That’s great for science programs, but political “truths” depend on the assumptions you start with. Different people start with different assumptions and arrive at differnent conclusions. It’s best to present as many sides as possible, and to clearly explain what assumptions are made and how the conclusions are reached.
When we start allocating airtime based on merit and content, left-wing viewpoints will disappear from the airwaves forever! 
Here are some beefs that FAIR has with The Newhour recently:
http://www.fair.org/activism/newshour-iraq.html
http://www.fair.org/media-beat/040415.html
http://www.fair.org/activism/newshour-parenti-update.html
Against evidence that PBS used to be left, here is a study of the NewsHour that dates back to 1990.
And here is a recent FAIR study of NPR in general:
I’ll grant you that Bill Moyer’s NOW has a left-wing point-of-view. However, even with it, you find a sense of “balance” that will occasionally even result in a tilt to the Right on something. I saw this a few months ago when they did a report on how corporations were trying to influence the climate talks [in Spain(?)]. Accompanying that piece on the web, they had a discussion of the climate change debate which was “balanced” to the point of really giving the fairly small minority of climate scientists that deny the importance of anthropogenic warming more weight than they would certainly get in any sort of respectable scientific publication, like Science.
Oh, and of course, no analysis of media bias is complete without discussing the degree to which Americans believed manifestly false things in regards to the Iraq War. If the media has a left-wing bias, they are doing a hell of a shitty job in getting it across in relation to the Administration (and their allies) lying and deception propaganda machine!
And, some conservatives on this very board, at least one participating in this very thread, have made claims about how before the war everyone believed that Iraq had WMD and how everyone found Colin Powell’s presentation at the U.N. very compelling at the time, completely ignoring that there was in fact a group of people who did not. That they were largely invisible to you guys ought to be taken as evidence against a liberal media bias and ought to make you start thinking about the need to get some of your information from the real liberal media (like The Nation) if you don’t actually want to be so far off the mark relative to the actual facts in the future!
Then there are all of those nature shows, full of “ecology” and “global warming” liberal propaganda. And smutty British sitcoms full of double entendres when everybody knows conservatives don’t “get” double entendres. And cooking shows that show MEN cooking–INDOORS! Then on national holidays the show former soldiers telling about their experiences and some of their stories are not all upbeat and glorious and some of the wusses even cry. Liberal rubbish, trying to stain the memories of our fighting men. And during pledge periods they show big bands and elderly crooners like Rosemary Clooney (aunt of prominent liberal George Clooney) and Lawrence Welk and we know what a commie HE was. And their Fourth of July extravaganza? Hosted year after year by Barry Bostwick, who was in that homersexual abomination “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” with (shudder!) SUSAN SARANDON!
You can’t tell THIS American that PBS isn’t a hotbed of pinko subversives set to sell this country to Fidel for a bottle of rum and a bag of Angolan heroin!
If there really was a liberal media, Michael Moore could’ve gone on vacation for the last two years.
xt: Radically right-wing is in the realm of neo-nazi stuff.
Sam: And from your [BrainGlutton’s] extreme lefty [persuasion? position?] […]
Part of the problem with evaluating journalistic bias, I think, is in this sort of inconsistency about degree of bias. Obviously, xt and Sam can’t be talking about the same kind of “extremism” or “radicalism” here. On a scale on which “radically right-wing” is as far off center as neo-nazis, “extreme lefty” would be groups like the anarchists or the Spartacists. (Even the Socialist Workers Party IMO isn’t quite as “radical left” as neo-nazis are “radical right”. ) And there’s no way in hell someone like BrainGlutton would count as an “extreme lefty” on that scale.
So evidently, we need to figure out some kind of agreed-upon standards for approximately quantifying political bias before we can ever hope to reach any kind of agreement about what sort of and how much bias there is in the media.
I would not agree that the WSJ editorial board is radical right wing. Radical right wing is Pat Buchannon, Pat Robertson, loonies who shoot abortion doctors; if anything the WSJ staff rags on them as much or more than anyone else. I would say the WSJ board is considered damn near an enemy by the radical right wing, certainly Buchannons band of merry men.
Its just silly, this acting as if left and right in this country are two seperate things; its a charade. They are two sides of the same thing; government control and intervention. They only differ on what and how govt controls and how, why and when govt intervenes. By and large, the WSJ board seems to be in favor of reducing govt control and intervention as much as possible (being free traders) and so nowadays they are niether left nor right wing. Groups sit in the wings, individuals sit in the center.
Lets not forget The McLaughlin Group. His typical panel leans heavily conservative. John Mclaughlin, Pat Buchanan, Tony Blankley are conservative. Mort Zuckerman is a moderate conservative. Clift is the token liberal. How long has this show been on? Over twenty years I think.
As icerigger noted, Pat Buchanan already has a spot on PBS; he’s a regular on The McLaughlin Group.
So what? When people in this country use the terms “conservative” or “right-wing,” they usually don’t mean “Libertarian.” For that matter, the Libertarians don’t consider themselves conservative or right-wing.
But it would be nice if there were at least one TV news network ideologically dominated by the Libertarian Party instead of (like Fox – and, increasingly, PBS) the Republican Party.
So, the thread was in part about whether PBS is going conservative, and one argument in favor of that view was that the WSJ ed. board was getting a program. ‘So what’ I was saying, and apparently you agree, is that the WSJ ed. board is not an example of right-wing or conservative, so I was taking issue with that particular argument in the article you posted.
I think it would be nice to not have ideologically dominated shows at all, but hey. Personally I think its a fad, and while a few core programs will remain, most of this whole left show/right show thing will go the way of the Sally Jesse Raphaels and all that crap.
No, Voodoochile, the WSJ editorial board is conservative. Not Libertarian. There’s a difference. Conservatives are pro-business, favoring whatever is profitable for established business interests, including public bailouts for struggling corporations, and fat government contracts for well-connected ones like Halliburton. Libertarians are pro-market, favoring total government inaction in the economic sphere regardless of who gets hurt.
To claim that the WSJ editorial page is not right-wing is freakin’ ludicrous! As I noted, they are most passionately right-wing in regards to business / economic issues where they are rabidly right-wing. To point to just 2 examples: They are essentially indistinguisable from the “Club for Growth” types on taxes…which means they hammer even moderate conservatives like Senators Snowe and Voinovich for not towing 100% to the supply-side religion. They are essentially indistinguishable from the most rabidly anti-environmental groups like Competitive Enterprise Institute, Science and Environment Policy Project (SEPP), Cato Institute, and National Center for Policy Analysis on environmental issues like climate change.
Even on social issues, such as abortion and gay marriage, they are right-wing even if they are a little less rabid.
I am willing to give the WSJ credit for running a good and, as near as I can tell, basically unbiased news reporting organization despite their right-wing editorial page. But to seriously claim their editorial page is not right-wing?!?! Give me a break!
A good, honest take on this issue comes from Eric Alterman’s “The Liberal Media” column in The Nation, September 20, 2004, in a discussion of how the media coverage has lent credibility to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth lies:
Couldn’t have said it better.