media – Page 4 – Pertinent Observations

The Economist and the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect

I’ve been a subscriber to the Economist for the last couple of years and quite enjoy reading that newspaper. There are weeks when I don’t manage to go through the week’s edition, but there are certain weeks when it forms a large part of my reading. I quite like the paper, and I subscribe to the daily “Espresso” issue on my mobile phone.

I have only one problem – a lot of their writing about India is biased, and filled with Sominisms. I mean their business pieces are pretty good, like this profile of Welspun. But their political coverage is generally biased by their correspondents’ dislike for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and hence not particularly objective.

I had recently carried a copy of the newspaper to read on my way to a quiz, where I met Baada. Baada was surprised that I read the newspaper, since it was so obviously biased in its coverage of Indian politics. “I agree that India coverage is biased”, I said, “but its worldwide coverage is really good. Hence I read it”.

Recently I came across the “Murray Gell-mann Amnesia effect“. It is named after the physicist, and claims that you will trust the rest of a newspaper even though you know that its coverage of your domain is shit. And thinking about it, I’m wondering if I should continue trusting The Economist.

Currently, I believe that the Economist’s coverage of Indian politics is shit, but I continue to read the newspaper for its other coverage. But what if everyone believes that the Economist’s coverage of their domain is inadequate? If that is the case, does it still make it a good paper? Should I use the fact of the Economist’s coverage of Indian business being better as a mitigating factor?

The problem is that there is no other paper that gives a nice concise view of what is happening in the world (FT is too voluminous given its frequency), and that makes the Economist good. But if their coverage is biased by their correspondents’ views in every country, it is not that trustworthy any more.

The only option I can think of is to continue reading the newspaper, but to “add salt to taste”. Every time I read a political story set in some country, I should keep in mind that the correspondent might be biased, and adjust my views accordingly. That way, I can consume the paper’s curation and analysis while not getting influenced by its inherent biases.

My tryst with Kannada media

So about a month or so back, I wrote up an essay on why the much-maligned TenderSURE project is a right step in the development of Bangalore, and why the Chief Minister’s comments on the issue were misguided and wrong.

Having written it, considering it worthy of a better forum than NED, I shared it with my Takshashila colleagues. They opined that is should get published in a Kannada newspaper, and Varun Shenoy duly translated the piece into Kannada. And then the story began.

We sent it to PrajaVani (which has published several other Op-Eds from other Takshashila people), but they summarily rejected this without giving reasons. We then sent it to UdayaVani, reaching it after passing some hoops, but then they raised some questions with the content, the answers to which had been made quite clear within the text.

I think Mint has spoilt me, in that I assume that it’s okay to write geeky stuff and have it accepted for publication. Rather, it is possible that they’ve recruited me so that they can further bolster their geek quotient. Last week, for example, I sent a piece on Fractional Brownian Motion, and it got published. A couple of years back I’d sent a formula with Tchebyshev’s inequality to be included in a piece on sampling, and they had published that too.

When translating my piece, Varun thought it was too geeky and technical, and he made an attempt to tone it down during his translation. And the translation wasn’t easy – for we had to find Kannada equivalents for some technical terms that I’d used. In some cases, Varun expertly found terms. In others, we simply toned it down.

Having toned down the piece and made an effort to make it “accessible”, UdayaVani’s response was a bit of a dampener for us – and it resulted in a severe bout of NED. And so we sat on the piece. And continued to put NED.

Finally, Varun got out of it and published it on the Takshashila blog (!!). The original piece I’d written is here:

A feature of Bangalore traffic, given the nature of the road network, is that bottlenecks are usually at the intersections, and not at the roads. As a consequence, irrespective of how much we widen the roads, the intersections will continue to constrain the flow of traffic in the city. In other words, making roads narrower will not have a material impact on the throughput of traffic in the city.

