Comment on LaCour (2014), “The Echo Chambers are Empty”

This note describes a number of anomalies uncovered during an attempt to replicate the text-based measures of ideology in Michael LaCour’s “The Echo Chambers Are Empty: Direct Evidence of Balanced, Not Biased, Exposure To Mass Media.” The recent publicity surrounding the retraction of Michael LaCour and Don Green’s Science paper on canvassing in gay marriage referenda campaigns reminded me of an experience I’d had (unsuccessfully) attempting to replicate some of LaCour’s other work last year. In light of the disturbing revelations regarding the Science paper, I decided to investigate more fully. This note describes the results of that exercise. Simply put, despite using the same dataset of news show transcripts and implementing the same method described in his paper, my results are not at all comparable to LaCour’s. LaCour’s text-based measures of news show ideology reported in “The Echo Chambers Are Empty” are very likely fabricated. ∗Thanks to Gaurav Sood for helpful comments.