text:
Charlie don't surf —
New analysis suggests Fox News is working, shifting votes to R column
Research relies on Americans being too lazy to keep channel surfing.
John Timmer - Sep 11, 2017 3:40 pm UTC
In the past, we've witnessed Fox News take an editorial position against basic facts, but has it really influenced anyone's vote?
Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock
Fox News on climate: skip the science, report the "controversy"
While it has presented itself as "balanced" over the years, there's little doubt that Fox News has consistently supported Republican candidates and positions even when that required taking an editorial position against basic facts. On some level, this has worked, as surveys have indicated Fox viewers are more likely to get those same facts wrong. But is it working in terms of the larger goal of supporting Republican causes?
According to a new study, the answer is yes. Two researchers, Gregory Martin and Ali Yurukoglu, have taken advantage of huge amounts of public data, some inadvertent experiments, and a lot of previous research to look into the influence of Fox News on people's votes. They conclude that, in recent elections, the mere availability of Fox could shift nationwide votes by over a percentage point.
The paper itself is rather complicated and tackles a lot of related issues regarding the influence of news media on voting. Martin and Yurukoglu are quite fond of mathematical analysis; it's rare for them to go more than a paragraph without regressing something (often several somethings). As a result, a lot of the paper reads like the following: "If voters treat signals from slanted outlets as true draws on the state of the world, and further, if they do not account for the correlation between repeated signals from the same source as in the model of DeMarzo, Vayanos, and Zwiebel, then equation 8 arises as the inverse-variance-weighted average of signals observed by viewer i in period t."
That said, the basic details of their argument are pretty straightforward, provided you break out the individual analyses.
Are our cable news sources biased?
This may seem like a formality, but the authors went and tackled it anyway, using methods that had been developed by other researchers. The analysis relied on digitized transcripts of speeches and statements from members of Congress. This allowed the researchers to identify phrases frequently used by members of one of the two parties during the 2000, 2004, and 2008 elections.
Many of these are about what you'd expect. The Democrats frequently mention civil rights, while Republicans are fond of saying "Reagan." In some cases, the party involved was the opposite of what you might expect. For example, the Democrats were the ones talking about "Republican leadership" and the "Bush administration," presumably because they were criticizing it. There was only one term, however, that appeared to be part of a political talking point, that being the Republicans' terming the estate tax as a "death tax."
Thus, the analysis didn't measure whether a news channel was parroting a party's talking points. Instead, it was looking at how often a station was mentioning what a given party was talking about.
For most of the period analyzed, CNN was indistinguishable from neutral (it saw a slight tilt toward Democrats during the 2010 midterm elections). MSNBC was also quite neutral up until midway through the last decade, at which point its management made a strategic lurch toward the Democrats. Since this happened late in the study and MSNBC's viewership is relatively small, the authors were never able to find an effect of viewing this channel that was statistically distinguishable from zero.
And then there's Fox. Fox started out with a slight tendency to talk more about what Republicans were saying, but that tendency grew dramatically more pronounced around Obama's election. (The dramatic shift with Obama's election is probably worth a separate study on its own.) It remained more polarized than MSNBC right up until the end of the study period in 2012, when MSNBC finally caught up with it. In fact, the authors' analysis suggests that Fox is teetering on the edge of being so relentlessly Republican that it risks losing business by driving any liberal viewers away.
Does this influence voters?
Most people would assume that news viewers would self-select a news source that matches their ideology. But various surveys have indicated that's not true, and the authors have a clever way of showing it's not the case here. It basically relies on people's laziness. On startup, most set-top boxes will simply default to the lowest channel number; if people are surfing, they'll surf upward from there. Not surprisingly, many viewers have a tendency to stop at lower-numbered channels.
For cable TV providers, channel number assignments are largely the result of historic accident. Thus, whether a person is more likely to watch Fox, CNN, or MSNBC depends in part on the order they appear on the channel list. Thus, if Fox is the lowest-numbered channel in a given region, people will be slightly more likely to watch it. The control, in this case, comes in the form of the US' two satellite TV providers, which offer the same channel lineup nationwide. "A one-standard-deviation decrease in Fox News's channel position," they calculate, "is associated with an increase of approximately 2.5 minutes per week in time spent watching Fox News."
Combined with the data above, this means that in certain cable markets, people tend to get exposed to more Fox News, which means more exposure to Republican ideas. At least within this study period, there was no effective counterbalance, either. CNN was too neutral, and MSNBC's influence was too small.
Is that enough to sway the vote? Here, Martin and Yurukoglu have a couple of ways of getting at the issue, based on ZIP-code-level voting and census data. For example, they could compare votes during the study period to those that occurred earlier, prior to the advent of Fox News. They could also predict the voting behavior of each ZIP code to the votes predicted by the demographics.