And Varun’s translation is here:

(Update: I tried to extract Varun’s piece here but it’s not rendering properly, so please click through and read on the Logos blog)

Read the whole thing, whichever piece you can understand. I think we are on to something here.

And on that note, it might make sense to do a more rigorous network-level analysis of Bangalore’s roads. Designing the graph is simple – each intersection (however small it might be) is a node, each “road segment” is an edge. The graph is both directed (to take care of one-ways) and weighted (to indicate width of roads).

We’ll need data on flows, though. If we can get comprehensive data of origin and destination of a large number of people, we should be able to impute flows in each segment based on that.

And then we can rigorously test the hypothesis (I admit that it’s still only a hypothesis) that bottlenecks on Bangalore’s roads are intersections and not roads.

NRIs and the double narrative bias

By definition journalism suffers from the narrative bias. In other words, in most conditions, only the spectacular is newsworthy. To take a popular example, “dog bites man” will never make news because of its sheer predictability – it simply doesn’t add any information content.

As a consequence, journalism “suffers” from what I call the “spectacular bias”. A spectacular event is much more likely to be reported compared to an unspectacular one. This has several implications.

Firstly it leads to distorted and suboptimal choices. For example, following the two fires in Volvo buses in 2013-14 people stopped traveling by buses of that particular make. This was irrational because even after those accidents Volvo buses continued to be safer than buses of any other make. Yet, the fact that Volvo buses had been involved in the accidents were. Ade the focus of reports and that led to irrational responses. Related to this, I usually ask in lectures I take if anyone has seen a headline that says “Ashok Leyland bus catches fire,people die” and if not, if it means that Ashok Leyland buses never catch fire.

Now that it is established that journalism suffers from the narrative bias and spectacular bias, let’s take it one level further – what about people who get their news exclusively from social media? Let us assume that news that is shared widely on social media is a subset of news that is reported in the mainstream media (it is a reasonable assumption that anything that trends on social media will get immediately picked up and reported by the mainstream media).

What kind of news will these people (who get news exclusively from mainstream media) consume? If a news item makes it big in the social media then it implies that the news item has something about it that is spectacular, and something that is spectacular relative to anything else that is reported. Now considering that news itself is a collection of spectacular stories, what this implies is that what gets shared on social media is spectacular when compared to other spectacular stories, or these stories are doubly spectacular!

Considering that news itself can cause significant irrational decisions among people, imagine the kind of impact that consumption of news solely via social media can have! Without going into merits of the news, we can safely argue that it leads to irrational decisions and opinions.

Now let us consider one such class of people who mostly consume news via social media (we are making a leap of faith here). Temporarily going into anecdata territory, let me quote examples of possibly irrational behaviour by NRIs here. First there is this relative who left India about a decade back. About a year or so back he started this Facebook community called “Bangalore – Water Issues and Solutions” . None of his actions or statements from earlier had indicated that he has any interest in this topic.

Then there is my wife who has been living abroad for the last seven months. Glancing at political status messages on her Facebook feed you see the Uber rape case, Leslie Udwin’s documentary “India’s daughter” and the case of the death of IAS officer DK Ravi. Clearly spectacular among the spectacular. Or take my own case – I’ve been out of India for more than a week now, and lacking good traditional sources of getting news from back home (websites are too cumbersome, I’m relying on social media too).

The consequent “double narrative bias” (since what you consume from social media undergoes two levels of narrative bias) means that NRIs, lacking good sources of news from back home, are likely to have a warped view of the happenings in India. This implies that their idea of India is likely to be largely shaped by this bias and unlikely to be representative of what’s actually happening (I’m by no means giving a clean chit to resident Indians here, since several of those too suffer from this double narrative bias. But proportions are smaller than that for NRIs).

From this point of view the decision by the current government to extend online voting rights to NRIs needs to be called to question – since there is good reason to believe that their idea of India suffers from two levels of narrative bias (NRIs are currently not barred from voting but they need to travel to India to cast their votes. A change in this rule has been proposed).

