Just more pressure to try to discredit and silence John & Ken, won't work, ratings are too high.
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November 14, 2011

Study: Hate speech on 'John and Ken,' Dobbs talk radio?


By JON CASSIDY / THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Two UCLA professors have put out a report seeking to quantify hate speech on immigration-themed talk radio.

They found a lot of it. But what they called hate speech, others would call plain, if possibly impolite, English; terms like "illegals," "illegal aliens," and even "illegal immigrants."

The study by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center reviewed single shows by John and Ken, Lou Dobbs, and Michael Savage, all of which aired in July 2008 and discussed immigration. Aside from the terminology tally, researchers checked all factual claims by the hosts and their guests.

The researchers found that factual claims made on "The Lou Dobbs Show" were accurate 87 percent of the time, while the "John and Ken Show" was 55 percent accurate, and "The Savage Nation" was 53 percent accurate.

The study was featured at a panel discussion at MALDEF's Los Angeles office Tuesday sponsored by the National Hispanic Media Coalition. The coalition also announced that its "Take John and Ken Off the Air Campaign" has gotten a dozen businesses to stop advertising on the show.

That campaign was launched last month after Kobylt and Chiampou gave out an activist's phone number on the air, producing a deluge of nasty messages.

Greg Ashlock, Clear Channel's Los Angeles market manager, did not respond to a request for comment on the study.

The study, titled "Quantifying Hate Speech on Commercial Radio," is a preliminary attempt by professors Chon A. Noriega and Francisco Javier Iribarren to "develop a sound, replicable methodology for qualitative content analysis" of hate speech on the air.

The cursory study, which was not peer-reviewed, was intended to quantify hate speech and to fact-check claims made by the hosts and their guests.

The professors didn't stick to official definitions of hate speech (i.e., directly or indirectly fostering violence against minorities). Any use of terms such as "illegals" or "illegal immigrants" was enough to get a check mark in their hate speech tally.

The researchers' fact-checking exercise also required a few subjective judgments, but the study provided extensive footnotes, so that anyone can judge the basis of the findings.

Any claim deemed unverifiable, distorted, or simply false counted against the accuracy score.

The researchers found that Dobbs was a more reliable source of information than the other hosts.

Dobbs was dinged for three unverifiable claims and one by a guest, but wasn't accused of saying anything actually false.

The study gave a charitable "unverifiable" label to Dobbs' claim that all labor economists have agreed for more than 15 years that immigration is of no benefit to the native-born. His "no benefit" claim is what's unverifiable; the debate over immigration, of course, is far from over.

Savage was accused of only one falsehood. His low score was due to 16 claims considered unverifiable or distorted.

These ranged from the extreme, such as comparing the beliefs of President Obama and the Baader-Meinhof terrorists, to conspiracy talk, to assertions that others might consider simple political opinions: the left likes the Fairness Doctrine (mandatory equal time in political shows) because it would increase their control of the media.

Kobylt, Chiampou, and their guest Jim Gilchrist were tagged with 21 unsubstantiated claims, 10 of them deemed simply false.

So are John and Ken fonts of misinformation? That answer will have to wait for a promised broader study, because the falsehoods cited here are largely quibbles.

"The L.A. council makes good on banning new fast food outlets in South L.A.," is how Chiampou described one issue. The researchers decided that since it was a yearlong moratorium, rather than a permanent ban, Chiampou would get dinged twice for making the remark and repeating it.

His other "falsehood" was saying that "20 percent of the restaurants on the West Side are fast food," when the actual number is 16 percent.

Kobylt got downgraded for blaming San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom for San Francisco's sanctuary ordinance, which dates to 1989, and for talking about fat Mexicans.

"The Mexican diet is what's shot up obesity rates in Los Angeles" was one Kobylt quote found false for oversimplifying obesity. "South L.A., poor people, they don't care what they look like" was another.

http://www.ocregister.com/news/study-32 ... peech.html