11/14: Terman

[smiklin]

Comment below with questions or thoughts about the reading for this week's workshop.

Please make your comments by Wednesday 11:59 PM, and upvote at least five of your peers' comments on Thursday prior to the workshop. You need to use 'thumbs-up' for your reactions to count towards 'top comments,' but you can use other emojis on top of the thumbs up.

[anuraag94]

Thanks in advance for your presentation.

Since confirmation bias in the news coverage of Muslim women is at least in part driven by existing public attitudes, and the formation of public attitudes is at least in part driven by news coverage, it seems like this would form an alarming positive feedback loop that's worth exploring.

What do you think is the best way to characterize and study this? How would the specific sociological and cultural determinants of gendered orientalism make this feedback loop analysis different from analyses of other cultural stereotypes that are hardened by media coverage?

[wanitchayap]

Thank you for your reading and presentation! I really enjoy reading your paper.

In the conclusion section, you suggested that researchers should compare Muslim women's portrayals in other platforms. I agree with this, and I especially think the American movie platform is a good place to start. American movies are very pervasive in various foreign cultures, and they often prime the audience's attitudes subconsciously. How would you use computational methods to study this topic on the movie platform? I am particularly curious about the method since movies are not as ready to be processed as texts are. Is it possible to analyze the movie platform completely free of human hard coding (and thus completely excluding human biases), and if so how? Or do you think that using humans to preprocess the movie platform would be better and why? Which elements of the movie platform you think would yield the richest information for studying this topic? And just out of curiosity, do you think different genres of movies would have heterogeneous effects on priming Muslim women's portrayals, and if so, which genre do you think has the most significant effect?

[goldengua]

Thank you very much for sharing this inspiring data. I am very interested in how the confirmation bias change over time and as a result of terrorism events. Particularly, I was surprised to find that the confirmation bias hypothesis may have lessoned in the post-911 era, and the coefficients were not significant with subdata collected after 9/11. I was wondering what factors might have driven this change in confirmation bias hypothesis (especially towards a non-significant direction)? How does the change in reaction to terrorism inform us about the underlying mechanisms for the confirmation bias hypothesis?

[SoyBison]

Thanks for your presentation! One thing that concerns me about your data is the possibility of confounding due to the perspective which gathering data from news sources presents. In the west, we mostly watch news from our countries. News stories, by their very nature, will be statistically focused on events in the host country, or their allies. Because of this, women from western countries will be brought on for interviews for a wider array of topics, whereas women from predominantly Muslim countries would only be brought on for topics which relate to Islam, Women's rights, and politics in those countries (many of which are dominated by Sunni Islam, which does promote misogynist institutions, and is dominated by imams who promote violent Jihad.) How do you address these sorts of concerns in your data collection and management system?

[nwrim]

Thanks for a very interesting presentation! I knew that "Muslims as Terrorists" stereotype was prevalent in America, but I did not knew that "Muslims as cultural threat" stereotype was also dominant and is influencing people's attitude.

My question is whether this result is general to all Muslim countries, or is it specific to only Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries. You mentioned that

Countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia are featured in greater quantities, while those nations with relatively good records—such as Malaysia and Tunisia—are shown less often. (p. 491)

In other worlds, Muslim countries that are not in MENA tend to have less misogynistic culture, which leads to less news coverage. Building on this, I was curious if the general pattern you reported in the article persists when we evaluate Muslim countries that are not in MENA independently. (I admit that this question partly stems from my belief that many Americans would not know that there are non-MENA Muslim countries) Also, in case the result does not generalize to countries outside MENA, can we say this article is on the topic of portrayal of "Muslim Woman"?

Thank you again for your presentation!

[hanjiaxu]

Thank you very much for presenting such an interesting topic. As mentioned above, it seems that confirmation bias in the press and public opinion influenced by the press are reinforcing each other. Do you have some ideas or research articles about how to break this vicious cycle?

A more general question is, the dominant culture seems to report or evaluate minority culture based on the standards from the dominant culture, I'm also wondering how Muslim country press reports stories in the U.S.? What would be a good way to report information about a minority culture?