This concept also helps us understand why political views of NRIs is likely to be much more polarised than that of the general Indian population (as exhibits note both the campaign to deny current Prime Minister Narendra Modi a visa to visit the U.S., and the reception he received when he ultimately went there). Their view is shaped by double narrative bias which leads to suboptimal opinions.

This double narrative bias also presents a good business opportunity – for media houses to target the diaspora. While most Indian publications have websites these are just repositories of news, and only news that has been widely shared gets mileage. This ends up reinforcing the double narrative bias.

What we need instead is a daily quick bite of news that can be consumed easily. This might lead to several NRIs to subscribe, so that they can get a quick understanding of what’s happening back home. (The economists espresso is a good template to follow for this one). And can serve to eliminate at least one level of narrative bias!

Rajat Gupta’s affiliations

Why the fuck does every single article that talks about this describe insider trader Rajat Gupta as a “former Goldman director”? Why not ex-McKinsey CEO? Or current P&G Board Member? And especially given that his insider trading was partly at Goldman’s expense?

Media is crazy

MGM Channel

Yesterday I upgraded my Tata Sky package to Annual Mega Pack (with the would-be-ladywife wanting all Kannada and Telugu channels, and all movie channles; and with me wanting all sports channels this was most economical). And got service to this channel called MGM which was earlier part of an add-on package I wasn’t sure I wanted (along with TCM, Lumiere and Warner Brothers).

So last evening I celebrated the upgradation of my Tata Sky package by watching this random (isn’t close to the same league as the dollars trilogy or once upon a time in the west) western called Hang ’em High. Decent movie, but what made it immensely watchable is that there were no ads.

Yes, you read that right. MGM doesn’t show any ads in the middle of movies. Not one. And given the Tata Sky pricing, I guess it charges a reasonable subscription fee to fund itself! The sad part is that they don’t advertise this enough and so probably they aren’t able to collect as much subscription fees as they could. Nevertheless, this is a beautiful model and I just hope they sustain (my assumption is that if they didn’t show ads during a Sunday evening movie, they won’t show ads at all).

Given the surfeit of advertising that plagues most of our movie channels, I knew something like this was going to happen sometime. A channel that subsists on user subscription rather than spoiling the viewing experience by flooding the movie with ads. And what has made this possible is direct to home television, where your choice of channels isn’t dictated by your neighbour’s. And one in which it is easy for the channel to monitor the number of subscribers without the distributor (in this case , Tata SKY) fudging the numbers.

We need to be thankful to DTH for enabling such beautiful concepts like no-ad-movies, and thank MGM for taking a bold step and starting a no ad channel. Now, can sports channels create “plus versions” of themselves where they’ll show uninterrupted sport rather than cutting the first and last ball of each over and showing the rest of the over in a smaller screen? I’m sure there are enough people who will be willing to pay a premium for it.

And I wish a similar model comes up for radio (Worldspace RIP but you didn’t offer radio in car). Again, too many ads.

Nubra Valley

I was in Nubra Valley, North Ladakh, the night the cloudburst and subsequent floods hit Ladakh. With the place having no mobile network, we were completely cut off from the rest of the world and had no clue of the disaster until we were more than halfway back, when the driver of a car coming in the opposite direction informed our driver.

Reports in newspapers have asked questions about the situation in Nubra. Apparently all means of communication to there have been cut off (looking back, it’s quite a wonder that we managed to get back to Leh; reading these reports really depress me about what might have been) and so the situation there is unknown.

I can say this much. There was little rain in Nubra the night the cloudburst hit Leh. We were sleeping in tents at this camp called “organic retreat” (more about that in another post) and there was only a light drizzle sometime in the night. The next morning, too, things seemed quite normal there. The Lama from the Sumur monastery, who is deemed to be the next Rimpoche of the Spituk Monastery in Leh, did make it to Leh (he was supposed to make the journey to Leh the day after disaster struck). We did see some ceremonies in his honour very close to Leh.