The results are rather striking. Channel position alone, assigned randomly, increased voting for Republican presidential candidates by 0.3 percentage points. And remember, channel position only induces an average of an extra 2.5 minutes of viewing a week. (Of course, that likely means that a smaller number of people watched a lot more than 2.5 minutes.)
The effect of Fox News overall, which has an audience that includes lots of people who watch it intentionally, is even larger. "We estimate that removing Fox News from cable television during the 2000 election cycle would have reduced the overall Republican presidential vote share by 0.46 percentage points," the authors conclude. "The predicted effect increases in 2004 and 2008 to 3.59 and 6.34 percentage points, respectively. This increase is driven by increasing viewership on Fox News as well as an increasingly conservative slant."
It shouldn't be surprising that a very popular TV channel that broadcasts a very consistent ideological message would have an influence on public opinion. The numbers for the 2008 election, however, seem remarkably high. But there's no difference in the methods used to obtain those numbers compared to the analysis done on the earlier elections, which produced more reasonable looking numbers. And those methods are quite clever, providing ways of turning a historical accident—the location of TV channels—into a controlled experiment.
American Economic Review, 2017. DOI: 10.1257/aer.20160812 (About DOIs).
Hot Jupiter Account Banned
marclamb wrote:
This whole article became suspect when they said CNN was neutral even alluding to the fact that it was the touchstone of news neutrality. Both sources have chosen a camp at odds with each other. At the risk of sounding like a tin foil hat wearer, I have been on site at at least two global news incidents and only one person removed from several other incidents. In every case I immediately looked up the mainstream news' interpretation of the events (it did take a couple of hours to get posted on their sites.) In all cases the facts were skewed to national interests. I found myself going to BBC news to get more accurate information but even then there was a bias.
Most news will come from Associated Press or Reuters relays and I believe if you can get to their raw stories as things are happening you can get a more realistic unfiltered take on unfolding events. Another main source is from press agents but those people or trained to direct information so... The absolute rawest source is from Emergency Band Radio but the juiciest bits will be trunked and or encrypted. So someone asked for a solution well an organization will have to be made that gets news from the rawest of sources, compare the coverage, do an analysis to derive the best interpretation of events and post just facts (no editorializing). I would also vet all the employees and only select people who are moderates who care more about accuracy than agendas and put mechanism in place to ensure those policies persists to prevent slippage into opinion based news that seems to infect most news sites today. The ultimate question is how well can Reuters or AP be trusted? Also money is a great motivator to corrupt any agency so maybe a more profound solution would be AI meta analysis with advanced probability algorithms using impartial actuaries as data controllers (new class of job.)
Anyway if someone is ambitious enough and level headed enough and incorruptible enough, then I would throw a few hundred dollars toward them in a crowdfunding site. But I feel that, that person would have to come from some mountain top in Tibet and be sparred the influences of 1st world living for that to happen. Catch 22 being they would have to understand modern tech to achieve the goals, so it is more than likely I would be able to ride off into two setting suns on a golden unicorn before that happens.
I wish people would comment instead of just down voting. Is it just that you don't like me saying that CNN is biased as well or do you find fault with a rethinking of news acquisition. Or is the the hopelessness that turns you off at the end of my comment? If it is the CNN thing then please continue to not comment but if you find fault with the rethinking I would be very interested in your thoughts on the subject and how you would rethink news or improve my rethinking.
Well, the article did not say CNN was neutral: it said it was statistically neutral; in the context of the article.
...and I do not argue with people that do not comprehend and then spout off- most of the time-. I just down vote; never both.
But, you are restrained -64 posts since 2012- and you asked an honest question why you were being dismissed and not engaged.
*edit* puncuation
marclamb Smack-Fu Master, in training
Hot Jupiter wrote:
1. For most of the period analyzed, CNN was indistinguishable from neutral
2. CNN was too neutral
As I said if it was the CNN comment that caused the vote then I didn't solicit your opinion as it would probably be of limited usefulness, consider it a test or filter that in a perfect world would have rendered this reply non existent. While I appreciate your consideration of my post count to date I really have no desire to get into a silly CNN/Fox political leaning and was really trying to answer a good question proposed by another post earlier while also opening it up to general consideration (explains why it wasn't a reply.) For I too "do not argue with people that do not comprehend and then spout off." For your consideration I looked through your post history and I feel that any further communication between us would be a considerable waste of time on my part. But I will thank you for confirming my suspicions on the downvotes, it has really made me feel a lot better about my post today.
Where the fuck did "ignore this fucker" go?
P.S. My bad.
It has been so long, I forgot where.
Last edited by Hot Jupiter on Mon Sep 11, 2017 9:10 pm
robert.walter Ars Praefectus