[bakerwho]

Thanks for your presentation, and the thought-provoking paper. As an Indian with an Islamic influenced upbringing, I find it very interesting to find a quantification of the orientalist attitude to Asia in general, and Islam in particular (even in liberal publications).

My question is about the translation of this research to action. Work that exposes gendered orientalism is unlikely to reach the communities that are being orientally gendered. It will most likely serve as generator of self-awareness in the west. How can communities whose stories are dominated by western media (like Muslim women) reclaim these narratives and replace them with ones that are truly representative of their thoughts and lived experiences?

[lulululugagaga]

Thanks for your presentation. I'm super interested in media bias. This reminds me of the recent media reports from CNN/BBC/NYT on HongKong upheaval, in which the reporters all mentioned a protester being shot by police while ignoring the fact that a protester poured gas and lit fire on a citizen in the same day. The world we see is partial, and I really appreciate your work to argue against such biased media coverage 'norm' on representing particular groups of people.

My question is about the data source and how you select them. Often, when dealing with non-big-data, I feel uncertain about the validity of my research for the reason that I may only cover a very small part, which the source selection itself can be prejudice. We know that there would be thousands of reports on one single event but we only deal with very limited materials. I want to ask when would be the time that you know 'my material is enough' to draw conclusions, how you make selections among all these countless reports?

[ydeng117]

Thanks for the presentation. like @lulululugagaga, I am also interested in the recent western media coverage on Hong Kong protest. While the protesters are throwing Molotov cocktails, damaging public infrastructures, and beating police officers and civilians, it seems that the western media continuously portrays the protesters as determined freedom fighters and victims of oppressive authority. Our media uses pictures, video clips, and words to depict a world that we are believing but not the truth that happened. My question is how can people tell whether the media is giving out biased reports, and how can we establish a social institution to surveil the power of the media and push the media to report unbiased news?

[PAHADRIANUS]

Thank you for your research which straightforwardly exposed such a huge issue with modern day media. Honestly, I have gradually come to detest the many of the major medias, which apparently have relinquished the conscience and responsibility of informing the public truthful news. Balanced reports are replaced with selected sources with bigotry, and objective narratives are replaced with purposeful opinions. These are the facts that we can feel but struggle to prove. You have essentially found a way to use computational methods, with careful model construction , to measure the media biases and investigate the mechanisms of their occurrence. I think it is more insightful that you found evidence through data collected from the NY times and the Washington Post, channels that we tend to believe to be rather impartial or even a bit favoring the Muslim minorities on these issues. The result of your analysis once again demonstrated that the intrinsic biases in the Americentric thought process, characterized by Said as Orientalism, are not problems subjected only to Fox News and the conservatives, rather to the entire US society alike. And there is no doubt that this is an expression of cultural intolerance, a result of deifying the euro-american value as the sole truth. That being said, I am still a bit concerned about the external validity of your method. I agree that the method worked extraordinarily well on the topic of Muslim women, which has large volumes of reports. However, we may not have that adequacy on all kinds of media coverage. How can we apply the similar computational method to discern media biases in areas of fewer data source available?

[vinsonyz]

Thanks for your presentation. Like @ydeng117 and @lulululugagaga, I am also interested in the protests in Hong Kong. Since where people stand depends on where they sit, the western media and Chinese media are unavoidably to be biased. Given that we are students in social sciences, how can we stay rational and neutral under the influence of the media on such a political protest?

[linghui-wu]

Thank you for the great presentation! I am very impressed by the incredible data source that articles in New York Times and Washington Post for 35 years have been employed to test the two hypotheses. For the mechanism part, which has not been fully explored yet, my question is regarding to what extent, the Muslim identity exacerbates the unequal status of Muslim women? Or in other words, is it possible for us to tell apart the effect of being a Muslim and being the minority of gender on Muslim women?

