels this week cold-shouldered a Saudi proposal for a ceasefire that would partially lift the kingdom’s blockade of the war-ravaged country.

If successful, the public diplomacy strategy could lead to grassroots organizations in Congressmen’s districts leaning on their political representatives in Washington to adopt more lenient attitudes towards the kingdom.

It would be a message that is aligned with positions adopted by the Israel lobby, various American Jewish organizations, and other pressure groups supportive of Saudi Arabia.

Going by Philadelphia World Affairs Council president Lauren Swartz and Alaska World Affairs Council president and CEO Lise Falskow, whose members are business leaders, students, educators, and other local residents interested in foreign affairs, the strategy is paying off.

"There was a huge message of change and progress. That is ... not much reported in the newspapers here… (Princess Reema) had all her data points about Saudi Arabia's impact, opportunity and connections to Pennsylvania" that include links to the state's energy industry, Ms. Swartz said after the ambassador addressed her group on Zoom.

"Being an oil country and Alaska being an oil state, it’s interesting to hear their perspective on gas and world markets and living in the neighborhood they do – and her being a woman," Ms. Falskow added.

A 10-page glossy booklet produced by the LS2 Group in advance of Princess Reema’s appearances emphasized the kingdom’s "great progress in the area of women and sports."

Replete with pictures of women athletes, some with headscarves, some without, the publication highlights their achievements as well as significant policy changes and incorporation of women in sports management as part of Prince Mohammed’s reforms.

The public diplomacy strategy counts on Middle America being less tuned into other aspects of the crown prince’s rule.

This would likely include this week’s sentencing of Nassima Al-Sada, a prominent Shiite women’s rights activist, to five years in prison, two of which will be suspended, according to a allegedly Qatari-backed, London-based new outlet. The suspension means that Ms. Sada, one of 12 women campaigners who were arrested in 2018, could be released at the end of June.

The LS2 Group-arranged engagements outside of Washington contrast starkly with high-brow webinars hosted by Washington thinktanks in which a revolving number of former administration officials, scholars and analysts debate what US policy towards Saudi Arabia should be. They usually split down the middle on whether the United States can afford to be tough on Saudi Arabia and Prince Mohammed on issues such as human rights.

Even so, if public opinion polls in recent years are anything to go by, Saudi public diplomacy faces significant challenges. Gallup concluded last year that 65 percent of Americans viewed Saudi Arabia unfavorably as opposed to 34 percent favorably, a trend that was also evident in surveys by Business Insider and YouGov.

Recognizing the hurdles, Princess Reema appears to be following her instincts by focusing on a “comprehensive partnership” with business, culture, and education.

With US activists taking credit for mounting pressure that led to Congressional censoring of US support for the war in Yemen and Mr. Biden’s suspension of arms sales, Princess Reema appears to hope that Middle America will be her secret weapon.

In other words, Middle America may be the latest battlefield, but ultimately Washington politics will determine the kingdom’s image in the West and the future of US-Saudi relations.

A podcast version of this story is available on Soundcloud, Itunes, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, Spreaker, Pocket Casts, Tumblr, Podbean, Audecibel,  Castbox, and Patreon.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is an award-winning journalist and a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore and the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute as well as an Honorary Senior Non-Resident Fellow at Eye on ISIS

[aois21]

December 2020

The December 2020 edition of the World’s Only Podcast is here to bring the top news as Silby and Ian give you their own unfiltered and congenial feedback. This episode the boys discuss the election results, the continuing pandemic, turmoil in minor league baseball, and the return of Animaniacs.

Be sure to read more about the topics Ian and Silby discussed: 

Democrats’ ‘Blue Wave’ Crashed in Statehouses Across the Country

More Latino voters support Trump in 2020 than 2016, but young Americans favor Biden, early CNN exit polls show

How voters shifted during four years of Trump

Muslim US voters cast ballots in ‘record numbers’, with exit poll showing nearly 70% voting for Biden

The Major Difference Between Black Male and Female Voters

Is This a Coup, or Just Another Trump Con? | The New Yorker

Referendum on Trump shatters turnout records

NYT: Exit Polls 2020

NYT: Exit Polls 2016 (for comparison)

COVID In Maryland: Gov. Hogan To Restrict Indoor Capacity To 50%, Restaurants To Close By 10 p.m.

Gov. Phil Murphy joins in Black Lives Matter protests in N.J.

Moderna: COVID vaccine shows 95% effectiveness

UnPopular Opinion podcast (South Dakota and reference to April infection rates)

Millions Of Americans Traveling For Thanksgiving, Ignoring CDC Advice

New York celebrates Trump’s defeat

New York City to Close Public Schools Again as Virus Cases Rise

As the U.S. nears the 200,000 daily case mark, Americans are urged to avoid Thanksgiving travel.

WaPo: South Dakota nurse says many patients deny the coronavirus exists — right up until death

Details of MLB takeover of MiLB emerge

Yankees pulling minor league team out of Staten Island

Why MLB’s minor leagues as you know them will end on Sept. 30

Local Leaders react to the loss of the Hagerstown Suns

Costs of Minor League game (2018)

MLB average ticket price 2006-2020

It Brings Me No Pleasure to Report That the New 'Animaniacs' Is Bad | Review

Pinky, Elmyra, and the Brain Wiki

Animaniacs review (on poking bears)

You can follow Silby on Twitter at @Silby_Says and Ian at @IRobertsWriter.

This episode is brought to you by Audible. Get access to over 180,000 audiobooks with your first month free. Visit www.audibletrial.com/aois21 and your first book is on us!

Additional sponsorship is provided by Fanatics.com! Get your gear for any sports team old and new! League authorize jerseys and hats, and Washington Nationals World Series Championship merchandise is available. Visit our website and click on the banner and stock up now!

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Want more? Check out the Fifth Segment of The World’s Only Podcast on the aois21 Patreon feed later this week! Visit Patreon.com/aois21 and become a patron for just $1 a month!

Find us on Podomatic, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher Radio, Google Play, TuneIn, Facebook.com/WorldsOnlyPodcast, and our home on the web, www.aois21.com. 

[shirlleycoyle]

OAN Is So Dangerous Because It Looks Like a Real News Channel

It’s the president’s favorite “news” channel, and a cornerstone of America’s growing disinformation problem. It’s One America News (OAN), a rotating collection of wobbly conspiracies and gibberish that has more in common with a state-run disinformation network than a credible news organization. 

OAN’s definition of “news” has included false claims of electoral fraud, baseless Kremlin-backed conspiracy theories, false claims that the novel coronavirus was developed in a North Carolina lab as part of a vast government conspiracy, and accusations that last summer’s protests over the police killing of George Floyd were part of a diabolical “coup.”

“According to the mainstream media, the riots and extreme violence are completely unorganized,” the network proclaimed last August. “However, it appears this coup attempt is led by a well-funded network of anarchists trying to take down the president.”

Last June, 75-year-old Martin Gugino had his skull fractured after being shoved to the ground by Buffalo police officers. Video clearly showed the elderly Gugino doing nothing wrong, but OAN insisted he was an “Antifa provocateur” using sophisticated tech to target the police.

“Newly released video appeared to show Gugino using a police tracker on his phone trying to scan police communications during the protest,” the network falsely claimed.

Tuesday, YouTube suspended the OAN channel for a week after the company uploaded a video promoting a bogus cure for COVID-19.

In seven years OAN has gone from completely unknown to being routinely amplified by Trump, catering in many ways to an audience of one. It is a symbiotic relationship, in which Trump can point to what vaguely look like news reports to buttress his own conspiracy theorizing, and the network, by providing them, can access his massive and loyal audience.

This relationship, like so much about Trump's presidency, is seemingly unique and aberrant. But while experts say OAN’s impact is overstated and future success unsure, they also warn that without a major course correction, the channel’s modest success is a troubling harbinger of dumber and more dangerous things to come.

OAN is the brainchild of millionaire Robert Herring, who ran a chain of Los Angeles pet stores before making his fortune printing circuit boards. In 2003, Herring created Herring Networks, which includes WealthTV, a self-proclaimed “lifestyle and entertainment cable network,” and OAN, which was launched in 2013.

Few gave OAN a second glance until it became a network exclusively dedicated to pandering to Donald Trump’s insatiable ego. Dating back to 2015, Trump touted the network and its coverage of his presidential bid, and throughout his presidency, he has praised and promoted it to his tens of millions of followers. Throughout election season, OAN heaped lavish praise on the president, even pulling polls that dared suggest Trump might not win his reelection bid.  And post-election, both Herring and the channel he founded have pivoted to parroting false Trump claims of rampant electoral fraud.

Much like the alternative-reality contemporaries OAN hopes to compete with, the channel’s unbridled dedication to Trumpism—and the relentless repetition of every conspiratorial MAGA brain fart—is routinely portrayed as objective journalism by company executives.

“We’re a no-fluff, very fast-paced live news service meant to inform,” Robert’s son Charles Herring told the Washington Post in 2017. “News anchors are not allowed to express opinions. They simply deliver the news and we leave it up to the viewers to decide. It’s not our family’s mission to determine the news.”

The president’s adoration of OAN means that despite being banned from briefings by the White House Correspondents’ Association for ignoring CDC safety protocols, the channel has been allowed to simply ignore the ban, and on any given week can still be found amplifying ludicrous claims from White House grounds with a quality reminiscent of high school A/V clubs.

Last week, OAN received yet another signal boost when Trump tweeted out a segment featuring bogus claim of electoral fraud propped up by “expert analysis” by Ron Watkins—son of 8kun (formerly 8chan) owner Jim Watkins—who is alleged to be a cornerstone of the QAnon conspiracy cult, where the false claim first originated:

But even with daily free marketing from the president, OAN’s real-world influence has been largely overstated.