In the next few days, I hope to write many more essays about my trip to Leh. And I’ve just started processing the pictures I took there. Some of them have been uploaded on facebook.

The Importance of Online News

Reading Deepak Shenoy’s excellent article on insurance this afternoon the first thing I wondered was about why I had never read anything like it before. It was so intuitive and insightful, and so obvious, yet I didn’t recall reading anything like it elsewhere in the “mainstream media” (quotes because that implicitly implies Yahoo! is not mainstream). And then I started thinking about Ajay Shah’s brilliant blog post about the undersupply of criticism.

Ajay mentions in his article that most articles on China (which need cooperation from sources in the Chinese government for information) tend to be favourable to the country, since no one wants to risk cutting off the supply of information (or worse) by antagonizing the Chinese government. A similar relationship, either implicitly or explicitly, is enjoyed between media and advertisers.

A quick glance through any business newspaper, or even a mainstream broadsheet, would tell you that financial institutions (this includes banks, asset management companies, insurers and brokerages) are heavy advertisers in these media. Given the amount of money papers make from these sources, it doesn’t make much business sense for them to publish opinion pieces that are critical of these heavy advertisers. There are papers (especially some broadsheets) that claim to enforce neutrality and fairness in their reporting, but even there it is hard to come across articles that are highly critical advertisers. The potential loss in revenue is too big a risk to take.

The biggest advantage of new media is that it provides alternate channels which depend on alternate sources of revenue. Think about the number of times you’ve seen banks or insurance companies advertising in the Yahoo! sidebar, and then compare that against the number of times you’ve seen such advertisements in newsprint. Similarly, there will be companies who are heavy advertisers online, but not so in broadsheets so you will find the latter to be more willing to be critical of them.

From the reader’s perspective it is important to get news and opinion not only from several sources, but also from several kinds of sources in order to get a balanced view.

Business Model for DD

Flipping channels an hour back, I happened to stop at this never-heard-before channel called “DD Bharati”. Usha Uthup was giving a concert that was clearly recorded for television. Looking at her, and considering that the program had been recorded in black-and-white film, I would suppose that it was ancient indeed. Maybe from some time in the 70s.

The program itself was nice. The sets, for the time, were excellent. Usha was backed up by a bunch of men clad in suits – one on keyboard, a couple on guitars, one on trumpet, one drumming, one on the cymbals and another just swaying from side to side. The songs were all quite good, most of them Usha’s own compositions, and I didn’t think twice about giving up on ESPN Sportscenter Asia, Roland Garros and three not-so-bad Hindi movies in order to watch this program. And while I was watching I thought of this business model for Doordarshan.

The basic idea is that there is a whole lot of footage – all that was shown all through the 70s and 80s – that is quite popular among people and nostalgia-inducing, which is held by Doordarshan. I would be surprised if DD would have licensed out any of its old content to any other channel, if not for any other reason but because so much bureaucracy would have to move for that to happen. Stuff like 80s soaps and sitcoms, shows like the Usha Uthup performance I watched today, etc.

So I think DD can truly profitably run a “nostalgia” kind of channel. The market of people who grew up on these programs in the 70s and 80s is large, and most would prefer to watch re-runs of those ancient shows rather than watch the tripe that is dished out by most channels today. And then there is an opportunity for people to catch up on stuff they missed out on back then for various reasons – for example I missed out on so many cool programs back in the late 80s because our antenna didn’t catch DD2, and I wouldn’t really mind watching those today.

And then those ads – yeah they are available on youtube (and on dd’s own site) but then I’m sure it would be profitable to run those ads now as programs in themselves! The opportunities, I think, are endless. Unfortunately it is a sarkari company that is not interested in profits that is sitting on all these options. The loss, I think, is for us potential viewers.