[timqzhang]

Thank you for your presentation. Indeed, the portrait construction in the social media is a serious social problem that should be tackled, since public opinions and even policies relevant may be shifted by it. Here are my two questions:

1. What is the interaction between social media and the public and government? In other words, it is less likely that the opinions of the public and the governments are only passively shaped by the social media, but they may respond and in turn modify the themes in the social media. Under that circumstance, what is the role of the public and the government, who together with the social media, co-shape the figure of certain group to the whole world? Are there any mechanism behind it?

2. Do you have any suggestions to alleviate such bias in the social media to Muslim women? And are there any substantial effect for Muslim women in the past several decades? Moreover, how do social media behave properly to report certain theme without biases, especially when the social media itself is often influenced by other factors like what as mentioned in the assumption in the first question.

[luxin-tian]

Thank you for your presentation in advance! Your paper examines the public bias on islamophobia and feminism from the perspective of public media. This not only matters for Muslims and draws important policy implications, but also provides a methodological perspective for similar topics. I just wonder if there is any potential problem in the process of choosing the time range and media resources? What may obstruct us if we make inference about public attitude based on the evidence of a few somewhat oligarchy media, especially in a country with freedom of the press?

[WMhYang]

Thank you very much for your presentation. In the paper, you mention that the unfair media coverage of Muslin women may shape the stereotype of Muslims as a cultural threat, so the policies that involve Muslims may also be affected. From my point of view, there is also a possibility that the existing stereotype has already determined what news readers want to see in the newspapers, so the unfair media coverage and policies are just a reflection of this stereotype. In other words, I believe that reverse causality may appear in this case, which can weaken your conclusion. In fact, my belief also echoes the second point of your conclusion: the mechanisms that drive this trend is unclear. As a result, I wonder is there a possibility that we could build a sturctural model to investigate the interaction between media coverage and public stereotype so that we can derive the actual effect from the simulation of the theoretical model?

[hihowme]

Thanks for your presentation in advance! I am always interested in the problem of media bias. Your research focusing on the influence of public media on shaping public views is really interesting! I have a question kinda in general, why does the media make those things in the first place? There is an opinion that they do it for the interest, but that maybe just from another wrong public view and then the media make this wrong view stronger, and then it goes into a vicious circle. Is there anyway, for the media, to publish a really objective article while at the same keep some of the readability and make people want to read that?

[Yilun0221]

Thank you for the presentation! My question is: If we want reading text analysis to read the subtext in an article, then what is the most important technical breakthrough?

[ShuyanHuang]

Thank you for presenting. I have also tried applying topic modeling to news texts, for example the Wall Street Journal. However I found the LDA very unstable. It could generate different results if I ran it several times with different random seeds. Since your method is based on LDA, have you check the robustness of the algorithm?

[bazirou]

Thank you for your presentation in advance! Your paper examines the public bias on islamophobia and feminism from the perspective of public media. My question is that is it possible for us to tell apart the effect of being a Muslim and being the minority of gender on Muslim women?

[policyglot]

Dr Terman,

More than the text analysis itself, I believe the important message your research brings forth is the paternalism embedded in seemingly liberal mindsets. At UChicago, our own professor Shweder speaks of the difference between imperial liberalism and liberal pluralism (Shweder, 2009). The news sources you reference from 1980- 2004 seem to belong to the former type.

Shweder then quotes Deborah Fitzmaurice, who notes that the liberal ideal of autonomy is

“the vision of people controlling, to some degree, their own destiny, fashioning it through their own decisions throughout their lives.”

Liberal pluralists do not position such autonomy as the supreme value for society.

Suppose you were to now undertake research for liberal pluralism in similar media text corpora. How would you go about looking for it?

References Shweder, R. A. (2009). Shouting at the Hebrews: Imperial Liberalism v Liberal Pluralism and the Practice of Male Circumcision. Law, Culture and the Humanities, 5(2), 247–265. https://doi.org/10.1177/1743872109102491

[RuoyunTan]

Thank you so much for the talk. This research topic about the US media portrayals about Muslim women is inspiring. I think your research methods are also applicable to study how the media portrays other groups or topics and this really helps us better understand how media influences people's perceptions.