Fox: presently an unindicted coconspirator.
acefsw Ars Praetorian
Ninhalem wrote:
From what I've read about neutral news sources, the Wall Street Journal and the Economist are going to be your best outlets. The Economist leans slightly left but many of the articles are extremely well researched and there's plenty of critical thinking involved, however, there's the issue. How many people have cracked open a book in the last year or read a long form article?
Actually, you sort of have a point. The news end of the WSJ, particularly business news, (not sure about The Economist) is/was factual and top notch. Their editorial section is super biased, skewed to the right and supporrs big biz at almost all costs.
I don't read the WSJ that much anymore, but there was a scholarly study, (several actually), comparing print news sources' veracity and they found that WSJs news reporting was not as biased as one would assume.
This was some time ago.
It was post Iraq war invasion research into media influence on the public overwhelming supporting the war despite the facts;. McClatchy was one of the least biased, challenged govt statements, stated facts more often, etc. and the WSJ
turned out to be fairly reliable at that time, (aside from editorials), but may not apply today.
Luddite Curmudgeon Ars Scholae Palatinae
Luddite Curmudgeon wrote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
I read this and I felt really sad. Because my first reaction is that it just digs in the polarization of the sides. Because to me, it obviates the question if there even IS another side. If one can't legitimately ask if there are other sides to an issue, you end up being totally informed on anything. And I think that's dangerous.
Fox may be blatantly Republican in it's outlook, but what about those who are blatantly Democrats? They say Fair and Balanced, and we take it from them being internally balanced, but maybe the term now means balancing the blatantly Dems networks.
they talk about it in this article.
At least within this study period, there was no effective counterbalance, either. CNN was too neutral, and MSNBC's influence was too small.
I mean unless you have someone else in mind.
I don't. I did see that part of the original study period, but I was more interested in ABC, CBS, NBC. You know, the original Over the Air networks, not the Cable come latelies. I don't watch the cable news networks. I usually watch NBC Nightly News. Sometimes ABC, CBS hardly ever. The only time I turned on Fox News was to see what hot women they've hired next (they don't call it FOX news for nothing). But their standards slipped when they hired Greta so I gave it up.
I posted that because your first reaction to the story was to post essentially "but what about this other topic that I want to talk about instead, [possibly] because it makes the story's point look hypocritical?" rather than discussing the actual topic.
shelbystripes wrote:
so the american people are too dumb and lazy to look for sources?
Yeah i can see that.
I think most the the people here are Ars already knew this though.
The question is what can we do about it?
The American public have been taught for the past 2+ decades to distrust outlets like the Washington Post. This whole "fake news" thing is the culmination of a counterprogramming long game. It's not a coincidence that FOX News built a large part of their reputation around Sean Hannity, one of the more popular AM radio talk show hosts. He was one of the ones telling his listeners not to trust the media for years--and then he joins FOX News, so all those people he trained to "not trust the news" still trusted FOX News. They set themselves up to feed off far-right paranoia and be the only "trustworthy" news station.
People don't care about the rules of journalism, but that's because they were gradually and carefully programmed not to. They don't know what it even means that Sean Hannity openly tells people he's an entertainer and not a journalist, because they don't believe that journalism has ethics or redeeming values anymore.
They're not dumb and lazy, they're reprogrammed, and you have to recognize that and treat that as the problem. The only thing to do about it is to reprogram them again, and that takes awhile.
It's been more than two decades. The Republican strategy since Nixon was to control messaging, to create media outlets for said messaging, and their first most concrete success was Reagan and the repeal of The Fairness Doctrine. The next was allowing media consolidation.
trumptman Seniorius Lurkius
Herein lies the problem.
rsamdmann Ars Centurion
Wwen wrote:
Fox should be labeled as a hate group and shut down.
Hate is not illegal in the US.
Peace_Man Ars Centurion
Great_Scott wrote:
HumansMustDie wrote:
If ignorance is used to sway democracy then the democratic system in that country is broken. Solutions to ignorance must be found. How much longer is the freedom to be as willfully ignorant as you wish going to be tolerated?
Good username! I guess the good news is that as soon as we decide that freedom isn't to be tolerated, pretty much everything is solvable.
Ignorance is NOT freedom. And it is the responsibility of a functioning democracy to ensure that the prerequisites for democracy continue to exist. This means that a good education system is mandatory.
I venture to guess that your insinuation that freedom isn't to be tolerated refers to a 'freedom' to remain ignorant. There is no such thing. Participation in our society requires certain things; what you refer to as 'freedom' is actually anarchy. This might be your choice, but it is not something that a functioning society can tolerate.
I can see where you might think that, but for me, if somebody is going to talk about being fair and balanced to both sides, but only talk about one side, that does seem hypocritical to me. I think if they had said 'we looked at all of these networks (to include NBC, CBS, ABC and not just the cable ones), I wouldn't have said that. Basically, I want a comprehensive answer, not just one that looked at a subset of the industry.