OAN doesn’t subscribe to industry-standard Nielsen estimates, so accurately measuring its viewership has proven to be a guessing game for TV ratings firms. (OAN claims to reach around 35 million potential homes, little more than a quarter of the total number of U.S. homes that currently own a television set.) Research firms like Kagan estimate OAN’s reach to be 23 million cable subscribers, a significantly smaller potential footprint than right-wing outlets like Newsmax TV (58.2 million) or Fox News (78.6 million). When Nielsen attempted to more accurately measure how many of those users actually watch the channel last year, it wasn’t pretty:

OAN’s ambitions have been challenged by the fact that numerous major cable outlets, including Comcast, Spectrum, and Dish Network have refused to carry the channel. A June Bloomberg report attributed this reluctance to stringent OAN contract requirements, an asking price out of line with the channel’s quality, or a lack of interest in being associated with controversy.

OAN’s biggest cable distributor, AT&T/DirecTV, has been trimming costs due to sustained TV subscriber losses from cord cutting and mismanagement. Reports earlier this year indicated that OAN’s contract with AT&T is up for renewal next year, potentially removing AT&T’s 19 million potential viewers from the equation if a new deal can’t be reached.

Neither OAN nor AT&T responded to inquiries about the status of the contract.

While OAN may not be brainwashing a massive audience; it is providing plausible-seeming props and set dressing for Trump as he uses social media to create an alternate reality in which he won the election, defeated the coronavirus, and is unfairly besieged on all sides by mean journalists and the “deep state.” It’s a false reality OAN hopes to take to the mainstream.

The MAGA set has become furious at Fox’s failure to more fully embrace false claims of election fraud, and for (accurately) calling Arizona for Joe Biden before other outlets on election night. A recent Morning Consult poll found that Fox News’ favorability among Republicans dropped from 67 to 54 percent post-election—simply for occasionally telling viewers the truth.

But without free daily advertising from the president, overtaking Fox will be a steep uphill climb for the fledgling network—especially if OAN continues to double down on conspiracies and nonsense, Stanford professor of political economics Greg Martin told Motherboard.

“Fox News in some sense created the market for OAN, by building up the taste for conservative-slanted TV news in a large audience,” Martin said. But he added that Fox maintains its massive audience by including just enough hard news (like a legitimate election data team willing to call Arizona early for Biden) to keep at least the illusion of integrity intact.

Martin’s research has found that in terms of gaining cable TV market share, there are diminishing returns when it comes toward pushing extremism at your target audience, suggesting that OAN’s quest to out-conspiracy Fox might not be a winning formula.

“One of the points we make in the paper is that there is a tradeoff in moving farther towards the ideological extreme: if people watch, you'll have greater influence on their beliefs, but you also increase the risk that they are turned off by it and don't watch at all,” Martin said.

Martin added that Fox has been very successful at this balancing act to create the illusion of mainstream respectability, but a network like OAN positioning itself even further to the right of Fox is likely to be drawing viewers from a limited pool of total viewers.

“Fox has already pushed the envelope about as far as you can go before the returns to additional ideological extremity start to turn negative,” he said. “So I am skeptical that OAN will achieve anything like Fox's influence on public policy and politics in the US, even if its ratings were to continue to grow.”

While OAN may never see the same level of success as Fox News, it doesn't have to: It has had, and could continue to have, real effects on the public discourse just by inverting the usual formula by which powerful people reach a mass audience via news outlets. And other media scholars say the success it has seen is a troubling omen for the future of U.S. journalism and America’s accelerating battle with disinformation and propaganda.

Victor Pickard, an American media studies scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, told Motherboard OAN’s rise comes at a major inflection point for U.S. media. With U.S. journalism facing an existential and financial crisis—and so many bad faith actors looking to fill the vacuum created—OAN will likely be the least of our problems. 

“It's difficult to imagine a surefire way to undo the damage to our media ecosystem, but one key piece of any solution must be to rebuild local journalism, whose dissolution has created the vacuum into which all manner of conspiratorial nonsense and disinformation has rushed in,” Pickard said. 

Decades of corporate consolidation and layoffs have hit local journalism particularly hard, replacing quality local reporting with a troubling combination of Facebook conspiracies, Trump-loyal disinformation empires like Sinclair Broadcasting, and a flood of even more malicious actors looking to disguise corporate and political propaganda as legitimate local news. 

Researchers have shown repeatedly that as local journalism is replaced with homogenized fluff and nonsense, Americans not only become less informed and more divided, but local corruption reporting falls through the cracks. In some instances, a lack of quality reporting has been directly linked to a measurable impact on election results.

Pickard noted that without addressing the underlying rot that fertilized the rise of the U.S. disinformation problem in the first place, things are likely to only get worse.

“Several structural conditions enabled the rise of OAN,” Pickard said. “First are the commercial values that incentivize media outlets to privilege profits above all else,” he said. “The proven formula of outrage-driven commentary is both cheap to produce and captures audiences' attention, which advertisers covet.”

In short, we’ve created an entire information ecosystem that prioritizes engagement above accuracy or insight, one in which it’s often not as profitable to tell the sometimes-boring but important truth.

Pickard has been a consistent advocate of providing more public funding for U.S. journalism as an antidote to the corrosive impact of engagement-based advertising. He also advocates for stronger “public interest protections that mandate social responsibilities such as maintaining ideological balance and fact-based coverage in our news media.”

In the 1940s the FCC passed the Fairness Doctrine, which required that broadcast news outlets cover issues of public interest fairly. But the rules were demolished in 1987 after Republicans spent years demonizing them, insisting they violated the First Amendment. Even if still around today, the rules would have only applied to broadcast television, not cable TV.

With inflammatory nonsense so profitable and Congress increasingly divided, a more modern proposal seems all but doomed. In its place, U.S. media policy has consisted of rubber stamping problematic mergers, eliminating decades-old media consolidation rules, and doubling down on an ad-based media environment that only tends to reward the inflammatory.

Without a major funding boost for real journalism and a massive rethinking of U.S. media policy, “news” empires like OAN will continue to see outsized influence on U.S. discourse, Pickard said—and it's not hard to imagine the possibilities for more sophisticated actors creating bespoke fake news for powerful politicians and political movements. Media experts also argue more mainstream journalists and outlets need to rethink their role in amplifying or validating bad faith viewpoints in a misguided quest for artificial balance. 

“I predict that our news media in general will continue to worsen because there's less and less actual journalism,” Pickard said. “Meanwhile, the rightwing, fact-free media model is a proven money maker with no countervailing force.”

As trust in institutions is eroded, the public tends to turn to dubious, sometimes terrible alternatives to reinforce their shaken worldview. OAN wasn’t the first “news” outlet to exploit our failure to prevent conspiratorial thinking from being mainlined into the American bloodstream, and without a dramatic shift in U.S. media policy and funding, it certainly won’t be the last.

OAN Is So Dangerous Because It Looks Like a Real News Channel syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[ronntorossian-blog]

Can Roseanne Still Win in Today’s Divided Marketplace?

During her standup, Roseanne Barr was controversial and unabashedly opinionated. Some of that coarseness was softened during her run as the star of the long-running and hugely popular sitcom, “Roseanne.” But never filed down entirely.

The honest, heartfelt and humorous portrayal of a blue-collar family struck a chord with middle America in a way other shows had not. Now, Barr and her series costar John Goodman are back on the promotional circuit, talking to the media and to fans about a Roseanne revival on ABC. The Associated Press described Barr as “more glamorous” and Goodman as “slimmer,” but the report didn’t dig too much into two of the biggest changes producers will face in re-inventing Roseanne for modern audiences. 

The TV market has changed dramatically since Roseanne hit the airwaves. There are far more shows on far more media outlets, including expanded cable offerings and streaming media. Audiences are segmented in ways they were not in the 80s, a fact other sitcom revivals have faced in recent years. And there’s another issue that hangs like a cloud over today’s market: the line between an actor’s personal views and their TV popularity are all but erased. 

Roseanne Barr supported President Trump, and that might play well with the audience for her program, which supported Trump in large numbers during the campaign and at the polls.  So, Barr said in an interview, reported by IndieWire, that her character, Roseanne Conner, supporting Trump made good sense: 

“I have always attempted to portray a realistic portrait of American working class people, and it was working class people who elected Trump… So, it was very real and something that needed to be discussed…” 

And that topic is definitely “discussed” on the program. An Associated Press review offered a glimpse as one such in-show exchange between “Roseanne Conner” and her on-screen sister, “Jackie”. In the scene, Roseanne is praising Trump for promising to make things better when Jackie fires back, ‘watch the news, now things are worse’… ‘Not on the real news’ Roseanne replies. 

It’s a conversation many people can imagine having over their own dinner table or at family gatherings. That dynamic was a key aspect of the formula that made Roseanne a success during its first run. Honest portrayals of American life imbued with real heart and the strength of relationships that transcends conflict. 

Barr tackled this in an interview too, saying: “This was something that needed to be discussed… The same holds true for people actually hating other people for the way they voted, which I feel is not American… so I wanted to bring it (the series) right down the middle, and we did…”.

Ronn Torossian is the CEO and founder of 5W Public Relations.

[localbizlift]

Cambridge Analytica’s Nix recalled by fake news probe

Stock up on the popcorn — the currently suspended CEO of the firm at the center of a data handling and political ad-targeting storm currently embroiling Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, has been recalled by a UK parliamentary committee that’s running a probe into the impact of fake news because it’s unhappy with the quality of his prior answers.

The committee also says it has fresh questions for Alexander Nix in light of revelations that hit the headlines at the weekend about how a researcher’s app was used to gather personal information on about 270,000 Facebookers and 50 million of their friends, back in 2015 — data that was passed to CA in violation of Facebook’s policies.

Nix gave evidence to the DCMS committee on February 27, when he claimed: “We do not work with Facebook data, and we do not have Facebook data. We do use Facebook as a platform to advertise, as do all brands and most agencies, or all agencies, I should say. We use Facebook as a means to gather data. We roll out surveys on Facebook that the public can engage with if they elect to.”

That line is one of the claims the committee says it’s keen to press him on now. In a letter to Nix, it writes: “[T]here are a number of inconsistencies in your evidence to us of 27 February, notably your denial that your company received data from the Global Science Research company [aka the firm behind the survey app used by CA to harvest data on 50M Facebook users, according to The Observer].”

“We are also interested in asking you again about your claim that you “do not work with Facebook data, and […] do not have Facebook data,” it continues, warning: “Giving false statements to a Select Committee is a very serious matter.”

