Chapter Six of Distorting the Law features a scalogram on pages 204-205. This page reviews that scalogram and others to reveal trends in coverage of Liebeck versus McDonald’s Restaurants, Inc. and McDonald’s Corporation -- the McDonald’s Coffee Case -- in 1994.
Reading Scalograms: Just enough detail for understanding
Let us see how to read the scalograms below from this slightly modified version of Table Six.
Each row of the modified Table Six represents an article about the verdict and award in Stella Liebeck’s suit against the McDonald’s Corporation. Each column of Table Six represents a category of facts or news about the case that might have been mentioned in each article. Each cell of Table Six enumerates from first to last sentences in the article (row) that made reference to the category of facts or news (column).
For example, the top row of Table Six concerns the earlier story of the Liebeck judgment distributed to clients by the Associated Press. Reading across the top of Table Six (reproduced in modified form below), we find that the nature of the burns that Ms. Liebeck suffered were mentioned in the headline (enumerated as 0) and in the first and second sentences and the sixteenth and seventeenth sentences of the AM cycle of the Associated Press; the nature of the awards meted out by the jury to Ms. Liebeck were mentioned in both the headline and in the first, third, fourth, and eighteenth sentence of the AP wire-story. Thus, when one scans across any row, one learns whether and where each article reproted or referred to each sort of news or facts.
If instead one reads down a column, one will discern whether and where each sort of news or fact elicited mention. Characteristics of civil justice in the United States, for example (the eleventh column of data counting from the left) drew comment from only the August 19th article in Houston Chronicle in the thirty-seventh and thirty-ninth sentences. Only the Bergen Record made mention of the testimony of scientists regarding the speed and severity of burns that coffee at various temperatures may inflict. The tenth sentence of the August 19th article in that New Jersey newspaper was the sole place in which readers might discover what the jurors in the Liebeck litigation learned about burns.
Interpretting the Scalograms: A Statistical Story of Stella
The slightly modified Table Six reveals signal characteristics of the coverage of Liebeck v. McDonald’s immediately after the verdict and awards were announced on August 18, 1994. Distorting the Law drew attention to three sets of columns. The four leftmost columns summarize four sorts of facts about which both jurors and newspaper readers learned:
- Liebeck’s Injuries = descriptions of third-degree and lesser burns that Ms. Liebeck suffered; estimates of how much of her body was burned; reports of skin grafts Ms. Liebeck underwent; and similar matters
- Jury’s Awards = accounts of damages overall or of compensatory or punitive awards separately
- Super-Hot or Defective Coffee = summaries of Ms. Liebeck’s major allegations in non-technical language
- Liebeck’s Handling of Coffee = characetrizations of what Ms. Liebeck was doing when the coffee spilled
Of the 26 articles -- two wire-service reports from the Associated Press and two reports each from the Atlanta Journal and Constitution and the Chicago Sun-Times -- only the report in the Louisville Courirer Journal failed to descrive Ms. Liebeck’s actions with her cup of McDonald’s coffee. Other than that, each of the first four sorts of facts yielded at least one sentence in each article.
The four rightmost columns form a second set of observations important for interpretation of the awards and verdict but unremarked in even one article:
- Uniform Commercial Code = guarantees that the law presumes for any commercial entity -- for example, the warranty of merchantability, which means that a merchant implicitly promises a customer that an item sold suits the purpose for which the product is acquired -- applied to the Liebeck-McDonald’s transaction
- Liebeck’s Litigiousness or Others’ -- the fact that Ms. Liebeck had never sued anyone or general attributions of litigiousness to plaintiffs or U. S culture
- Liebeck’s Initial Claim, Offer to Settle -- the facts that Ms. Liebeck had first asked McDonald’s merely to redress the high temeratures at which it brewed and held coffee and later had asked for $20,000 to cover medical bills and the time her daughter took off to nurse Ms. Liebeck but had been rebuffed by McDonald’s, which offered $700
- Sympathy for Plaintiff -- any expressions of compassion or empathy for Ms. Liebeck over her injuries or her situation
Not one source commented on any of these four topics. One omission is both shocking and understandable. Journalists often shy away from the complexities of the law, so the absence of comment about the Uniform Commercial Code is understandable and predictable. Still, readers should have been made aware that a theory that followed from well-known laws and precedents supported Ms. Liebeck. To put the matter in a different way: under one reading of the black-letter law, Stella Liebeck had to recover and McDonald’s Corporation should never have litigated the case.