Ash_ZA Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
I Live in a country where government propaganda is in the order of the day. In our case the propaganda is on a larger scale (For example the public broadcaster who is the main source of news was instructed to only show positive news of the corrupt ruling party) to government sponsoring completely biassed news agencies. The government went as far as to indirectly pay UK based Bell Pottinger ludicrous amounts of money to help with the propaganda campaign blaming a small minority for their failures and sowing racial division. There are still a large number of fake "news" websites ran by their private sector friends pushing this agenda.
When people are poor and desperate (27.7% official unemployment rate, as high as 38% unofficially) they easily believe the lies especially with our country's history. This I believe is much more damaging than say 1% of the votes but that doesn't make it right in any way.
News should be factual not propaganda or opinion.
coolblue2000 Ars Tribunus Militum
I am from the UK and visited the US on holiday a number of years ago. I switched on the TV in the hotel room and Fox news was on. I was astounded by how terrible it was. There was a murder by some (at least partial celebrity) guy that had chopped a woman up left her in a dumpster and then fled in a speedboat to Canada. Fox covered this story and then immediately the news reader started promoting their book on murder! As far as I remember it was pretty much along the lines of "If you liked this story then buy my book"...
I could honestly not believe what I was seeing...
biohazard918 Ars Centurion
ej24 wrote:
Neither Fox News nor CNN are real "news". They're considered News Entertainment Programming. The only news that is more or less real is your boring old local news channels like ABC, NBC, Fox, and so on. But the branded 24hr news networks of Fox News, etc are purely for-profit, entertainment based on current events. Unfortunately the general population doesn't understand this because Fox News, CNN, etc have sets and presentations that look like news. An anchor at a desk, a story box in the corner, interviews with experts, and so on, but these are not real journalists. These channels are no different than The Daily Show or The Colbert Report. The difference is those were purposefully satirical and it was obviously for entertainment. The dangerous thing is, these shows on Fox News and CNN are masquerading as news and people believe it. They're just opinion pieces sprinkled in between advertisements.
I'll never forget this episode of crossfire with Jon Stewart.
https://youtu.be/DTXIoJn0KTs
He's genuinely distraught and frustrated. Meanwhile Tucker Carlson is getting pissy b/c Stewart won't play their game. Stewart has gone on a few rants about how toxic the 24hr news entertainment media is. They're very interesting and eye opening. It's not just Fox News, all 24hr news channels were the end of public discourse.
Might want to look into who owns your local tv stations. Sinclair media is pushing a political agenda on the local stations they own with content the stations are required to air as part of their news programs. They happen to own a lot of stations and are looking to buy more. Other media companies could be doing something similar but none are anything like sinclairs' size.
ab78 Ars Scholae Palatinae
itfa wrote:
core_dump wrote:
CNN belongs to the same group, biased and utterly nauseous.
PBS is about the best one can get.
VOX seems to be exceptional.
Just look at their front page today and tell me with a straight face that they don't have their own political bias.
That's not how it works. No single story can provide an assessment of the bias or lack of bias of a publication. A perfectly neutral publication might publish articles critical of activities of both parties, but by looking at just one story you might assume they were heavily biased against one side or the other. Look at their front pages for a month or six and then we can talk about bias.
This happens all the time with the BBC: whenever they publish something that reads negatively about something, people line up to accuse them of bias. But overall, it's people on all sides complaining of bias, which is a fair indication that the reporting overall is reasonably balanced.
One thing that boils my piss about bias: there seems to be a growing and unhealthy convention that to avoid bias, equal airtime and / or equal credence needs to be given to all protagonists. Sometimes things are just plain wrong and need calling out as such: flat earthers, as an obvious and uncontroversial example, but also anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers etc.
JButler wrote:
This is silly. Vote shift due to Fox News PALES in comparison to pervasive left-leaning propaganda in just about everywhere else. Not just news outlets (yes, including Ars), think TV shows, movies and schools. With the news outlets, people generally know what they are getting into (many Ars readers notwithstanding, lol), not so with other sources of propaganda. There's a reason majority of impressionable young adults in 20's and 30's are left-leaning.
Oh yeah its totally some liberal conspiracy. The reason so many people my age shun the gop can't have anything to do with their despicable agenda. I got news for you most of this "left-leaning propaganda" is actually center right. Why the fuck would I support the party that wants to tell me who I can marry and has an on going moral panic over bathroom usage. Why shouldn't I be fucking angry that we saddle people who have the gall to get sick or injured with crippling debt or the growing wage gap. I'm sure I would be completely in favor of mass incarceration of non violent drug offenders and the mentally unwell if I had watched less cbs as a teen and went to a proper conservative school. Never mind that we have people like the texas board of education trying to undermine science education the schools are full of leftist propaganda! Maybe I don't vote republican because I won't have the luxury of being dead in 20 or 30 years and don't have to worry about the long term effects of climate change.