Here are just some further thoughts of mine on this topic:

I think another interesting angle for us to view this problem is to compare the US media with the media in other countries. We can ask questions like: for a certain topic or a certain event, how does the media in that country report it? How does the US media depict it? And how do the other countries, including other Western countries, other Muslim countries, and countries in other parts of the world, depict it? Furthermore, we may even see how the media's depiction in one country is linked to the media's attitudes in other countries by looking at the quoting or reprinting of media articles.

[anqi-hu]

Thank you for sharing these findings with us! While reading the article, I couldn't help but notice that by "Muslim women", you refer to women in predominantly Muslim countries. Setting potential technical hurdles aside, I think it would be interesting to look at women's portrayals with a more strict regard to their Muslim/non-Muslim identities, i.e. how are Muslim women treated in popular media vs. their non-Muslim counterparts from the same/politically similar countries? In your opinion, how feasible would this be? If so, how would you approach it? If not, what are the constraints?

[yongfeilu]

Thank your for sharing the exciting presentation! I am really impressed by how confirmation bias and media coverage to influence our opinions on public events. Given such bias, are there any good ways for us to abstract more objective and complete facts from numerous reports by social media or research by scholars? In recent months, we can see huge differences between the coverage of many western media and that of China on HongKong upheaval. In particular, when people travel across various countries with different political regimens, they can experience such differences. What is your opinion about this? Is there anything we can change about this through scientific research?

[dhruvalb]

Thank you for sharing your work! It is a very interesting method to quantify a phenomenon that many people may be able to notice without being able to prove it. Do you think it might be worth looking into US economic and political relations with the countries as we evaluate how the US media portrays their cultural practices and gender roles?

[ZhouXing-19]

Thank you very much for your presentation and I found this topic is very interesting. I have two small questions: (1) Is it possible that the media coverage bias can be partly explained by the lack of attention on women's rights in some non-muslim countries? Or is it because in these countries, discrimination on women is less visible than traditional domestic violence? (2) I can't help but wonder if such coverage can be viewed as not only a hostile attitude towards Muslim society but also a form of comfort to domestic people. Since sexual discrimination takes various forms in different societies, then is it possible that media avoid talking about sexual bias in non-muslim countries just because such form of problems have not been well addressed but they want people living here to feel better? Just some of my naive thoughts, thank you!

[adarshmathew]

This was a fascinating paper to read and critically examine. I apologize for the host of questions.

1. Co-occurrence of topics by region: The low ranking of 'Religion' as a theme in the Expected Topic Proportions (Fig 3) surprised me, but seeing it pop up with a high value for the MENA subset made me wonder -- what's the correlation between different topics by region? Women's Rights in Asia may be discussed along with Sexual Assault and Family, but it could be discussed with Religion and Combat (given the Afghanistan and Iraq wars) in the MENA region. Would an analysis of co-occurrence of topics give more insight about representations of women in these regions?

2. Including Conservative reportage as a lagged variable: Your choice of looking at only NYT and WaPo is interesting -- they may be papers of record, but they may not be leading the conversation on this particular issue (especially given how this issue animates the right-wing and their Huntington-esque Clash of Civilizations characterization). It could be very likely that the conversation is driven by these outlets, which piques (biases) the attention of the audience, leading to NYT/WaPo doing a piece of their own. You allude to this in your conclusion by referring to Chris Bail's work. Would you place a lot of weight on this explanation? You could add a lagged variable that measures reportage by WSJ/Fox/NYPost/Enquirer on this topic to see how it explains volume and theme of reportage.

3. On 'Newsiness': Reportage does not occur in a vacuum, it's predicated on prior engagement. Proxies for 'engagement' could be the number of immigrants in the US by country, volume of trade, war, or even a lagged variable on the number of reports on the country. The Muslim world has been in the public psyche of the US for a while now, especially so in your period of reference -- 1979's oil crisis, the Iranian revolution, the Israel-Palestine issue, USSR's invasion of Afghanistan, the Gulf wars, and then 9/11. Is it possible that the Muslim world is overrepresented in your data, by virtue of this long-standing engagement? You mentioned implementing a two-step Heckman model for Hypothesis 2 to account for potential selection effects, changing the n from 1451 to ~1040. Was there a pattern in which countries were dropped? If there's an overrepresentation of the Muslim world in the dataset, wouldn't that affect the validity of your results for Hypothesis 1?