The self-styled ‘not a political consultancy’ but “technology-driven marketing firm” (and sometime “campaign consultancy and communication services” company) — which Nix also described in his last evidence session as “not a data miner… a data analytics company” — had its Facebook account suspended late last week for violating Facebook’s platform policies.

The UK’s data protection watchdog, the ICO, has also applied for a warrant to gain access to CA’s offices and servers — accusing the company of failing to hand over information the regulator had requested as part of a wider investigation it’s carrying out into the use of data analytics for political purposes.

CA is also now facing several legal challenges from Facebook users angry about how their data appears to have been misused.

We reached out to the company for comment on the DCMS recall. At the time of writing it had not responded.

Below are a few choice segments from Nix’s last evidence session in from of the committee — which we expect he will be asked to revisit should he agree to make a repeat appearance…

Q698       Rebecca Pow:… Could you expand a bit more on what those surveys are, what you are asking people and how you are gathering the data? Do you keep that data on surveys carried out on Facebook or does Facebook keep it?

Alexander Nix: I cannot speak to Facebook, but as far as I am aware the process works a bit like an opinion survey. If I want to find out how many people prefer red cars or yellow cars, I can post that question on Facebook and people can agree. They can opt in to answer a survey and they give their consent and they say, “I prefer a yellow car” and then we can collect that data. That is no different to running a telephone poll or a digital poll or a mail poll or any other form of poll. It is just a platform that allows you to engage with communities.

Q699       Rebecca Pow: Are they a big part of your data-gathering service?

Alexander Nix: When we work for brands, whether it is in the UK or in the US or elsewhere, we often feel the need to probe their customers and find out what they think about particular products or services. We might use Facebook as a means to engage with the general public to gather this data.

Q700       Simon Hart: Let me ask a very quick question on the Facebook survey opt-in option that you were describing. If you are asking somebody what kind of car they prefer and they opt in, does that facilitate access to other data that may be held by Facebook, which is irrelevant to car colour, or is it only the data you collect on car colour that is relevant?Nothing else that is part of the data held by Facebook would be available to you.

Alexander Nix: You are absolutely right—no other data. As far as I am aware, Facebook does not share any of its data. It is what is known as a walled garden, which keep its data—

Q701       Simon Hart: People are not in any way accidently giving you consent to access data other than that that you specifically asked for.

Alexander Nix: That is correct. People are not giving us consent and Facebook does not have a mechanism that allows third parties such as us to access its data on its customers.

Q702       Simon Hart: Even with its customers’ consent.

Alexander Nix: Even with its customers’ consent.

Chair: You said in your letter to me that, “Cambridge Analytica does not gather” data from Facebook.

Alexander Nix: From Facebook?

Chair: Yes.

Alexander Nix: That is correct.

*

Q718       Chair: The actual quote from the letter is: “On 8 February 2018 Mr Matheson implied that Cambridge Analytica ‘gathers data from users on Facebook.’ Cambridge Analytica does not gather such data.” But from what you said you do, do you not, through the surveys?

Alexander Nix: Yes, I think I can see what has happened here. What we were trying to say in our letter is that we do not gather Facebook data from Facebook users. We can use Facebook as an instrument to go out and run large-scale surveys of the users, but we do not gather Facebook data.

Q719       Chair: By that do you mean that you do not have access to data that is owned by Facebook?

Alexander Nix: Exactly.

Q720       Chair: You acquire data from Facebook users through them engaging with surveys and other things.

Alexander Nix: Exactly right.

Q721       Chair: Is your engagement, either directly or through any associate companies you may have, just through the placing of surveys or are there other tools or games or thingsthat are on Facebook that you use to gather data from Facebook users?

Alexander Nix: No, simply through surveys.

*

Q729       Chair: In that presentation I think there is a slide on data analytics where you describe that data is sourced from multiple sources and any marketing company will know that there are companies that specialise in data analytics to analyse consumer behaviour. I think on your chart you had logos of different companies. I think Experian was one and Nielsen was one. You had Facebook on there as well. Again, just to confirm on this, is that because you are highlighting the fact that you can gather data from Facebook?

Alexander Nix: Collect data through Facebook—that is exactly right, yes.

Q730       Chair: Does any of your data comes from Global Science Research company?

Alexander Nix: GSR?

Chair: Yes.

Alexander Nix: We had a relationship with GSR. They did some research for us back in 2014. That research proved to be fruitless and so the answer is no.

Q731       Chair: They have not supplied you with data or information?

Alexander Nix: No.

Q732       Chair: Your datasets are not based with information you have received from them?

Alexander Nix: No.

Chair: At all?

Alexander Nix: At all.

[pmsocialmedia]

Cambridge Analytica’s Nix recalled by fake news probe

Stock up on the popcorn — the currently suspended CEO of the firm at the center of a data handling and political ad-targeting storm currently embroiling Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, has been recalled by a UK parliamentary committee that’s running a probe into the impact of fake news because it’s unhappy with the quality of his prior answers.

The committee also says it has fresh questions for Alexander Nix in light of revelations that hit the headlines at the weekend about how a researcher’s app was used to gather personal information on about 270,000 Facebookers and 50 million of their friends, back in 2015 — data that was passed to CA in violation of Facebook’s policies.

Nix gave evidence to the DCMS committee on February 27, when he claimed: “We do not work with Facebook data, and we do not have Facebook data. We do use Facebook as a platform to advertise, as do all brands and most agencies, or all agencies, I should say. We use Facebook as a means to gather data. We roll out surveys on Facebook that the public can engage with if they elect to.”

That line is one of the claims the committee says it’s keen to press him on now. In a letter to Nix, it writes: “[T]here are a number of inconsistencies in your evidence to us of 27 February, notably your denial that your company received data from the Global Science Research company [aka the firm behind the survey app used by CA to harvest data on 50M Facebook users, according to The Observer].”

“We are also interested in asking you again about your claim that you “do not work with Facebook data, and […] do not have Facebook data,” it continues, warning: “Giving false statements to a Select Committee is a very serious matter.”

The self-styled ‘not a political consultancy’ but “technology-driven marketing firm” (and sometime “campaign consultancy and communication services” company) — which Nix also described in his last evidence session as “not a data miner… a data analytics company” — had its Facebook account suspended late last week for violating Facebook’s platform policies.

The UK’s data protection watchdog, the ICO, has also applied for a warrant to gain access to CA’s offices and servers — accusing the company of failing to hand over information the regulator had requested as part of a wider investigation it’s carrying out into the use of data analytics for political purposes.

CA is also now facing several legal challenges from Facebook users angry about how their data appears to have been misused.

We reached out to the company for comment on the DCMS recall. At the time of writing it had not responded.

Below are a few choice segments from Nix’s last evidence session in from of the committee — which we expect he will be asked to revisit should he agree to make a repeat appearance…

Q698       Rebecca Pow:… Could you expand a bit more on what those surveys are, what you are asking people and how you are gathering the data? Do you keep that data on surveys carried out on Facebook or does Facebook keep it?

Alexander Nix: I cannot speak to Facebook, but as far as I am aware the process works a bit like an opinion survey. If I want to find out how many people prefer red cars or yellow cars, I can post that question on Facebook and people can agree. They can opt in to answer a survey and they give their consent and they say, “I prefer a yellow car” and then we can collect that data. That is no different to running a telephone poll or a digital poll or a mail poll or any other form of poll. It is just a platform that allows you to engage with communities.

Q699       Rebecca Pow: Are they a big part of your data-gathering service?

Alexander Nix: When we work for brands, whether it is in the UK or in the US or elsewhere, we often feel the need to probe their customers and find out what they think about particular products or services. We might use Facebook as a means to engage with the general public to gather this data.

Q700       Simon Hart: Let me ask a very quick question on the Facebook survey opt-in option that you were describing. If you are asking somebody what kind of car they prefer and they opt in, does that facilitate access to other data that may be held by Facebook, which is irrelevant to car colour, or is it only the data you collect on car colour that is relevant?Nothing else that is part of the data held by Facebook would be available to you.

Alexander Nix: You are absolutely right—no other data. As far as I am aware, Facebook does not share any of its data. It is what is known as a walled garden, which keep its data—

Q701       Simon Hart: People are not in any way accidently giving you consent to access data other than that that you specifically asked for.

Alexander Nix: That is correct. People are not giving us consent and Facebook does not have a mechanism that allows third parties such as us to access its data on its customers.

Q702       Simon Hart: Even with its customers’ consent.

Alexander Nix: Even with its customers’ consent.

Chair: You said in your letter to me that, “Cambridge Analytica does not gather” data from Facebook.

Alexander Nix: From Facebook?

Chair: Yes.

Alexander Nix: That is correct.

*

Q718       Chair: The actual quote from the letter is: “On 8 February 2018 Mr Matheson implied that Cambridge Analytica ‘gathers data from users on Facebook.’ Cambridge Analytica does not gather such data.” But from what you said you do, do you not, through the surveys?

Alexander Nix: Yes, I think I can see what has happened here. What we were trying to say in our letter is that we do not gather Facebook data from Facebook users. We can use Facebook as an instrument to go out and run large-scale surveys of the users, but we do not gather Facebook data.

Q719       Chair: By that do you mean that you do not have access to data that is owned by Facebook?

Alexander Nix: Exactly.

Q720       Chair: You acquire data from Facebook users through them engaging with surveys and other things.

Alexander Nix: Exactly right.

Q721       Chair: Is your engagement, either directly or through any associate companies you may have, just through the placing of surveys or are there other tools or games or thingsthat are on Facebook that you use to gather data from Facebook users?

Alexander Nix: No, simply through surveys.

*

Q729       Chair: In that presentation I think there is a slide on data analytics where you describe that data is sourced from multiple sources and any marketing company will know that there are companies that specialise in data analytics to analyse consumer behaviour. I think on your chart you had logos of different companies. I think Experian was one and Nielsen was one. You had Facebook on there as well. Again, just to confirm on this, is that because you are highlighting the fact that you can gather data from Facebook?

Alexander Nix: Collect data through Facebook—that is exactly right, yes.