The seven topics in the middle of Table Six were covered less than the first set (columns one through four) but more than the second set (columns twelve through fifteen). Individual interpreters will likely disagree about whether readers needed to know about:
- Reactions to Spill or Judgment = responses from prominent or ordinary folk to the winning side or the amount won
- McDonald’s Conduct and Cases = the more than 700 scalding complaints lodged against the McDonald’s Corporation over excessively hot coffee; past lawsuits and judgments against the corporation; and so on
- Location of the Spill = that Ms. Liebeck’s grandson had parked the vehicle; that the car was not moving and was to the side of the McDonald’s lot; and similar factlets
- Jury’s Decision-Making = the message that jurors wanted to send and the motives behind it
- Warnings on Coffee Cups = how tiny and hard-to-spot warnings on the disposable cup were
- Science of Burns = how few seconds it takes for coffee at 180 degrees Fahrenheit to burn through the skin and subcutaneous fat (3rd degree burns)
- Civil Justice System = general observations about how disputes or civil suits work in the United States
Although reasonable interpreters might differ on how well the scalogram that is Table Six in the book captures initial coverage, practitioners of quantitative social sciences tend to use coefficients to assess the data’s fit. A perfectly reproducible scalogram would generate a "Coefficient of Reproducibilty" [CR] equal to 1.0; this first scalogram has a CR equal to 0.97. The first scalogram has a "Coefficient of Scalability" [CS] equal to 0.93. A CS greater than 0.70 is generally quite acceptable to social scientists. [To spare you further suspense: all of the scalograms to which we refer surpass the minimal standards [CR > 0.90 and CS > 0.70.]
Among the news-sources are two wire-service articles from the Associated Press, which supplies to its clients model coverage of developments that otherwise might escape reporters. Please think of the AP’s reportage as a sort of baseline for coverage. That is why we have emphasized the AP in the scalogram.
This first chapter in the statistical story of Stella Liebeck makes it clear the following.
1. Some of the categories of facts that most shaped the thinking of jurors were utterly or largely ignored by journalists. Chapter Six emphasizes this divorce between the relevances of jurors and journalists.
2. More than three-quarters of all sentences in Table Six were coded into one of the four leftmost categories, the only categories that every article mentioned at least once. Transmogrified by common standards for what is and what is not "news-worthy," the courtroom case was truncated into a litigational legend, as Chapter Six shows.
3. Some seemingly crucial factlets -- past complaints against McDonald’s, where the car was and whether it was moving, and how the jurors reasoned -- were covered sparsely when they were covered at all. For these factlets of middling "news-worth," the story with which a reader is regaled will vary with the length and depth that the reader’s paper elects to accord to the dispute.
The modest scalogram for the second "stage" of Liebeck v. McDonald’s contains but two articles, so one might be tempted to skip it. The articles from the Associated Press and the Chicago Sun-Times -- a news daily published near the corporate headquarters for McDonald’s -- carried the news that the trial judge had referred the parties to an arbiter. However, they also:
1. devoted far fewer words to a case rapidly losing its immediacy,
2. placed less emphasis on Ms. Liebeck’s contention that McDonald’s coffee was too hot,
3. featured less prominently the nature of Ms. Liebeck’s injuries, and
4. commented on the civil justice system in general, which only the Houston Chronicle -- a daily published near an office of Ms. Liebeck’s lkead attorney -- had in the first wave.
The signal feature of the two reports was that they misstated the location of the car and Ms. Liebeck when she spilled the coffee! The myth that the spill occurred at the drive-up window, an assertion not advanced in the initial wave of coverage, was not disseminated by the wire-service and the Chicago paper.
The third wave of coverage Scalogram Three followed the trial judge’s reduction of damages. Trial judge Robert Scott sharply reduced the punitive damages to be awarded Ms. Liebeck but let stand the compensatory damages awarded her about one month before. Fourteen newspapers (about two-thirds of the number of papers that initially covered the story) and two AP articles altered the Legend of Liebeck in some fascinating ways. The most important of these is that the Associated Press and six out of nine articles repeated the misinformation that Ms. Liebeck had spilled her coffee at the drive-through window. This fit the emerging legend of Liebeck but contradicted coverage in the initial wave!