Bonus questions:

1. In operationalizing Hypothesis 2, you set the outcome variable as the ratio of words on Women's Rights to the no. of words in the article. How do you account for words you've dropped in the cleaning process - named entities, stopwords, etc.

2. Would you expect any additional variation explained by classifying countries as Sunni/Shia-dominated? Would your hypotheses be valid for a country like Nigeria which has an almost equal proportion of Muslims and Christians?

[AllisonXiong]

Thanks for sharing this exciting research with us! The revealment of savior narrative and paternalism underneath the gendered orientalism is inspiring. However, I found your use of the term "confirmation bias" a little confusing. Confirmation bias refers to an ingrained cognitive bias that people tend to search and trust information that is in favor of their original belief. By offering pre-screened information on the gender equality situation in Islamic regions, the mass media is actually an active constructor of the biased perception among the public, rather than the object of such bias. Hence, the media seems more of a source rather than a victim of confirmation bias. Would you please explain the reason you chose the term? Thanks!

[heathercchen]

Thank you so much for sharing such an exciting topic with us! I have quite an extended question about the phenomenon you mentioned in this research paper. As your result pointed out, U.S media tends to have rigid biased opinions towards Muslim society and women's rights within these communities. Do you believe that the media has somehow justified reason to do that? Since we know that there are more dramatic miserable stories in newspapers than in real lives, just because those stories are catchy and attract more audience. Do you believe this bias of media is its inherent drawback? If not, is there anyways they could overcome that? Thank you!

[ChivLiu]

Thank you for the presentation! News nowadays has been closely connected with social networks when the majority of media companies use their social network accounts to spread the latest news. Any sorts of articles have a group of targeted viewers. Therefore, like papers, the news could also use tailored materials and data to deliver the viewers the most astonishing messages. As well, to satisfy the viewers, the news could also emphasize the part of facts that most of their viewers, who grew from similar cultural backgrounds, would appreciate. My question is would you consider the news more like a tool of politicians than an objective message? In addition, in what way could common people more efficiently justify the bias that the news contains?

[zeyuxu1997]

Thanks for your presentation. I really agree with your findings that the bias can affect the focus of reporting and lead to a stronger bias in return. However, it's hard to avoid that through law because of freedom of press. The press should report the truth, but they can choose stories to be covered. The advantage of such reports is that people are more interested in news consistent with their opinions. (I think it's called confirmation bias.) Maybe the reason of your finding is that those who report stories in Muslim countries that woman's rights are respected there are eliminated in the cruel competition of the journalism. I wonder what's your advice to starting a research studying the impact of competition between different news agencies on the report bias in your work?

[JuneZzj]

Thank you for the exciting topics and presentations. I cannot agree with you more about the point where the press usually intentionally choose the facts to publish and comment in order to attract readers and the public. I noticed that you applied the Structural Topic Model (STM) for the purpose of filtering and categorizing the topics. Do you think there are some potential factors which may contribute to the inconsistency between the data you collected and the model itself? What assumption we are supposed to bring out in this case? Also, whether the method of this study can be applied to other related fields (i.e. the study of the stereotype of some minorities and how the effects of the stereotype can be mitigated.) Thank you.

[hesongrun]

Thank you so much for the presentation! There seems to be an exaggeration of political correctness towards different sensitive topics in our current age. I think news media is one of the example. Because of the thinking, they tend to report what general public expect to be true, just like the Muslim women in your paper. How can we counteract such trend? Are there any approaches we can take to maintain the objectivity of news media? Thanks!

[harryx113]

Thank you in advance for the presentation.