Q730       Chair: Does any of your data comes from Global Science Research company?

Alexander Nix: GSR?

Chair: Yes.

Alexander Nix: We had a relationship with GSR. They did some research for us back in 2014. That research proved to be fruitless and so the answer is no.

Q731       Chair: They have not supplied you with data or information?

Alexander Nix: No.

Q732       Chair: Your datasets are not based with information you have received from them?

Alexander Nix: No.

Chair: At all?

Alexander Nix: At all.

via Social – TechCrunch http://ift.tt/2IJTSYm

[workfromhom]

Cambridge Analytica’s Nix recalled by fake news probe

Stock up on the popcorn — the currently suspended CEO of the firm at the center of a data handling and political ad-targeting storm currently embroiling Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, has been recalled by a UK parliamentary committee that’s running a probe into the impact of fake news because it’s unhappy with the quality of his prior answers.

The committee also says it has fresh questions for Alexander Nix in light of revelations that hit the headlines at the weekend about how a researcher’s app was used to gather personal information on about 270,000 Facebookers and 50 million of their friends, back in 2015 — data that was passed to CA in violation of Facebook’s policies.

Nix gave evidence to the DCMS committee on February 27, when he claimed: “We do not work with Facebook data, and we do not have Facebook data. We do use Facebook as a platform to advertise, as do all brands and most agencies, or all agencies, I should say. We use Facebook as a means to gather data. We roll out surveys on Facebook that the public can engage with if they elect to.”

That line is one of the claims the committee says it’s keen to press him on now. In a letter to Nix, it writes: “[T]here are a number of inconsistencies in your evidence to us of 27 February, notably your denial that your company received data from the Global Science Research company [aka the firm behind the survey app used by CA to harvest data on 50M Facebook users, according to The Observer].”

“We are also interested in asking you again about your claim that you “do not work with Facebook data, and […] do not have Facebook data,” it continues, warning: “Giving false statements to a Select Committee is a very serious matter.”

The self-styled ‘not a political consultancy’ but “technology-driven marketing firm” (and sometime “campaign consultancy and communication services” company) — which Nix also described in his last evidence session as “not a data miner… a data analytics company” — had its Facebook account suspended late last week for violating Facebook’s platform policies.

The UK’s data protection watchdog, the ICO, has also applied for a warrant to gain access to CA’s offices and servers — accusing the company of failing to hand over information the regulator had requested as part of a wider investigation it’s carrying out into the use of data analytics for political purposes.

CA is also now facing several legal challenges from Facebook users angry about how their data appears to have been misused.

We reached out to the company for comment on the DCMS recall. At the time of writing it had not responded.

Below are a few choice segments from Nix’s last evidence session in from of the committee — which we expect he will be asked to revisit should he agree to make a repeat appearance…

Q698       Rebecca Pow:… Could you expand a bit more on what those surveys are, what you are asking people and how you are gathering the data? Do you keep that data on surveys carried out on Facebook or does Facebook keep it?

Alexander Nix: I cannot speak to Facebook, but as far as I am aware the process works a bit like an opinion survey. If I want to find out how many people prefer red cars or yellow cars, I can post that question on Facebook and people can agree. They can opt in to answer a survey and they give their consent and they say, “I prefer a yellow car” and then we can collect that data. That is no different to running a telephone poll or a digital poll or a mail poll or any other form of poll. It is just a platform that allows you to engage with communities.

Q699       Rebecca Pow: Are they a big part of your data-gathering service?

Alexander Nix: When we work for brands, whether it is in the UK or in the US or elsewhere, we often feel the need to probe their customers and find out what they think about particular products or services. We might use Facebook as a means to engage with the general public to gather this data.

Q700       Simon Hart: Let me ask a very quick question on the Facebook survey opt-in option that you were describing. If you are asking somebody what kind of car they prefer and they opt in, does that facilitate access to other data that may be held by Facebook, which is irrelevant to car colour, or is it only the data you collect on car colour that is relevant?Nothing else that is part of the data held by Facebook would be available to you.

Alexander Nix: You are absolutely right—no other data. As far as I am aware, Facebook does not share any of its data. It is what is known as a walled garden, which keep its data—

Q701       Simon Hart: People are not in any way accidently giving you consent to access data other than that that you specifically asked for.

Alexander Nix: That is correct. People are not giving us consent and Facebook does not have a mechanism that allows third parties such as us to access its data on its customers.

Q702       Simon Hart: Even with its customers’ consent.

Alexander Nix: Even with its customers’ consent.

Chair: You said in your letter to me that, “Cambridge Analytica does not gather” data from Facebook.

Alexander Nix: From Facebook?

Chair: Yes.

Alexander Nix: That is correct.

*

Q718       Chair: The actual quote from the letter is: “On 8 February 2018 Mr Matheson implied that Cambridge Analytica ‘gathers data from users on Facebook.’ Cambridge Analytica does not gather such data.” But from what you said you do, do you not, through the surveys?

Alexander Nix: Yes, I think I can see what has happened here. What we were trying to say in our letter is that we do not gather Facebook data from Facebook users. We can use Facebook as an instrument to go out and run large-scale surveys of the users, but we do not gather Facebook data.

Q719       Chair: By that do you mean that you do not have access to data that is owned by Facebook?

Alexander Nix: Exactly.

Q720       Chair: You acquire data from Facebook users through them engaging with surveys and other things.

Alexander Nix: Exactly right.

Q721       Chair: Is your engagement, either directly or through any associate companies you may have, just through the placing of surveys or are there other tools or games or thingsthat are on Facebook that you use to gather data from Facebook users?

Alexander Nix: No, simply through surveys.

*

Q729       Chair: In that presentation I think there is a slide on data analytics where you describe that data is sourced from multiple sources and any marketing company will know that there are companies that specialise in data analytics to analyse consumer behaviour. I think on your chart you had logos of different companies. I think Experian was one and Nielsen was one. You had Facebook on there as well. Again, just to confirm on this, is that because you are highlighting the fact that you can gather data from Facebook?

Alexander Nix: Collect data through Facebook—that is exactly right, yes.

Q730       Chair: Does any of your data comes from Global Science Research company?

Alexander Nix: GSR?

Chair: Yes.

Alexander Nix: We had a relationship with GSR. They did some research for us back in 2014. That research proved to be fruitless and so the answer is no.

Q731       Chair: They have not supplied you with data or information?

Alexander Nix: No.

Q732       Chair: Your datasets are not based with information you have received from them?

Alexander Nix: No.

Chair: At all?

Alexander Nix: At all.

from Facebook – TechCrunch http://ift.tt/2IJTSYm via IFTTT

[patriotsnet]

What News Channel Do Republicans Watch

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/what-news-channel-do-republicans-watch/

What News Channel Do Republicans Watch

Us Election 2020: We Put Republicans And Democrats In A Group Chat

US election 2020

It started off cordially.

As Americans went to the polls, we put 12 Biden voters and 13 Trump voters in a group chat for a virtual watch party.

The Democrats , Republicans and Independents all agreed that this election campaign has been “the race that never ends”. But then the results started to come in, and tensions flared.

Indiana goes to Trump

Within minutes of the first polls closing, Indiana was called for President Donald Trump.

Momentum builds among Republicans

The text group started buzzing when Mr Trump took the lead in Florida. But not everyone shared the happiness.

Eyes turn to states in the upper Midwest

As the polls closed in Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin – states which Mr Trump took in 2016 – the races were all too close to call.

Andrew, an independent voter from Michigan who was undecided until the last minute and ultimately cast a vote for Biden, said he thought the president would lose in there.

Trump momentum sends Democrats to bed

Then a “red wave” of projections suggested wins for Republicans across the southern US.

Republicans in the chat shared photos of their watch parties, including one voter, Eliana, who said she was at a party indoors with 500 people.

The conversation that followed a few of the networks projecting Florida for Trump sent some weary and frustrated Democrats to bed.

Biden speaks, Trump tweets

The two candidates then told supporters that the fight would go on into Wednesday.

—

Compulsory Reductions In Meat Consumption

In April 2021, at least five Fox News and Fox Business personalities amplified a story published by the Daily Mail, a British tabloid, that incorrectly linked a university study to President Joe Biden’s climate change agenda, to falsely assert that Americans would be compelled to dramatically reduce their meat consumption to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions caused by . Fox News aired a graphic detailing the supposed compulsory reductions, falsely indicating the information came from the Agriculture Department, which numerous Republican politicians and commentators tweeted. Fox News anchor John Roberts reported, “say goodbye to your burgers if you want to sign up to the Biden climate agenda.” Days later, Roberts acknowledged on air that the story was false.

As Trump Separates From Fox News What’s Next For Both

As supporters of President Donald Trump gathered around the country in the past week to protest the election, a surprising chant could occasionally be heard: “Fox News sucks.”

The network has held a central role during Trump’s presidency, regularly hosting him on its various shows and featuring a slate of commentators who vociferously defend him. But that relationship began to show signs of strain in recent months, culminating in outright hostility from Trump after Fox News and The Associated Press became the first major media outlets to announce that former Vice President Joe Biden had won Arizona in the presidential race.

On Thursday, Trump took his anger at Fox News even further, claiming the network’s ratings had “collapsed,” which is untrue. On election night, ratings data from Nielsen showed that Fox News averaged 14.1 million viewers from 8-11 p.m. ET, a record for cable news coverage of a presidential election.

“Very sad to watch this happen,” Trump tweeted, “but they forgot what made them successful, what got them there. They forgot the Golden Goose.”

With Biden as president-elect, Fox News’ relationship with Trump and conservative America is at a crossroads. The conservative media landscape is far broader today than it was four years ago, and the rival networks that proliferated during Trump’s presidency could be eager to take on Fox News — possibly in concert with Trump. But any predictions of Fox News’ demise would be premature.