And you know what I'm still not hard left despite what people claim in this country. I'm not calling for the abolition of private property or the mass nationalization of industry. I just want to know I won't be financially ruined and will be cared for if I get seriously ill, to have my civil liberties protected whether that be the right to marry whom ever I love regardless of gender or the right to bear arms. It would also be nice if I had more then one option for broadband and we could stop radically altering the climate of the only planet we happen to live on. But apparently that makes me a communist or something.
Edit: fyi I live in a red state and went to religious schools for my entire education. Still turned out left leaning, bi and secular. I would also add that much of the agenda pushed by the right here seems pretty odd for people who claim to venerate a man who's big message was love your neighbor.
jantism Smack-Fu Master, in training
Peace_Man wrote:
But our current system doesn't support your contention. And because of that, people generally urge purely voluntary means to educate the public. At the national level most people's votes aren't influential, especially in populous states. It is quite rational to be ignorant because the time spent to become knowledgeable will not translate into greater influence of your vote and because it's a cost with no realized benefit to the individual. This effect decreases, the more local the vote.
Education is compulsory in the U.S. with some exceptions, but ignorance still abounds. It can be argued whether that education is good or not. Is it only good if political ignorance is reduced? Which facts must one know to prevent this "anarchy" and what is the recourse for a functioning society for people who don't vote or always vote a certain way?
57 posts | registered Jan 3, 2011
Great_Scott Ars Tribunus Militum et Subscriptor
That's a good argument.
Who is it that determines the definition of "ignorance"?
rabish12 Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
Dictionary works for me.
jantism wrote:
Going back to the foundation of USA, the Founding Fathers expressed their belief that an educated electorate was essential to a well functioning democracy. Unfortunately the government has strayed from the lofty principles that the birth of the country was founded on in many ways since. However, it is still in the best interests of the current plutocracy to have a large pool of educated workers, so despite the need for an educated populace not being enshrined in the Constitution, education is still mandatory. Of course, everyone knows that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't force it to drink
Tue Sep 12, 2017 12:19 pm
I couldn't agree more. The Founding Fathers didn't really need to worry about education, though - they restricted sufferage.
Re: Famous quote - What if I don't like the Kool-Aid?
woodelf Ars Praefectus et Subscriptor
kisunssi wrote:
This increase is driven by increasing viewership on Fox News as well as an increasingly conservative slant.
Of course there may be other reasons why viewers are switching to Fox News than those proposed by this study.
The declining standards of the other networks' news output, for example...
If the others had declined while Fox News hadn't, you might have an argument. But since it's been right there with them, at many times leading the pack, it can't provide the explanation you're looking for.
Savvi Smack-Fu Master, in training et Subscriptor
A couple years ago, I read an article on The Economist about my country that was absolute crap. They got the most basic facts wrong, and miss any relevant context. I no longer trust anything from them.
I consider their position mostly free market fanaticism. Mainstream Republican perhaps?
d4Njv wrote:
this study says differently.
For most of the period analyzed, CNN was indistinguishable from neutral (it saw a slight tilt toward Democrats during the 2010 midterm elections).
From the OP's tone, presumably any data will either fail to persuade the OP otherwise or cause the OP to dig in deeper. Some people make a conclusion and then try to cherry-pick data instead of drawing conclusions from data.
The problem is confusing "biased" with "bad". CNN is rarely biased, but too frequently does poor journalism. As opposed to, say, Vox or Pro Publica, which have distinct unabashed biases, but do excellent journalism.
And then there's Fox News: biased, pretends it isn't, and rarely does good journalism.
shadedmagus Ars Tribunus Militum et Subscriptor
The dramatic shift with Obama's election is probably worth a separate study on its own.
I don't think it needs a study. In fact, I believe it can be understood with a simple equation that the bigots hold in their minds:
Black Person + White House = Unacceptable
EDIT: I mean, I can't think of any other reason why there was such a concerted effort by the Republicans (and conservative outlets like Fox News) to denigrate Obama and stonewall everything he tried to do, and why there is now such a concerted effort to destroy his policy legacy.
Savvi wrote:
Dunno. I read the Economist regularly, and while the countries I'm intimately familiar with aren't some far-flung area with few natives to provide context to an outsider, it does get most of the rather subtle interactions quite right.
Maybe you read a shitty article? I mean, they did employ Lomborg as their science writer a while back, and that resulted in a host of really shitty climate articles. Fortunately, they fixed that problem a while back.
shadedmagus wrote:
I mean, did you see what they did to Clinton? Not sure what would happen to Bill if he tried to run now. We certainly know what happened to Hillary.
TubeDude Smack-Fu Master, in training
Not defending FOX or the OP, however, plenty of studies show CNN's bias. you barely have to even look.
1 post | registered May 28, 2018