I believe there is an increasing number of academic publications revealing gender, religious and racial bias. And yet, the mainstream media does not seem to be nudged by these studies and moving towards a more unbiased state. You and many fellow classmates have mentioned that the reason for such reluctance of change is due to confirmation bias, as the media only provides content desired by their readership. Now, my extremely general question is, since we all agree that we are being constantly fed with biased information, what should we do next as social scientists? How can we exert the necessary momentum to make the world a less biased place?

[tianyueniu]

Thank you for the reading! Your way of quantifying gendered orientalism is very inspiring. I think it might also be very interesting to apply your method to compare Western media's portrayal and other media's portrayal on similar events. Do you think the same computational method can be applied to other languages as well? In your opinion, will contextual biases exist in non-Western media?

[romanticmonkey]

Thank you, Professor Terman, for such an impressive study! My question relates to @policyglot 's idea of the prevalence of paternalism in the liberal media landscape.

I wonder if these articles emphasizing maltreatments toward Muslim women, except being "newsworthy," also serve as tranquilizers for the western women, that is, having western women appreciate more of their status quo compared to the commonly depicted "predicament" of Muslim women. As a result, gender inequality in a relatively egalitarian society (e.g. in the US) might be overlooked. The media thus leads the public to worry about feminine liberation in the Muslim community instead of focusing on solving more local gender-related issues (e.g. job inequality). Although this issue sounds a bit conspiratorial, I hope to hear your thoughts on whether this tranquilizing effect might indeed be a motivation of news agencies or media giants.

[minminfly68]

Dr. Terman, thanks for sharing the interesting article with a focus on the bias and equality by using text analysis on US news media, showing the potential race discrimination and stereotype behind it. Excellent insight!

However, in terms of media, I am very interesting in another topic apart from fascinating topic that some classmates have mentioned about Westerner's media bias. I really would like to know the difference of different media's coverage on Muslim news from a comparative perspective. We may have a H1: If the media is far-right, it would have more racial discrimination on Arabs than middle or left-sde media. We can do so by comparing the coverage in Fox News and New York Times, CNBC, CNN etc. Do they share any similarities or discrepancies?

Thanks a lot!

[chiayunc]

Thank you for the wonderful work. My question is that to set forth an even more powerful argument that there indeed is a confirmation bias, is it needed that we set the quantified news coverage result against the number of actually news-worthy events of the related topics that are going on? maybe through data provided by NGOs or the government?

[rkcatipon]

Dr. Terman, thank you for sharing your research. I look forward to your presentation!

My question is about the choice of analyzing just two sources, the Washington Post and the New York Times. As a former journalist, I can attest to the fact that these two sources used to inform coverage by other outlets. We would look to these platforms to a) break a story first and b) to do so with the highest level of editorial integrity. But in this age of the 24-hour news cycle and the rapid speed in which news now breaks, this process has been disrupted. The NYT and WP no longer have the same dominance in the news industry or in public consumption. They are still widely circulated and are still respected within journalism, but U.S. consumers have found other, more direct, sources for information such as microblogs, social media networks, podcasts, and etc.

How does one account for these shifts in the news industry over time? Do you believe that given the disruptions in journalism, such as the fracturing of the news market and the lessening dependence on the NYT and the WP, that their coverage is still indicative of US media at large? Do emerging platforms for media also reflect past orientalist trends or do you suspect that they may diverge? How do we conduct a study on media bias when the media is so very fractured now?

[nswxin]

Thank you for your presentation! I do agree with you that people tend to reconfirm their previous beliefs (even it's incredibly biased). After reading your research, I examined myself and discover that I am not different. Can you please give us some advice, as the individual, how can we clear our eyes and avoid being blind by our own bias with current social media?

[cytwill]

Thank you for this presentation! I think that sort of bias in coverage is quite normal in topics more than Muslim females. Our opinions are more prone to be manipulated by media than we originally thought. Mass media tends to either amplify what we generally believe (stereotype) or overturn them. In the case of Muslin Females, I think it is more of an augment. And so is the case of some reports about the sort of authoritarianism in China, which I feel it's far from reality.
Inspired by this research, I think if we do similar research about Chinese democracy, we might yield some analogous conclusions. So I wonder if there are any strategies to help to eliminate such bias in coverage reports, which might emphasize the value of turning down the stereotype in the mass media?