Orators and Writers

Yesterday I was reading an op-ed in Mint when it struck me was that this particular columnist never argues – in the sense that he never constructs an argument using inductive or deductive logic. His method or argument is to say the same thing over and over again – in different ways, using different metaphors. He hopes to make his point by way of reinforcement, and considering his popularity and his ubiquity across the media, I’m sure it works for a lot of people (though not for me).

Then I started thinking about people who are known to be “great orators”, mostly from the Indian political space. I started thinking about Vajpayee, about Chandrashekhar and several other similar people. I discovered the same thing about them. That they seldom construct an argument using deductive or inductive logic. Their way of getting the point across is the same as the Mint columnist’s – to say the same thing forcefully and in several different ways.

And thinking about it, it seems quite logical. When you are addressing a large audience, you will need to take everyone along. You will need to ensure that everyone is clued in on what you are speaking on. And when you speak, there is no way for the listener to take a step or two back if he/she misses something you said. Unlike text, the speech has to be interpreted in one parse. So if you are to be a great orator, you need to make sure that you take the audience along; that you construct your speech in such a way that even if someone gets distracted for a few words they can join back and appreciate the rest of the speech. Hence you are better off indulging in rhetoric rather than argument.

A writer, on the other hand, has no such compulsions. It is easy for his reader to go back and forth and parse the essay in whatever order he deems fit. As long as he keeps the language simple, the reader is likely to go along with him. On the other hand, if the writer indulges in rhetoric, the reader is likely to get bored and that could be counterproductive. Hence, writers are more into argument than into rhetoric.

Which brings me back to the Mint columnist I was reading yesterday who, as far as I know, has been a prolific writer but not as much as an orator (or maybe he is but I wouldn’t know since he lives abroad). And I’m puzzled that he has settled on a rhetorical style rather than an argumentative style. I’ve happened to meet him and even then he was mostly using rhetoric rather than reasoning in his arguments.

So yeah, the essence is that there are two ways in which you can construct arguments – by logical reasoning which is mostly preferred by writers and by rhetoric which is preferred by orators. I’m not sure how successful you can be if you interchange styles.

The other side of the long tail

There are several people who talk about how the advent and the popularity of the internet has resulted in markets in many a long tail. Without loss of generality, let us just take the market for writing here. Several niches which were earlier not served since there wasn’t enough of a dedicated audience in a particular geographical area for a certain set of articles and so no one bothered to write and disseminate them.

For example, it is unlikely that there was enough of a “market” for a series of posts on the Studs and Fighters Theory in the days before the internet – a market big enough for a newspaper or a magazine or a journal to bother publishing. Now, the internet not only allows me to publish it without effort or cost, but also lets me know that there is enough of a market for this kind of a series for me to bother publishing it rather than just explain it to a few friends in a smoky bar or cafe.

Now, the funda is that sometimes the long tail can exist in geographically coherent markets and not online! For example, all of yesterday, while at work i was frantically searching for sources to follow the BBMP election results. Everyone led me to this TV9 video streaming but it didn’t open on my office network and I couldn’t find any other live sources that were constantly updating the results. I had had similar problems following the results of the Karnataka Assembly elections two years back.

It was then I realized that the “traditional market” can itself be the long tail! For example, the amount of information I found about the elections in this morning’s papers was really impressive – in fact, the much ridiculed ToI had pretty good coverage of the polls, as did the Deccan Herald or the New Indian Express. Earlier in the morning, yesterday, too there were the Kannada channels which focused exclusively on the election results.

What I’m saying here may be fairly obvious, but just wanted to point out that long tail need not refer exclusively to the new media, or new channels. When you look at it in certain ways, several of the traditional media are also catering esssentially to a long tail, though when there was only the traditional media, no one really used the term.

Talking of BBMP elections, take a look at this graphic that was presented in the Deccan Herald today. Don’t you see a pattern in this?