In addition, please notice how the high temperatures at which McDonald’s served its coffee, the plaintiff’s key contention, was in this third stage covered by
1. only half of the articles (it had been covered by every one in stage one);
2. the ninth sentence (on average) in the third scalogram (the mean first mention in the first scalogram had been the third sentence of articles in stage one); and
3. approximately three sentences in this scalogram but almost five sentence in Scalogram One.
for this third wave.
The dwindling length in words and in sentences of reportage of the reduction of damages was quite predictable by standard understandings of "news-worth."
The fourth spur to coverage was an appellate decision by the New Mexico Supreme Court, a decision covered by the Chicago Sun-Times and USA Today. The scalogram for this fourth stage tells us very little. Please notice, however, that all but the first four categories of details have disappeared from the two capsules. You might also notice that USA Today bucks the trend in misreporting the location of Ms. Liebeck’s spill. The Sun-Times also avoided error in this regard -- by not mentioning location at all. In the first wave of reporting (Scalogram One/Table Six in the book, August 18-19, 1994), not one report from the AP or a newspaper misstated the location of the spill. By December of 1994, not a single news source stated the location of the spill -- that Ms. Liebeck was seated in the passenger seat and/or that the car was parked to the side of the parking lot -- correctly.
When the parties finally settled, sixteen articles appeared. These sixteen are scaled in the fifth scalogram. This graphic permits us to view the case in its last rendering by spot-reports. Among the good news was that the Chicago Sun-Times this time stated correctly both the location of Ms. Liebeck in the vehicle and the location of the vehicle in the parking lot -- not at the drive-through window and not on the road. Among the bad news was that the other eight newspapers that covered the settlement (and the Associated Press story) stated the location of Ms. Liebeck or the car or both incorrectly. Six newspapers -- among them the Wall street Journal and the Washington Post -- failed to mention location, leaving readers to learn or invent that detail on their own. Of the five news leaders analyzed in Chapter Five, only the Los Angeles Times mentioned location; that article was incorrect.
Overall, the final scalogram reveals that fifteen newspapers and the Associated Press covered the settlement. Of these sixteen stories, a majority mentioned four categories of facts: the burns, the awards, the spill, and the location. Not even a third of the newspapers brought up Ms. Liebeck’s primary contention that McDonald’s served its coffee excessively hot. Other information important to the jurors -- McDonald’s passivity regarding previous complaints, the scientific significance of holding temperatures recommended in McDonald’s manuals, the Uniform Commercial Code -- continued to be overlooked. The jurors’ major concerns had been revealed in an exposé in the Wall Street Journal in September; only the Journal and the Memphis Commercial Appeal took advantage of this investigative reporting.
Creating the Scalograms: More detail than anyone could crave
Table Six in the book and the diagrams above are scalograms, graphic orderings of data to detect and make more apparent an underlying structure in or among data. This means that articles (that is, the rows) and categories of facts/news (the columns) are arrayed so that the categories that most often drew one or more sentences define columns to the left of the table and those that drew not even one mention define rightward columns and that articles that mentioned more categories of facts are in higher rows and articles that mentioned fewer are in lower rows. (To learn more about Guttman scaling, review the slides at http://www.ed.utah.edu/Psych/CourseMaterials/7570/MS03/sld001.htm)
To create the scalogram, the authors rearranged rows and columns to maximize the number of cells with at least one sentence enumerated -- that is, the article made at least one mention of that category of facts or news -- to the left of and above cells with no numbers. If data were perfectly reproducible and perfectly scalable, all non-empty cells would be found in the upper left part of the scalogram and all empty cells would occur in the lower right part.
Any empty cell with at least one non-empty cell to its right is designated an "error" in scalogram analysis, as is any non-empty cell with
Social scientists evaluate scalograms by two statistics that approximate 1.0 when scaling is very successful but approach zero when scaling produces an array that is not revealing of structure. The usual standard for the "Coefficient of Reproducibility" is about 0.90. The usual standard for the "Coefficient of Scalability" is about 0.70.
Table Six (pp. 204-205) features a "Coefficient of Reproducibility" equal to 0.97 and a "Coefficient of Scalability" equal to 0.93.