Chapter 18 Exercises

These exercises ask you to do what most discussions of "media bias" do not — work directly with primary sources, comparable across the political spectrum, and audit your own information environment. Several of them are designed to take an hour or more. None can be done by reading other people's opinions about the media; you have to look at the media yourself.

Exercise 1: Trace a Story Across Three Outlets

Pick a single political news story published in the past two weeks. Find that story's coverage in three different outlets:

  • One mainstream-press outlet (NYT, WaPo, AP, or one of the broadcast network news sites)
  • One conservative-media outlet (Fox News, Wall Street Journal, National Review, Daily Wire, or a similar outlet)
  • One outlet from the contested-territory category (The Atlantic, Politico, The Bulwark, The Free Press, or a Substack of your choice)

Read all three pieces in their entirety. Then produce a written analysis (700–900 words) addressing the following:

  1. What facts are agreed upon across all three accounts?
  2. What facts appear in one or two accounts but not all three? Are the missing facts plausibly relevant?
  3. What adjectives, framing choices, or scene-setting language differ across the accounts?
  4. Which sources are quoted in each account? Are there asymmetries in whom each outlet treats as authoritative?
  5. Which account, if any, do you find most persuasive — and what specifically about its handling of the story produces that judgment?

The point of the exercise is not to identify which outlet is "biased." All of them, in some sense, have an angle. The point is to develop the skill of reading multiple sources critically and noticing what each does and does not include.

Exercise 2: Audit Your Own Information Diet

Over the next seven days, log every political-news source you encounter — including social-media feeds, podcasts, articles, video, casual conversation, and any other input. For each entry, record:

  • The source (specific outlet, podcast name, individual creator, or person you spoke with)
  • The approximate time spent consuming it
  • The format (article, video, podcast, social-media post, conversation)
  • A one-sentence description of what you took from it

At the end of the week, produce a written summary (500–700 words) addressing:

  • What is the actual ideological distribution of your information diet, by time?
  • How much time did you spend on opinion content vs. reporting?
  • How much time did you spend on national vs. local coverage?
  • How much of your information environment came through algorithmic recommendation vs. direct subscription / direct visit?
  • What surprises you about the audit? What, if anything, would you want to change?

Be honest. The point is to see what your information environment actually is, not what you would like it to be.

Exercise 3: Identify Your Local News Ecosystem

For the county or city where you live (or where you grew up, if your current location does not match):

  1. Identify all newspapers — daily, weekly, alternative — currently operating. For each, record the publication, its circulation if you can determine it, its ownership (independent, chain, nonprofit), and the year of its founding.
  2. Identify any local broadcast stations (TV and radio) that provide local news coverage. For each, record the network affiliation, the ownership group, and a rough sense of how much local original reporting it produces.
  3. Identify any digital-only local outlets, including any nonprofit local newsrooms, hyperlocal blogs, or alt-weeklies' digital successors.
  4. Determine when your nearest community lost (if it has) its primary daily newspaper.

Use the Northwestern Local News Initiative's State of Local News 2024 report and Penny Abernathy's State of Local News dashboards to verify your findings.

Write a 500–700 word report on your local news ecosystem. Is your community a "news desert"? A "ghost-newspaper" community? A community with robust local news? What evidence supports your conclusion? What civic information are you, personally, missing because of the local-news situation?

Exercise 4: Analyze a Pew Media-Consumption Study

Go to the Pew Research Center's website (pewresearch.org) and find one of its periodic studies of American news consumption — The State of the News Media, Political Polarization & Media Habits, the Digital News Report (with Reuters Institute), or one of the topic-specific media studies. Read the full study, including methodology.

Produce a written analysis (600–800 words) addressing:

  1. What is the central empirical finding of the study?
  2. How was the data collected (sample size, sampling method, time period, response rate)?
  3. What are the limitations the authors themselves acknowledge?
  4. What does the study tell you that you did not already know?
  5. Which finding from the study most surprises you, and why?

The point of this exercise is to develop the habit of reading the underlying empirical sources rather than the secondhand summaries of them. Most public discussion of "what the data shows" about American media consumption rests on a thin layer of misquoted findings on top of studies that, when read carefully, contain more nuance than the discussion captures.

Exercise 5: Steel-Man Section 230, Both Directions

Without using the chapter's framing, write two essays of approximately 400 words each:

Essay A: The strongest case for retaining Section 230 in its current form. What does the provision do? Why was it created? What benefits has it produced? What harms would removing or narrowing it produce? Whose interests does retention serve, and which of those interests are legitimate?

Essay B: The strongest case for reforming Section 230. What current platform behavior does the provision insulate from accountability? What harms does that insulation produce? How would specific reforms address those harms without producing other harms? Whose interests does reform serve, and which of those interests are legitimate?

The catch: when you have written both essays, ask a friend or family member to read both and try to guess which one represents your actual view. If they cannot tell, you have done the steel-manning correctly.