text:
Q: Numerical integration Loop Python I would like to write a program that solves the definite integral below in a loop which considers a different value of the constant c per iteration.
I would then like each solution to the integral to be outputted into a new array.
How do I best write this program in python?

with limits between 0 and 1.
from scipy import integrate
integrate.quad
Is acceptable here. My major struggle is structuring the program.
Here is an old attempt (that failed)
# import c
fn = 'cooltemp.dat'
c = loadtxt(fn,unpack=True,usecols=[1])

I=[]
for n in range(len(c)):

    # equation
    eqn = 2*x*c[n]

    # integrate
    result,error = integrate.quad(lambda x: eqn,0,1)

    I.append(result)

I = array(I)

A: For instance to compute the given integral for c in [0, 9] :
[scipy.integrate.quadrature(lambda x: 2 * c * x, 0, 1)[0] for c in xrange(10)]

This is using list comprehension and lambda functions.
Alternatively, you could define the function which returns the integral from a given c as a ufunc (thanks to vectorize). This is perhaps more in the spirit of numpy.
>>> func = lambda c: scipy.integrate.quadrature(lambda x: 2 * c * x, 0, 1)[0]
>>> ndfunc = np.vectorize(func)
>>> ndfunc(np.arange(10))
array([ 0.,  1.,  2.,  3.,  4.,  5.,  6.,  7.,  8.,  9.])