Coverage Of Russia Investigation

Special Counsel investigation

On October 30, 2017, when special counsel Robert Mueller indicted Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, and revealed George Papadopoulos had plead guilty , this was the focus of most media’s coverage, except Fox News’. Hosts and guests on Fox News called for Mueller to be fired. Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson focused their shows on unsubstantiated allegations that Clinton sold uranium to Russia in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation and on the Clinton campaign’s role in funding the Donald Trump–Russia dossier. Hannity asserted: “The very thing they are accusing President Trump of doing, they did it themselves.” During the segment, Hannity mistakenly referred to Clinton as President Clinton. Fox News dedicated extensive coverage to the uranium story, which Democrats said was an attempt to distract from Mueller’s intensifying investigation. CNN described the coverage as “a tour de force in deflection and dismissal”. On October 31, CNN reported Fox News employees were dissatisfied with their outlet’s coverage of the Russia investigation, with employees calling it an “embarrassment”, “laughable” and saying it “does the viewer a huge disservice and further divides the country” and that it is “another blow to journalists at Fox who come in every day wanting to cover the news in a fair and objective way”.

In 2020 The News Sources For Republicans And Democrats Were Very Different

In 2020, Pew Research found the news diet among Republicans and Democrats varied greatly. The lone … exception was on broadcast TV.

Last week the Pew Research Center released an American News Pathways project entitled; How Americans Navigate the News in 2020: A Tumultuous Year in Review. According to Pew, the purpose was to understand how Americans interacted with the news and information throughout the 2020, focusing on the pandemic and election. The data came from a yearlong undertaking consisting of ten separate surveys each with 9,000 or more U.S. adults, from November 2019 through December 2020.

It’s well known the political opinions of Americans has become more polarized, this has been reflected with their news sources. Pew found those Americans who identify themselves as Republican or as an independent that lean Republican often had a different news source, than Democrats or independent leaning Democrats. To some degree, the one common news source was the network TV newscasts. Even Republicans were divided among themselves, those that followed Donald Trump for news and information had a different viewpoint on the pandemic and election than those Republicans that didn’t follow Trump. Adding to all this was the prevalence of unproven news stories especially on social media. To say the least, 2020 was a raucous and unprecedented year for news. Here are some of the findings.

Poll: 78% Of Gop Fox News Viewers Say Trump Is Best President Ever

A new survey of the network’s watchers reveal the hard core of the Republican Party and how hopeless it is for Democrats to try and court them.

Photo Illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast/Getty

Almost 8 in 10 Republicans who watch Fox News say Donald Trump is the most successful president in history.

That was just one finding of a new poll showing the deep ideological divide between Fox News viewers and everyone else. The poll results were provided to The Daily Beast by Navigator, a project launched by Democratic groups Global Strategy Group and GBA strategies. They surveyed more than 1,000 registered voters online with the goal of examining the differences in views between Fox News viewers and non-Fox viewers.

It comes after Democratic strategists have whether candidates and officeholders should appear on Trump’s favorite cable news channel to win over its regular viewers. Candidates like Sen. Amy Klobuchar have deliberately made efforts to speak to Fox News viewers, and the Democratic National Committee briefly entertained the idea of hosting a debate on Fox News before deciding against it.

But Thursday’s survey shows why many in the party have largely written off the network’s viewers as a lost cause.

The survey’s authors argue that the network presents an “alternate reality” in American politics, and plays an “outsized role in the way many experience and form opinions on the most important issues facing the country.”

How The Study Works

The coolest thing about this research is the methodology. It’s really hard to estimate the effects of media outlets on individuals’ behavior, as media consumption is a two-way street. Yes, media can change peoples’ opinions and behavior, but people also choose to consume particular media because it aligns with their opinions and affirms stuff they’re doing already.

And prior economic research on media bias has found that media outlets’ political stances are demand-driven: that is, they take the positions they do because they want to gain readers/listeners/viewers. In this interpretation, Fox News might just be producing segments depicting food stamp recipients as lazy lobster-eating surfers because their audience already hates food stamps and welfare programs and wants something with which to agree. Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug.

So figuring out that a given media outlet is changing viewers’ minds, rather than merely reflecting their viewpoints back to them, is tricky. But Martin and Yurukoglu figured out an ingenious way around that problem: channel ordering.

Especially combined with the prior, also rigorous research looking at Fox’s initial rollout, Martin and Yurukoglu’s paper provides powerful evidence that Fox News is a critically important actor in American politics. It’s doing more than serving a market need; it’s actively reshaping American public opinion.

A New Survey Reveals How Political Leanings Affect Our Tv Preferences For Starters Liberals Love Letterman And Conservatives Prefer Leno

“Americans’ partisan preferences don’t end with their thoughts on how to fix the economy,” says Lucy Madison at CBS News. Democrats and Republicans have very different TV viewing habits, too. The specifics are outlined in a new survey from consumer researcher firm Experian-Simmons, which prepared the report for Entertainment Weekly. Here, four lessons about the relationship between politics and the boob tube:

1. There’s a late-night partisan divideThe Dave Letterman-Jay Leno rivalry has gotten political. The survey reveals that Democrats prefer watching The Late Show with David Letterman, while Republicans favor The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. And the differences are polarizing, says Madison. “Not infrequently, a show beloved by one party is reviled by the other.” Case in point: The Daily Show and The Colbert Report topped liberals’ list of favorites, but are among conservatives’ least favorite shows.

2. The differences in comedy tastes reinforce stereotypes“Literate media-savvy comedies” that rely on “sarcastic humor,” like 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation, score high with Democrats, Experian-Simmons senior marketing manager John Fetto tells Entertainment Weekly. On the other hand, more traditional comedies, like ABC’s The Middle, are popular with Republicans. Not appearing on either party’s list of faves? Two and a Half Men. “Just who are the 20 million people watching that crap every week?” says Brian Moylan at Gawker.

Republican Vs Democrat Survey: Who Watches The Best Tv Shows

Republicans don’t watch MTV’s Jersey Shore. But they dig ABC’s Castle.

Democrats don’t like Discovery’s Deadliest Catch. But they swoon for NBC’s Parks and Recreation.

Those are a few of the findings from an annual research survey by that measures the consumer preferences of various political ideologies. In a report prepared exclusively for EW, the company calculated some of the favorite — and least favorite — TV shows of political partisans.

In the findings, “sarcastic” media-savvy comedies and morally murky antiheroes tend to draw Dems. While serious work-centered shows , along with reality competitions, tend to draw conservatives.

Focusing on well-known cable and broadcast original entertainment series , here’s who wins the 2011 prime-time primaries:

LIBERAL-DEMOCRAT FAVORITES:

—The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report : As you might expect.

—30 Rock and Parks and Recreation : Literate media-savvy comedies score high among Dems in general, notes Experian-Simmons senior marketing manager John Fetto. “Sarcastic humor is always a hook for them,” he adds.

—The View : Shows that skew female tend to do better among Dems, while male-friendly shows tend to do perform higher among Republicans.

—Glee

—Modern Family : Last year, the progressive Glee and Modern Family scored surprisingly strong among both political leanings. Among conservatives this year, the shows still do fairly well, but have dropped out of their top ranks.

—It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

What The Best 2020 Post

All Videos

Some of the most substantial daylight we observed between Fox News Republicans and far-right news Republicans was on their beliefs around conspiracy theories — especially the core beliefs of QAnon. Overall, 23 percent of Republicans mostly or completely agree with the core QAnon tenet that “the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.” But Republicans who trust mainstream news sources or Fox News were actually the least likely to believe in the main QAnon conspiracy theory, with just 19 percent and 17 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, Republicans who don’t watch television news, which notably includes those who get news solely from online sources, were considerably more likely to believe in a system run by Satanist pedophiles . But by far, the Republicans who were most likely to believe in QAnon were those who trusted far-right news sources .

related:Why Being ‘Anti-Media’ Is Now Part Of The GOP Identity Read more. »

Media preferences don’t explain all the differences we see among Republicans; as noted, on the question of the “Big Lie,” Fox News Republicans are very much not in sync with Republicans who get their news from mainstream news outlets, even if they do hold this belief less strongly than Republicans who get their news from far-right outlets. 

The Difference Between Which News Outlets Republicans And Democrats Trust

Americans are divided by political party on which news sources they trust, according to the latest Economist/YouGov Poll. 

Most Republicans trust Fox News, the only news organization to receive a majority of GOP support in the survey. One-third of Republicans trust The Wall Street Journal, while one-third are neutral on whether the newspaper is trustworthy. A quarter  of Republicans trust One America News Network, a conservative broadcast organization that has been elevated by President Donald Trump and the White House in recent months. 

Trump has promoted OANN as a “great alternative” to Fox News — though, OANN hasn’t usurped the media giant among Republicans overall. About one-third of Fox News viewers trust OANN, compared to 15 percent of Americans overall. OANN is frequently criticized for spreading disproven conspiracy theories and misinformation that President Trump has re-circulated on his Twitter account.  

Despite this, OANN remains more trusted among Republicans than The Washington Post , The New York Times , CNN , and MSNBC . A majority of Republicans actively distrust CNN , MSNBC , and The New York Times  — each of which are outlets that have received frequent attacks and threats from the president for not providing favorable coverage to his administration.  

Two-thirds of Democrats actively distrust Fox News, while 14 percent trust the network. About half  of Democrats remain neutral on OANN, though about two in five consider it untrustworthy.  

Image: Getty 

Democrats And Republicans Split On Political Content On Late Night But Jimmy Fallon Is Americas Favorite Host

E-mail to a friend

58% of the public has a favorable opinion of Jimmy Fallon, and 55% have a favorable opinion of “The Tonight Show.”

62% of Republicans don’t like when late-night hosts discuss politics, while an equal share of Democrats do.

As Stephen Colbert’s more political “Late Show” begins to top Jimmy Fallon’s “Tonight Show” in the ratings, new polling shows Democrats and Republicans almost diametrically opposed on their views of late-night political content, indicating that it might be difficult for networks to find a late-night show to please all audiences.

The March 7-10 Morning Consult/The Hollywood Reporter found that Fallon was the fan favorite among 2,201 adults, having the highest favorability at 58 percent. Fallon was also the most popular late-night host among Republicans, with 48 percent viewing him favorably, and the second-most popular among Democrats, coming in 1 percentage point behind Jimmy Kimmel of “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” who had a favorability of 73 percent. The margin of error for the Democratic subsample was 3 percentage points, and the margin of error for the Republican subsample was 4 percentage points.

