Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't by John Jr. (books that read to you TXT) 📕

89 The implications for Senate races after the mid-1990s are based upon extrapolating their results. See Jeff Mana, Christopher Uggen, and Marcus Britton, “The Truly Disfranchised: Felon Voting Rights and American Politics,” University of Minnesota working paper, January 3, 2001 (http://www.northwestern.edu/ipr/publications/papers/manza.pdf).

90 Survey conducted in Washington State by Venture Data L.L.C. on May 22-23, 2005 for Public Opinion Strategies.

91 While the effect isn’t statistically significant for Hispanics, non-felon Hispanics fall between “independent” and “a few more Democrats than Republicans,” while felon Hispanics fall between “a few more Democrats than Republicans” and “mostly Democrats.”

92 Brian Faler, “Election Turnout in 2004 Was Highest Since 1968,” Washington Post, January 15, 2005.

93 Pauline Jelinek, “Election Turnout Rate Tops 40 Percent,” Associated Press, November 8, 2006 (http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/ELN_TURNOUT?SITE=7219&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTME=2006-11-08-18-54-03).

94 John R. Lott, Jr., “A Review Article on Donald Wittman’s The Myth of Democratic Failure,” Public Choice, vol. 92, no. 1-2 (July 1997): 1-13.

95 Http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=40862.

96 For example, in 2004, 55 percent of journalists at national media outlets claimed that the media was “not critical enough” of President Bush, while only 8 percent believed that the media has been “too critical.” By contrast, a similar poll during 1995 found that 48 percent of the press believed that “too little” coverage had been given to President Clinton’s accomplishments, while only 2 percent thought that “too much” coverage went to his achievements. See the Times Mirror Survey, see MRC’s June, 1995 edition of MediaWatch. Pew Research Center for the People and the press, Survey of Journalists, March 10 - April 20, 2004. Patterson and Donsbach’s survey of journalists lead them to conclude that “there is . . . a perceptual gap between journalists’ self-image and their actions, and it leads them to reject any suggestion that they are politically biased.” Thomas Patterson and Donsbach Wolfgang, “News Decisions: Journalists as Partisan Actors,” Political Communication (1996): 466.

97 This discussion is based upon John R. Lott, Jr. and Kevin Hassett, “Is Newspaper Coverage of Economic Events Politically Biased?: Reagan to Bush II,” AEI working paper 2004 (http://ssrn.com/abstract=588453). Hassett and I assembled a list of dates on which important economic news was released for most newspapers from 1991 to 2004. We also followed four major papers and the Associated Press for a slightly longer period—from 1985 onward. We then used Nexis—a computer database of news stories from 389 newspapers—to gather all 12,620 headlines that ran in America’s newspapers covering economic news stories on those dates. We looked at headlines the day of and the day after the data were announced but excluded follow-up and feature stories in order to link the headlines directly with the economic numbers.

98 For example, unemployment fell by 2 percentage points during Reagan’s second term and by 1.5 percentage points during Clinton’s second term, while GDP growth was similar (3.8 and 4.0 respectively) during both periods. Yet, Reagan received 7 percent fewer positive headlines than Clinton even after accounting for the slight differences in economic conditions. Unsurprisingly, during Reagan’s second term, those who believed the economy was getting worse exceeded those who thought it was improving. The difference was almost 17 percentage points. During Clinton’s second term, the reverse was true - optimists about the economy outnumbered pessimists by 6 percentage points.

99 There have been a few other attempts to measure systematically media bias. One interesting paper by Groseclose and Milyo developed an index of how conservative or liberal media coverage was by counting the number of times that a media outlet cited various think tanks and comparing that with the number of times that members of Congress cited the same think tanks in speeches on the floor of the House and Senate. By comparing the citation patterns between politicians and media, they constructed an Americans for Democratic Action score for each media outlet, and thus ranked it on the same scale that politicians are ranked from liberal to conservative. They found that “Most of the mainstream media outlets that we examined . . . were closer to the average Democrat in Congress than they were to the median member of the House.” This may indicate bias, but since an article may also quote an academic or a business, government, or union official, examining only think tanks could give a mistaken picture of any bias. Most reporters interview both sides for a story (though the vast majority of news stories in their data set only mention one of the 200 think tanks that they categorize as conservative or liberal), and any bias is likely to be much more subtle.

Another paper by DellaVigna and Kaplan claims that FOX News is conservative because people in particular areas tended to vote more conservatively after their cable systems started carrying FOX News. Even if one accepts their test and results, this does not constitute evidence that FOX is “conservative,” only that it is not as liberal as the other media that it was replacing. See Tim Groseclose and Jeff Milyo, “A Measure of Media Bias,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2005, 1191-1237, and Stefano DellaVigna and Ethan Kaplan, “The FOX News Effect: Media Bias and Voting,” University of California at Berkeley, March 30, 2006.

100 The discussion in this section is based upon: John R. Lott, Jr., “Public Schooling, Indoctrination, and Totalitarianism,” Journal of Political Economy , vol. 107, no. 6, part 2, December 1999: S127-S157; John R. Lott, Jr.,”An Explanation for Public Provision of Schooling: The Importance of Indoctrination,” Journal of Law and Economics, vol. 33, no.1, April 1990: 199-231; John R. Lott, Jr.,” Why is Education Publicly Provided?: A Critical Survey,” Cato Journal, vol. 7, no. 2, Fall 1987: 475-501; John R. Lott, Jr., “The Institutional Arrangement of Public Education: The Puzzle of Exclusive Territories,” Public Choice, vol. 54, no. 1, 1987: 89-96; and John R. Lott, Jr.,”Alternative Explanations for Public Provision of Education,” UCLA Dissertation, 1984.

101 J. Bruce Amstutz, Afghanistan: The First