A: You're really close.
fn = 'cooltemp.dat'
c_values = loadtxt(fn,unpack=True,usecols=[1])

I=[]
for c in c_values: #can iterate over numpy arrays directly.  No need for `range(len(...))`

    # equation
    #eqn = 2*x*c[n] #This doesn't work, x not defined yet.

    # integrate
    result,error = integrate.quad(lambda x: 2*c*x, 0, 1)

    I.append(result)

I = array(I)

I think you're a little confused about how lambda works.
my_func = lambda x: 2*x

is the same thing as:
def my_func(x):
    return 2*x

If you still don't like lambda, you can do this:
f(x,c):
   return 2*x*c

#...snip...
integral, error = integrate.quad(f, 0, 1, args=(c,) )

A: constants = [1,2,3]

integrals = []                                  #alternatively {}

from scipy import integrate

def f(x,c):
    2*x*c

for c in constants:
    integral, error = integrate.quad(lambda x: f(x,c),0.,1.)
    integrals.append(integral)                 #alternatively integrals[integral]

This will output a list of just like Nicolas answer, for whatever list of constants.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Fox Cities visitor spending up for eighth straight year
Visitors spent $470 million in 2017, an increase of more than 1.6 percent from 2016, according to a statewide impact study.
Fox Cities visitor spending up for eighth straight year Visitors spent $470 million in 2017, an increase of more than 1.6 percent from 2016, according to a statewide impact study. Check out this story on postcrescent.com: https://post.cr/2HZN5x7
Shane Nyman, USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin Published 4:13 p.m. CT May 7, 2018
The Fox River is among the features of the Fox Cities that brings in folks from out of town.(Photo: Photo courtesy of the Fox Cities Convention & Visitors Bureau)
APPLETON - The Fox Cities saw an increase in tourism dollars for an eighth straight year, the Fox Cities Convention & Visitors Bureau announced Monday.
Visitors spent $470 million in 2017, an increase of more than 1.6 percent from 2016, according to an annual statewide impact study by Tourism Economics.
Pam Seidl, executive director of the Fox Cities Convention & Visitors Bureau, said the spending numbers were a pleasant surprise because 2017 had the makings of an average year.
"We've been on a very steady growth path, and of course when you have large growth year after year, to maintain that is really exciting and not necessarily always possible," Seidl said.
There had been a few indicators that 2017 was going to be a "flat year," Seidl said. She pointed to the Fox Cities Exhibition Center, which was under construction most of the year, and a few of the region's hotels that were undergoing renovations, including the DoubleTree by Hilton in Neenah.
"I think holistically it's a testament to a strong economy," Seidl said of the maintained momentum. "People have the ability, the funds to travel. Businesses are allowing more corporate travel as well."
While the findings showed continued growth, it was at a slower pace than Wisconsin as a whole. Statewide, visitors spent $20.6 billion in 2017, up 3.2 percent from 2016.
Looking ahead, there are plenty of reasons for optimism about 2018 and beyond. This will be the first full year of operation for the exhibition center, and the calendar is expected to fill up more and more in coming years.
Arts and entertainment attractions like the Fox Cities Performing Arts Center and Mile of Music will continue to pull people in. And the PAC will welcome the blockbuster musical "Hamilton" as part of the 2019-20 Broadway season.
"I think our arts and culture scene is really coming along and kind of helping us in that leisure area," Seidl said, "and we're getting that name for the talent that comes through this market."
The $25 million indoor sports facility under development in Grand Chute is another potential plus in the years ahead. Planned to be a destination for youth and adult teams and tournaments, the building is targeted for opening in 2019.
The eight-year run of growing tourism dollars began in 2011 as the recovery from the Great Recession revved up. When the economy took a dive at the end of the previous decade, Fox Cities tourism took a downturn for the first time in about 15 years, Seidl said.
But since the turnaround in 2011, the tourism economy has surpassed those pre-recession totals.
Of the $470 million pulled in last year, the three biggest industries are food and beverage, lodging and retail. The study found the food and beverage sector tallied $142 million. Lodging took in $107 million and retail $98 million.
The Fox Cities region as defined for the study includes 19 communities, with Neenah as a southern edge, Kaukauna to the north, Hortonville and Clayton to the west and Sherwood and Harrison to the east.
FIVE-YEAR COMPARISON
Visitor spending in the Fox Cities
2017: $470 million
Visitor spending in Wisconsin
2017: $20.6 billion
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