Fallon’s “Tonight Show” had the highest share of talk-show favorability among the public , as well as among Democrats and Republicans .

Report That Biden Administration Was Building Trump Wall

According to analysis by Media Matters, on May 12, 2021, Fox News reported on its website, “Border lie — Biden resumes border wall construction after promising to halt it.” Correspondent Bill Melugin then appeared on Special Report with Bret Baier to report “the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is actually going to be restarting border wall construction down in the Rio Grande Valley” after “a lot of blowback and pressure from local residents and local politicians.” After the Corps of Engineers tweeted a clarification, Melugin deleted a tweet about the story and tweeted an “update” clarifying that a levee wall was being constructed to mitigate damage to flood control systems caused by uncompleted wall construction, and the website story headline was changed to “Biden administration to resume border wall levee construction as crisis worsens.” Later on Fox News Primetime, host Brian Kilmeade briefly noted the levee but commented to former Trump advisor Stephen Miller, “They’re going to restart building the wall again, Stephen.” Fox News host Sean Hannity later broadcast the original Melugin story without any mention of the levee.

Americans Use Of A News Outlet Does Not Always Mean They Trust It

Even as Republicans and Democrats sort themselves into different news universes, there are a few sources that are used by large numbers on both sides.

A deeper analysis reveals, however, that getting political news from a source does not always mean one trusts it. Indeed, some people report getting news from sources they also say they distrust. This is particularly true among Republicans. For example, among the 24% of Republicans who said they got political and election news from CNN in the last week, about four-in-ten say they distrust CNN. Conversely, among the 53% of Democrats who use CNN, just 4% distrust it.

Similarly, for each of the three major commercial broadcast networks, about two-in-ten Republicans who got political news from these outlets in the past week also say they distrust that source .

And while relatively small numbers of Republicans got news from MSNBC , The New York Times and The Washington Post in the past week, of those who did, 45% distrust The Washington Post, 38% distrust The New York Times and 37% distrust MSNBC.

For Democrats, the data tells a different story. With one exception, few Democrats say they got news in the past week from sources they distrust. The exception is Fox News. Nearly one-quarter of Democrats got news there in the past week. And of those who did, 27% say they do not trust the cable channel as a source of information about the election and politics.

Lebron James Net Worth Revealed And Spoiler Hes Not A Billionaire

In the survey, Pew also looked at the affect former President Donald Trump had on Republicans as a news source with the pandemic and election. About 30% of Republicans had used Trump as their primary source for the two top news events. The Republicans that relied on Trump had a different perspective than those Republicans that didn’t.

Two takeaways on the impact of Trump were:

·        Republicans that had relied on Trump for COVID-19 news followed the pandemic and Presidential task force more closely than other Republicans. They were more likely to say the pandemic was overblown and the media covered it poorly. In September 2020, 89% of Republicans that depended on Trump for news on COVID-19 thought the U.S. had controlled the pandemic as well as it could, compared to 59% for the other Republicans. That 30% difference continued into November.

Those respondents who relied primarily on social media for news, knew less about current events and more familiar with false claims and unconfirmed stories about the pandemic and election. According to Pew, 18% of Americans received most of their political news on social media, a percentage greater than local TV at 16%, cable TV at 16%, network TV at 13% and radio at 8% . Moreover, those Americans that relied on social media for news, did not follow the pandemic and election as closely.

The Tucker Carlson Fans Who Got Vaxxed

I asked vaccinated fans of the Fox News host what it will take to get more Republicans to get their shots.

Late last month, as the Delta variant of the coronavirus filled hospitals across the under-vaccinated South, Tucker Carlson took to his usual perch as the most-watched host on the most-watched cable-news network, just asking questions about the COVID-19 vaccines. “Tonight, congressional Democrats have called for a vaccine mandate in Congress,” Carlson said, as if flabbergasted by every word. “Members and staffers would be required to get a shot that the CDC told us today doesn’t work very well and, by the way, whose long-term effects cannot be known.”

Carlson’s Facebook followers commented eagerly on the video clip, spreading unfounded fears about vaccination among themselves. “Completely disappointed in our government, don’t believe a word they speak! Will not get the shot!” one person . Together, Carlson and his viewers are a placenta and embryo, gestating dangerous ideas and keeping the pandemic alive.

It’s no secret that Carlson’s audience, and Fox’s, are overwhelmingly Republican and right-wing. And in after , Republicans are much less likely than Democrats to say they have been vaccinated and much more likely to say they definitely won’t be vaccinated. The partisan gap in vaccinations has only grown over time.

Republicans Migrate To Fox

To some extent, these patterns reflect the migration of Republicans toward the Fox News Channel and away from other TV news sources. Between 1998 and 2008, the share of Republicans saying they regularly watch Fox News rose 22 points, from 14% to 36%. Meanwhile, the share who regularly watch network evening news fell 15 points and the share who regularly watch CNN declined by eight points.

There also has been movement in the regular viewing habits of Democrats. The share of Democrats who regularly watch CNN increased from 25% to 33% between 1998 and 2008, and the share of Democrats who regularly watch MSNBC increased from 10% to 18%. Notably, the share of Democrats who say they regularly watch the Fox News Channel has remained largely unchanged over the past decade .

From 1998 through 2002 there was little difference in the share of Democrats and Republicans using these sources regularly. But in 2004, Republicans moved sharply away from CNN and toward the Fox News Channel. In the 2008 survey, 33% of Democrats regularly watched CNN compared with 17% of Republicans, while 36% of Republicans and 21% of Democrats regularly watched Fox News.

Americans Are Divided By Party In The Sources They Turn To For Political News

Mark JurkowitzAmy MitchellElisa ShearerMason Walker

To a large degree, the pattern of partisan polarization that emerges in attitudes about the credibility of news sources is also evident in the sources that Republicans and Democrats rely on for news about politics and the election.

Overall, Republicans get political and election news from a smaller group of sources than Democrats, with an overwhelming reliance on one source – Fox News. Democrats , on the other hand, use a wider range of sources.

Six-in-ten Republicans say they got news from the Fox News cable network in the past week. After Fox News, there is a huge gap before the next most turned-to sources – ABC News, NBC News and CBS News, all at similar levels .

Despite Republicans’ deep distrust of CNN, it is among the more commonly used sources among Republicans, with 24% who got political news there in the past week. Next come the radio shows of Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh . No other source tops 15% among Republicans.

On the Democratic side, CNN is turned to by the greatest portion, with 53% saying they got political news there in the past week. As is the case with Republicans, the three major commercial broadcast networks are the next most turned to sources of political news for Democrats, albeit in bigger doses — NBC , ABC and CBS .

[gibsongirlselections]

Trading Social Science for Social Intimidation

As Americans watch the nightly mayhem in Portland, Seattle, Chicago, and other cities, their shock comes not just from watching a vicious segment of the population loot, destroy property, and even physically assault in the name of social justice. If history has taught us anything, it is that anarchist and criminal mentalities lie dormant in every country, just waiting for the opportunity to take control of legitimate protest—in today’s case, the peaceable demonstrations inspired by George Floyd’s tragic death.

What is far more distressing about the present chaos is the response of historically responsible liberals who now seem to condone not only street violence, but the aggressive “cancellation” of citizens with views well within the mainstream. Many institutions once at the vanguard of advancing free speech—including the ACLU, colleges and universities, newspapers like the New York Times, and several social media companies—now appear to be working overtime against it. When Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell recently chided the far left as “not interested in winning debates with better arguments [but preferring] to shut down debate altogether,” one could be forgiven for thinking he was referencing the entire Democratic Party.

To the extent that the right has an explanation for this anti-liberal liberalism, it is that the center-left is suffering from an advanced case of what many Republicans mockingly call “Trump Derangement Syndrome” (TDS). In other words, with the election so close, the president’s opponents will countenance anything that stokes dissatisfaction with his administration.

We know there is some truth to this, if for no other reason than that those Democrats still uncomfortable with cancel culture have been warning others in their party against getting too carried away with their dislike of Trump. “[They] should forget President Trump for a second,” writes long-time party activist Ted Van Dyk in a July 26 Wall Street Journal op-ed. “Democrats are presenting a pro-chaos caricature of themselves, which will discredit them with the public if they maintain it.”

But to settle for TDS as the explanation for growing liberal intolerance is to miss a much deeper crisis on the left, one that has been building for decades and would exist even if President Trump had never been elected. To understand this crisis, we must remind ourselves of something so obvious that, like air, it is easily overlooked: namely, that the underlying rationale for any form of left-wing governance over the last two centuries has been the presumed ability of educated officials to use social science for the benefit of the larger society. From early 18th century Owenism and Saint-Simonianism to Soviet communism to today’s European social democracies, to be anywhere on the left has been to believe in some form of technocratic governance.

The American left is no exception. For more than a century, it has created or shaped a wide range of government programs based more on the wisdom of credentialed experts (or legislation shaped by experts) than on market forces. Sometimes referred to collectively as the administrative state, these include K-12 education, public universities, health and welfare bureaucracies, departments of urban planning, environmental agencies, and correctional facilities. The left has also promoted the interests of trial lawyers, industrial unions, and other groups whose activities, although outside of government, were still seen as compatible with technocratic governance.

The power of claiming to represent the wisdom of social science can be seen in the fact that whenever any liberal program or agenda has failed in some spectacular way, the left has always been able to fall back on comparisons to experimental research. In other words, just as well-intended mistakes are an unfortunate but necessary part of laboratory investigation, so technological governance will inevitably take unproductive detours from time to time. Even having to backtrack on its aggressive promotion of phrenology and blatantly segregationist policies in the early 20th century never fatally tarnished the left’s case for expert rule.

But as politically effective as assuming the mantle of social science has been for American liberals, three recent developments now threaten to end its usefulness.

The first is the growing evidence that much of the research used by the administrative state over the years has been intentionally falsified by its academic authors, either to advance their own ideological biases or to please their government funders. It has been well-documented since the mid-1990s that any academic study that contradicts left-wing beliefs has an especially difficult time getting the peer endorsements needed for publication. This is true even when the rejected paper appears just as comprehensively researched as the more liberal papers commonly accepted by prestigious journals.