[chun-hu]

Thank you in advance for your presentation. I'm impressed by the time span of news coverage you used in the analysis. As you mentioned in the Conclusions, the precise mechanisms driving these confirmation bias and reduction are still unknown. I'm thinking that one possible way to look at the mechanism is to analyze the trend of representation in media coverage over the 35 years. Is there a consistent number of reports on the representation of women in the MENA region over the years? Or are there a series of events that lead to a surge in reports?

Another question that I'm interested in is the representation of Muslim women in media in other countries. Since your analysis mainly focused on the US media, I'm wondering if the media in other countries have similar stereotypes. It would be interesting to know if this is a specific thing in the US media or a general stereotype across countries.

[dongchengecon]

Thanks a lot for your presentation! In the conclusion part, you have argued that "readers are exposed to a particularly pernicious stereotype of Muslims" and you have provided strong evidence in the paper for this argument. When we think about the reasons behind, the media slant could be actually driven by consumer preference. Maybe we could build a model with firms' maximizing their profits, and compare these profit-maximizing points with their actual choice. Based on this model, we might explain the outcome theoretically.

[boyangqu]

Thanks for your presentation! My question is related to the general topic of bias. As human beings, bias is unavoidable, and not only in the topic of Muslim females. Moreover, since people grow up and are educated with all kinds of biases from news/school/peers, which may be different for different countries or communities, and this leads to unconscious bias in our ideology. The truth for one is not the truth for the other. Respect is one way to deal with this, but in the purpose of research or news, what are possible suggestions regarding this unconscious bias and different ideologies among people?

[keertanavc]

Thank you for the presentation. I am interested in both the heterogeneity of these findings and the policy implications. Is there any work published or in progress that looks at how these biases vary between different types of media outlets? (for example, conservative versus liberal media outlets and the country of location etc.) Also, what steps do you think media outlets can take to ensure fair reporting of news?

[skanthan95]

Thank you for the thought-provoking reading, and thanks in advance for the presentation!

Given that US media outlets perpetuate the stereotype that Muslims are a cultural threat--and these channels shape public attitudes towards Muslims--particular care must be given to selecting the specific words used to describe them.

That being said, do you think US media should avoid using words like "terrorist" when reporting on ideologically-motivated violence, instead using words like "militia" or "gunman" to avoid exacerbating people's tendency to associate terrorism with Islam? Or, would this be a cosmetic change that does little to change the underlying problem?

[nt546]

Thanks for your presentation! The paper talks about selective reporting by western media about women from Muslim countries. The feedback effect from biased reporting reinforces people's belief that Islamic countries are regressive. Could you suggest some behavioral nudges that could break this vicious cycle?

[yutianlai]

Thanks for your presentation in advance! I'm curious about the data you choose and corresponding method you use. Since you choose "news" , selection bias might arise due to the limited participants/perspectives contributing to the news text. What other sources would you consider to include so as to draw a holistic picture of your research? And how would you change the corresponding method?

[KenChenCompEcon]

Thanks for the presentation! It is wonderful to see that tendencies on biased reporting on women's topics differ between the Middle East and other areas. What I am curious about is the mechanism behind it. Does the confirmation causes biased reporting or is it working reversely? Is there a design for testing that hypothesis?

[YuxinNg]

Thank you for sharing the interesting article. We have witnessed there is a bias when US news represents Muslin women. You mentioned that Muslin women are considered newsworthy. Does the newsworthy indicates that the public want to get information about Muslin women's rights being violated. I am wondering if this bias is generated by the US news or it is actually generated by the public. Also, you mentioned in your article that due to the limited sample, you do not know the degree of this bias across other media. I think it will be very interesting if we check this bias on social media platform. Do you think we will witness the same degree of bias towards muslin women on social media platform? Thanks!

[ShanglunLi]

Thank you for providing such an interesting paper to read. I have a question that is it possible to differentiate the effect of being a Muslim and being the minority of gender on Muslim women?