Exercise 6: Read a Defamation Case End-to-End

Choose one of the following defamation cases and read at least the Supreme Court opinion (or, if the case did not reach the Supreme Court, the decisive lower-court opinion):

  • New York Times v. Sullivan (1964)
  • Curtis Publishing v. Butts (1967)
  • Gertz v. Robert Welch Inc. (1974)
  • Hustler Magazine v. Falwell (1988)
  • The 2023 settlement and disclosed materials in Dominion v. Fox News

Produce a written analysis (500–700 words) addressing:

  1. What was the alleged defamatory statement?
  2. What was the legal standard the Court applied?
  3. What is the case's significance for the contemporary press environment?
  4. Do you find the standard the case established to be appropriate? Why or why not? What do you think Justices Thomas and Gorsuch are getting right or wrong in their recent calls to revisit Sullivan?

Exercise 7: Compare Two Coverage Patterns

Pick a single political event from the past five years that produced sharply different mainstream-press and conservative-media coverage. Examples might include:

  • The Hunter Biden laptop story, October 2020
  • The Trump-Russia investigation, 2017–19
  • The COVID-origin lab-leak hypothesis, January 2020 to mid-2021
  • The 2024 Trump indictments
  • The 2024 Biden cognitive-decline coverage

For your chosen event, identify:

  1. The mainstream-press treatment in October 2020 (or the parallel early period of the story).
  2. The conservative-media treatment in the same period.
  3. The mainstream-press treatment six to twelve months later.
  4. The conservative-media treatment six to twelve months later.
  5. What we now know to be true about the underlying event.

Produce a written analysis (700–900 words). Where did each side of the press get it right, and where did each side get it wrong? Was the asymmetry symmetric (each side wrong in equal-but-opposite ways), asymmetric (one side wrong substantially more), or some mixture?

Exercise 8: Democracy Audit — Your District's Local News

For your congressional district (the running thread from Chapter 1), produce a Democracy Audit deliverable on the local news ecosystem.

Required components:

  1. Inventory. All local-news outlets covering your district, by category (daily newspaper, weekly newspaper, broadcast TV, radio, digital-only, nonprofit). For each, identify the ownership.
  2. Coverage measurement. For each outlet, identify how much coverage your House representative, your state legislators (whose districts overlap yours), and your county commission or city council have received in the past three months. Use the outlets' own websites or aggregator tools.
  3. Comparison. How does coverage of your member of Congress compare to coverage of your governor? Of the President? Of national political figures? Where is the local government in the prioritization?
  4. Counterfactual. Identify one local-government decision in the past year that had measurable impact on residents but received no apparent coverage from any local outlet. (You will probably need to read minutes from local-government meetings or talk to local activists to identify this.)
  5. Recommendation. Based on what you have found, what is the state of democratic accountability for your local representatives? What, if anything, is missing? What would have to change for the situation to improve?

This is the largest exercise in the chapter. It can take ten or more hours. It is also the exercise most directly connected to the central skill the textbook is trying to teach: how to know, with evidence, what is actually happening in the political institutions that govern you.

Exercise 9: Map the Cable-News Audience Composition for Two Programs

Choose two cable-news programs from different networks — one Fox News program (e.g., Hannity, The Five, The Story with Martha MacCallum, or a daytime news block) and one MSNBC program (e.g., The Rachel Maddow Show, Morning Joe, The 11th Hour, or Deadline: White House). Watch each for at least 90 minutes — across multiple episodes if necessary — taking notes on:

  1. How the program characterizes itself: news, opinion, or analysis?
  2. How clearly the news/opinion distinction is signaled to the viewer.
  3. Which political figures are interviewed or quoted, and whether opposing-view voices are present at meaningful length.
  4. Which adjectives, framing devices, and tonal cues recur.
  5. Which advertisers run during the program.

Write a 600–800 word comparison. Where are the two programs symmetric mirrors of each other? Where are they asymmetric — doing different things in different ways? Which program more clearly signals when it is presenting opinion versus reporting? What does the advertiser mix tell you about each program's commercial audience?

Exercise 10: Read the Original Section 230

Find the actual statutory text of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (47 U.S.C. § 230). It is short — perhaps 600 words of operative text. Read it carefully, in its entirety, twice. Note in particular:

  • The "Good Samaritan" provision (subsection (c)(2)) on platform moderation rights.
  • The definition of "interactive computer service" (subsection (f)).
  • The findings and policy statements (subsection (a) and (b)).
  • The exceptions (subsection (e)) — federal criminal law, intellectual-property law, certain sex-trafficking provisions added by FOSTA-SESTA in 2018.

Write a 400–500 word memo explaining what the statute actually does, what it does not do, and which provisions of the statute the contemporary reform debates are actually targeting. Most public discussion of "Section 230" describes the provision incorrectly. Your memo should describe it correctly.

A side benefit of this exercise: the experience of reading a short, important federal statute end-to-end is itself a civic skill. Section 230 is unusually short and unusually important. Most citizens have never read it. Be one who has.