But in 2005, Dr. John Ioannidis, co-director of Stanford University’s Meta-Research Innovation Center, went one step further. In a now-famous report, he showed that even the social science research that does get published is not nearly as rigorous as it has been made to appear. Much of what has been taught for decades as “settled science” is, he showed, the product of unreliable statistical testing, the misleading use of small sample sizes, unwarranted credence given to small effects, unshared experimental data, and other scientifically dubious methods.

Ever since Ioannidis’ paper, it has become painfully clear that even many of the most influential experiments in sociology, political science, social psychology, economics, climate science, anthropology, education, and medicine cannot meet the first requirement of science: replication of results upon retesting. Widely cited studies supposedly confirming the liberal assertion that discriminatory behavior stems from unconscious stereotyping, for example, cannot be duplicated.

In 2015, Science tried to replicate the findings of 100 articles published in three prominent psychological journals during 2008 and got significant results for only 36, compared to the significance claimed by 97 of the originals. A similar study one year later in the Finance and Economics Discussion Series of the Federal Reserve could not reproduce the outcomes of a majority of prominent economics articles.

Ioannidis himself now believes that up to half the discoveries ever published in peer-reviewed social science and medical journals are probably wrong, an opinion he shares with The Lancet’s respected editor-in-chief, Richard Charles Horton. National Association of Scholars (NAS) president Peter Wood has similarly argued that many of the regulations, laws, and social programs routinely passed by Congress on the basis of supposedly solid research have no real scientific justification.

Even in the area of environmental science—where investigations tend to involve more physics and chemistry than social science—much of the research still cannot be replicated. Studies related to nuclear power turn out to be especially iffy. The dangers of accidents like Fukushima (where all the deaths were caused by the tsunami, not radiation) are grossly exaggerated while hazards posed by renewables like hydroelectric power are simply ignored. Completely overlooked are the successful development of fast neutron reactors, which eliminate the problem of radioactive waste, and of small modular reactors, whose simplicity of design makes them exceptionally safe.

The second development to undermine people’s faith in technocratic governance is their own experience of it. In 1964, polls showed that three of every four Americans trusted the competence of public officials. Today, only one third of respondents feel the same way. Recent surveys reported by City Journal show that those states that boast the most comprehensive menu of public services rank lowest for the efficient delivery of any of them. Indeed, there is a direct connection between how much a state spends on programs to improve the quality of its citizen’s lives and the percentage of those same citizens eager to migrate elsewhere.

Especially striking is the declining status of what decades ago was one of America’s most admired institutions, public education. In the latest annual poll by Harvard’s Education Next magazine, 75 percent of respondents graded the performance of the nation’s schools with a C or less.

Republicans may not be precisely on target when they attribute the decline of America’s big cities to the failure of Democratic mayors. But they are close enough to what the public perceives as the real problem—that government has wasted hundreds of billions over the last half-century to “engineer” an urban revival. That accusation has become one of the GOP’s most effective talking points.

The third and most recent threat to public support for technocratic governance is the dawning awareness that there must soon be a radical restructuring of state and federal finances. Had politicians listened to the advice of knowledgeable commentators and used the economic recovery of the last decade to prudently build a financial cushion, the need might never have arisen. But from 2010 to 2020, the federal government averaged deficits of more than $1 trillion per year, more than doubling its liabilities to $22 trillion. During that same period, the net debt owed by many states ballooned as well: New Jersey to $199 billion, Illinois to $248 billion, and California to $288 billion.

Then came the coronavirus, which almost overnight added 5.9 trillion to the U.S. deficit while starving the states of sales tax revenue. Even before the recently aborted negotiation on a second stimulus, it was already clear that the country’s cumulative debt would soon be greater than its annual economic output (GDP), the point where any nation’s creditworthiness is automatically called into question.

As voters contemplate the mix of tax increases and spending cuts that will eventually be required to balance government books, they know that many public programs are going to have to be trimmed, combined, or even eliminated. So large is America’s sovereign debt, as International Monetary Fund (IMF) economists Fabien Gonguet and Klaus-Peter Hellwig make clear in their recent working paper on “Public Wealth in the United States,” that no state or federal department will be spared.

Taken together, these three developments—the discrediting of the research underpinning current social services, the mushrooming mistrust of institutional elites, and the looming need to significantly downsize government—have created a crisis for modern liberals that is far more personal than generally recognized. Once, perhaps as students, they admired the administrative state from a purely intellectual perspective, as outsiders. But today, as working adults, liberals are the administrative state.

Among public school teachers and administrators, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans is 87 to 13. Among social workers, it is 93 to 7; for those involved in environmental regulation, 91 to 9; and for public defenders it is 19 to 1. Among college professors and administrators—many of whom work at private institutions but still benefit from government grants and federal student loans—it is 17 to 2.

When it comes to federal employees, a good indicator of party affiliation is campaign contributions. In 2016, according to The Hill, 95 percent of the donations from workers in 14 agencies went to Clinton. At the Department of Justice, 99 percent of the money went to Clinton; at the State Department, it was also 99 percent. Of the political contributions from Internal Revenue Service workers, 94 percent went to Clinton.

What does the modern liberal do when the old appeal to credentialed expertise is no longer enough to protect his or her job from being restructured, downsized, made more accountable, subject to greater competition, or even abolished? They do what privileged bureaucrats have always done when the rationale for their status no longer holds sway: they find a purpose whose ideology combines “right thinking” with a puritanical intolerance of any criticism of that thinking.

The K-12 public schools that fail miserably in international comparisons, the universities increasingly blamed for selfishly putting so many American students into debt, the court systems and social agencies which have presided over the collapse of America’s inner cities – all resist the reform they fear by uniting behind a substitute for social science which leaves their institutions and authority intact. The goal, as Center of the American Experiment senior policy analyst Katherine Kersten recently observed, is to go from being “the expert” to being “the elect.”

That liberals would gravitate to wokeness is hardly a surprise. With its unrelenting racial interpretation of every social encounter, it preserves the left’s claim to represent all minority and disadvantaged groups while simultaneously inventing endless reasons for institutional remedy. Once more, any criticism is easily dismissed as the result of the critic’s own unconscious privilege—the same way psychoanalysts used to deflect any challenge to their professional opinion as “a psychological resistance.”

Wokeness also comes with an especially powerful language for social intimidation, honed over decades through its evolution from deconstructionism to political correctness to identity politics to today’s cancel culture. It’s so powerful, in fact, that it can now intimidate the heads of major corporations. Wokeness even appeals to many clergy who, having failed to stem the declining number of church-affiliated believers, seek relevance in a biblically forbidden compromise with those preaching earthly utopia.

What all this means is that liberal intolerance will be with us long after the election, no matter who wins. At a time when sociological support for its institutions is no longer a given, when average Americans are increasingly skeptical of governing elites, and when public debt is about to force some serious budget adjustments, the last thing anyone on the left wants is a friendly, rational conversation.

There is no better glimpse into the future than what happened last February, when the Oakland, California-based Independence Institute decided to sponsor a conference on improving the accuracy of social science research. Not only were the organizers labeled everything from misogynistic white supremacists to climate change deniers, but two graduate students set to speak at the gathering were forced to withdraw after threats of career sabotage. Even the event’s most commonsense recommendations—to do more replication studies, to prioritize grants to researchers who pre-register their protocols, and to require experimenters to make their data and research protocols publicly available—were viciously attacked on social media as right-wing propaganda.

Whatever far-left lunacy today’s liberals are willing to tolerate in the name of upending white male privilege is really a measure of what they are prepared to inflict to preserve their own.

Dr. Lewis Andrews was executive director of the Yankee Institute for Public Policy at Trinity College from 1999 to 2009. He is author of the new book Living Spiritually in the Material World (Fidelis Books).

The post Trading Social Science for Social Intimidation appeared first on The American Conservative.

[jayanthitbrc]

Market Research Services Market Size – Segmentation, Trends, Growth and Regional Forecast 2023

The Business Research Company published its Market Research Services Global Market Report 2020 which provides strategists, marketers and senior management with the critical information they need to assess the global Market Research Services market. The report provides in-depth analysis of the impact of COVID-19 on the market, along with revised market numbers due to the effects of the coronavirus. The report covers the market research services market’s segments- 1) By Type: Marketing Research And Analysis Services, Public Opinion And Election Polling 2) By End Use Industry: IT Services, Manufacturing, Financial Services, Construction, Others. View Complete Report: https://www.thebusinessresearchcompany.com/report/market-research-services-global-market-report-2020-30-covid-19-impact-and-recovery Market Research Services Global Market Report 2020 is the most comprehensive report available on this market and will help gain a truly global perspective as it covers 60 geographies. The chapter on the impact of COVID-19 gives valuable insights on supply chain disruptions, logistical challenges, and other economic implications of the virus on the market. The chapter also covers markets which have been positively affected by the pandemic. The global market research services market is expected to decline from $75.8 billion in 2019 to $74 billion in 2020 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of -2.4%. The decline is mainly due to economic slowdown across countries owing to the COVID-19 outbreak and the measures to contain it. The market is then expected to recover and grow at a CAGR of 4% from 2021 and reach $82.9 billion in 2023. Market research companies are increasingly using advanced research technologies to generate consumer insights. For instance, eye tracking technology aids researchers in giving unbiased insights. This technology is used in studying consumer behavior during shopping, wherein researchers can capture actual reaction and time spent gazing at a particular product or a group. Thus, eye tracking technology is helpful for gauging consumer reaction towards products, without any bias or errors. Few Points From Table Of Content   1. Executive Summary 2. Report Structure 3. Market Research Services Market Characteristics 4. Market Research Services Market Product Analysis 5. Market Research Services Market Supply Chain …… 19. Market Research Services Market Competitive Landscape 20. Key Mergers And Acquisitions In The Market Research Services Market 21. Market Background: Design, Research, Promotional And Consulting Services Market 22. Recommendations 23. Appendix 24. Copyright And Disclaimer Request A Sample Report At: https://www.thebusinessresearchcompany.com/sample.aspx?id=2162&type=smp Few Points From List Of Table  Table 1: Historic Market Growth, Value ($ Billion) Table 2: Forecast Market Growth, Value ($ Billion) Table 3: Global Market Research Services Market, 2019, By Region, Value ($ Billion) ……..  Table 127: Global Market Research Services Market In 2023- Growth Countries Table 128: Global Market Research Services Market In 2023- Growth Segments Table 129: Global Market Research Services Market In 2023- Growth Strategies About The Business Research Company:  The Business Research Company is a Business Intelligence Company which excels in company, market and consumer research. It has offices in the UK, the US and India and a network of trained researchers in 15 countries globally.   Contact Information:  The Business Research Company  Europe: +44 207 1930 708  Asia: +91 8897263534  Americas: +1 315 623 0293  Email: info@tbrc.info  Follow us on Blog: http://blog.tbrc.info/        Follow us on LinkedIn: https://in.linkedin.com/company/the-business-research-company

[bountyofbeads]

Plutocrats, Please Stop Running These Selfish, Stupid, Quixotic Presidential Campaigns

By Max Burns | Published Nov. 18, 2019 4:52 AM ET | Daily Beast Inside | Posted November 18, 2019 |

At least on paper, Democrats talk tough about the importance of protecting the democratic process from a flood of billionaire bucks. “Big money is drowning out the voices of everyday Americans,” the 2016 Democratic Party Platform reads. “We must have the necessary tools to fight back and safeguard our electoral and political integrity.”

This isn’t a new development; campaign finance reform played a major role in every Democratic presidential platform since 1992. Last month, dual-frontrunners Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren released their own campaign finance reform proposals. Bernie Sanders put forward a bold plan that would mandate public financing laws for all federal elections.

And then there’s Democratic megadonor and billionaire Tom Steyer.

Steyer is most prominent for claiming the title of “single largest donor in American politics” on several occasions. Whether you think that honorific is worthy of praise depends largely on whether or not your name is Tom Steyer.

“I was watching how this campaign was going, and in my opinion, the overriding issue today is that the politics of our country, the government, has been taken over by corporate dollars,” Steyer told The Atlantic’s Edward-Isaac Dovere. Steyer seems to view the corporate capture of American politics more as a challenge than a warning – and it prompted him to launch a quixotic campaign for the presidency.

Steyer’s campaign makes a mockery of Democratic calls for limitations on the corrosive influence of money in politics. It is a campaign devoid of any coherent message beyond ankle-deep platitudes about impeaching Donald Trump and saving the environment. The campaign exists almost entirely on the airwaves, and is bereft of actual donors or ground support.

Yet Steyer will be on the stage at November’s Democratic debate while credible public servants like Secretary Julian Castro will not. Call it the billionaire’s bluff.

Between July 1 and Sept. 30, Steyer spent a staggering $47.6 million of his $1.6 billion fortune to secure a spot on the October debate stage. Despite polling at or below 1 percent nationally since announcing his candidacy, Steyer made clear his plan to loan his campaign at least $60 million more.

Steyer has barely scraped together the 165,000 small-dollar donors required by the Democratic Party to qualify for participation in official debates. That’s thanks in large part to Steyer’s fortune, which enables him to run a sweeping national ad campaign designed to pull donors from every nook and cranny of the republic. And his strategy is (barely) working—but at what ethical cost?

A growing list of Democratic Senate challengers are running neck-and-neck with increasingly unpopular Republican incumbents Thom Tillis in North Carolina, Cory Gardner in Colorado, Joni Ernst in Iowa, and Martha McSally in Arizona. Winning races like these will be essential if Democratic presidential contenders hope to deliver on any of their lofty campaign pledges.

A figure like $47 million could have been game-changing when spread across tight races—especially when Democrats have the rare opportunity to flip the Senate and break a decade of Republican obstruction. But instead of strengthening the party as a whole, Steyer chose to spend that money on—himself.

Without the privilege of his boundless wealth, most voters wouldn’t even know Steyer’s name. His campaign exists not because of any popular call for his candidacy or particular policy expertise, but because Steyer has pockets deep enough to thrust his face in front of every single Democratic voter with a television, radio, computer or mailbox.

That isn’t an exaggeration. Fully 67 percent of all spending on television ads across the entire Democratic primary has come from Steyer’s bank account. When flooding the zone with money is your only strategy, every problem starts to look like a money problem. Maybe that’s why Steyer’s campaign thinks democracy is for sale.

Just last week, Steyer’s Iowa operation faced a scandal when state director Pat Murphy resigned after offering elected officials cash in exchange for endorsing Steyer. The perception of attempted quid pro quo arrangements by the Democratic race’s largest self-funder should leave a bad taste in the mouth of any voter who looks at Donald Trump’s current impeachment woes with disappointment and disgust.

“By purchasing a larger voice than any other presidential contender, Bloomberg hopes to shock-and-awe Democratic voters into supporting his platform of – well, it’s not really clear, actually.”

Clearly, DNC debate requirements must be strengthened. In the future, the DNC should consider not only the raw number of donors a candidate must generate—currently 165,000—but also the proportion of campaign funds coming from grassroots donors compared to the total raised. In Steyer’s case, despite raising nearly $50 million, only 4 percent came from actual voters.

More worrisome is the message Steyer’s campaign sends to other deep-pocketed, misguided billionaires looking for a new hobby. Former New York City Mayor and current multibillionaire Michael Bloomberg recently floated his own entry into the Democratic primary.

If Bloomberg runs, he plans to implement an even bolder version of the Steyer Strategy. The Associated Press reports Bloomberg will pass on early primary states like Iowa and New Hampshire in order to deploy his immense $52 billion fortune in a slew of pricey Super Tuesday media markets. By purchasing a larger voice than any other presidential contender, Bloomberg hopes to shock-and-awe Democratic voters into supporting his platform of—well, it’s not really clear, actually.

When campaign treasuries are independently generated, they cease to be reflective of a candidate’s actual popularity. In his decision to skip early states in favor of spending his way to prominence on Super Tuesday, Bloomberg is choosing his own voters.

Steyer and Bloomberg put the arrogance of plutocratic wealth on full display. Where traditional candidates are dependent on voters who contribute the money that becomes campaign advertising, both Steyer and Bloomberg are beholden to only one donor: themselves. In a nation where money has been declared equal to speech, the candidates who can funnel the most cash to themselves will inherently be more visible – and in the case of Democratic debate rules, just popular enough.

It is perverse that the Democratic Party, an organization so vocally in favor of regulating the sprawling power of plutocrats, has left itself open to such crude manipulation of our nomination process. It is on the party to make necessary changes that prevent this kind of blatant gaming of the system going forward.

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Tom Steyer Says He Can’t Disclose Hundreds of Millions in Financial Assets

By Lachlan Markay | Updated Sep. 18, 2019 3:39AM ET Published Sep. 17, 2019 9:56PM ET | Daily Beast | Posted November 18, 2019 |

Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer has insisted publicly that he is divested from his once-extensive fossil fuel interests. But he also has hundreds of millions of dollars tied up in assets that he will not or cannot disclose.

The California billionaire filed a new personal financial accounting last week giving a broad view of his extensive assets and sources of income. But he declined to go into detail about significant segments of his investment portfolio, citing confidentiality agreements that bar him from publicly disclosing the underlying assets in which he is invested.

Those assets are worth between $370 million and $742 million, according to a Daily Beast review of the filing, which only discloses the values in ranges. The total could actually be higher than that, as four of the assets, holdings in two hedge funds and two private equity funds, are valued at more than $50 million, without an upper range (The Daily Beast pegged their values at $50 million precisely for the purposes of this analysis). 

Steyer declined to fully detail his holdings in 43 different investment vehicles, including hedge funds managed by Farallon Capital Management, the firm Steyer founded more than 30 years ago.

“Underlying assets are not disclosed due to a preexisting confidentiality agreement,” Steyer repeatedly told the Office of Government Ethics in his financial disclosure filing. For all 43 line items, Steyer pledged that he “will divest this asset if elected.”

Steyer’s arrangement appears kosher legally.  Federal law allows political candidates to shield such specifics from public view if the asset at issue “is considered confidential as a result of a privileged [legal] relationship.”

Steyer stressed compliance in a statement to the Daily Beast. "His public release is consistent with Office of Government Ethics guidance with respect to not disclosing underlying assets of investment funds and general IRS guidance on requirements for entities that have to file public returns," his campaign said.

But his report will still likely draw additional scrutiny from federal ethics officials due to that lack of disclosure, according to Alex Baumgart, a researcher at the Center for Responsive Politics, which first obtained a copy of Steyer’s financial disclosure filing. 

“OGE is generally pretty stringent when it comes to this so we'll see what happens, I'd expect a bit of a back and forth at least before OGE certifies,” Baumgart said in an email.

“I think it's going to depend a lot on how the agency officials react to this and if they see it as valid,” he added. “The question that Steyer and the agency officials have to answer is ‘would disclosure actually violate his confidentiality agreements?’—which it may for these types of investments.”

His withholding of those details from his financial disclosure nevertheless obscures from public view significant information about his vast personal wealth, including information that would verify his claims that he has purged his portfolio of assets that conflict with his image as a strident environmentalist.

“I divested from all of that stuff,” Steyer said of his once-extensive fossil fuel holdings in an ABC interview in July. Steyer has made the same claim since 2014, when he says he instructed Farallon, which still manages much of his assets, to allocate them away from the firm’s oil and coal holdings.

In a statement issued Tuesday night, Steyer’s campaign continued to stress that he was abiding by is pledge that he has divested from fossil fuel holdings, not just through his Farallon holdings but in every other investment fund in which he has a stake.  

"Tom has divested from Farallon's fossil fuel holdings and has provided all investment funds with a copy of his investment policy so that they can be screened clear of fossil fuel holdings," the campaign said. "If any investments don't meet Tom's screening, the proceeds from those investments are donated to charity."

But while Farallon and similar companies must disclose what assets they have under management, they do not have to disclose which funds actually hold which assets, and certainly not how those assets are distributed among their clients. That makes it virtually impossible to independently verify Steyer’s public statements about his holdings.

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