Moderator’s Note: My initial take was, if what you are saying is perfectly acceptable, then why the seemingly rather coy use of the lineout tag? Since the tag is new (to us, at any rate), I suppose a lot of people are going to want to play with it. Using the lineout for irony or emphasis isn’t against the rules, but let me just state the (what should be obvious) point that using the line through doesn’t absolve anybody of any violation of the forum rules.
That goes for the spoiler tag as well, of course.
In general, I would like to see the rhetoric in this and numerous other political threads toned down a notch.
But bias in the media goes beyond merely having an opinion. Nobody would complain about the ‘liberal media’ if it were just the editorial page that were concerned. Bias manifests itself in what stories get reported, which facts are left out, and so forth. People who listen to NPR and people who watch Fox have different *factual * beliefs as a result of their viewing/listening habits, even if you correct for pre-existing political orientation of the viewer/listener. I finally got off my lazy ass and Googled the study I remembered reading about a long time ago. It was conducted by University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes.
It is a disaster for democracy if people are uninformed. Fox clearly does a bad job of informing its viewers–worse than other media sources. They are failing to discharge their journalistic obligations. I don’t need to read a book on journalistic ethics to know that systematically misinforming the public about matters on which tens of thousands of peoples’ of lives hang is morally grotesque.
One problem that I can remember with the study is that I didn’t particularly care for the method they used to determine whether a group was liberal or conservative: going by the political orientation of the Senator name dropping them.
Also, a fair amount of these groups put together studies, polls, etc. Do the issues they study determine their political bias or are the studies themselves biased?
I can’t remember the standard they used to eliminate certain references also. When these groups release a new study, poll, etc., the news is reported. That doesn’t strike me as a sign of bias either, and neither does not reporting on a new study. It all depends on what kind of a news day it is.
Of course I could be remembering it wrong. I’m going by memory here and I just woke up. Hopefully someone will find another link.
The very first statement in the thread you started contained a misstatement of fact, as pointed out by Rufus Xavier. And you went on to declare that the idea that the Republicans were trying to make NPR “toe the conservative line” was “beyond debate”. Both assertions being either false or debatable, it was not a promising start to a thread, but nonetheless it continued.
The reason the thread turned to denials of NPR bias was that your OP stated that NPR was not biased. In other words, you put forth a position, and that position was debated (despite your attempt to define it as unassailable).
No, the best thing to do would be to start a thread “Fox News Is Not Biased”. Then people can check in with the reasons they think that Fox News is biased, and we can see what a reasonable standard of evidence is. Then we can apply that same standard to NPR and the rest of the American media, and see if they are biased or not.
We may find, then, that the standard used to establish bias at Fox News equally well can be used to establish bias at NPR. Or we could find that the same tactics used so strenuously by the lefties to deny bias in the rest of the media work equally well in challenging one of their sacred cows, namely bias at Fox.
Then the thread can degenerate into name-calling and screams of “No fair coming up with arguments I can’t answer!”, accusations of trolling, calling people dense, and so forth. Rather similar to the threads about the Swift Boat veterans, with the essential difference that I have not the patience that Sam Stone and others did.
Now;
My understanding is that bias is in the eye of the beholder.
Isn’t it enough proof that an organization is biased away from a certain group when that group starts to complain that it is?
For instance; if the right keeps complaining that NPR is biased towards the left, isn’t that enough? Or if the left repeatedly states that Fox is biased towards the right?
If the right complained that Fox is biased towards the left, it would raise eyebrows, no?
Can’t we accept the statements of the groups that make the claims of bias? Why does the right see NPR as biased and why does the left see Fox as biased? Because they (Fox and NPR) inlcude or fail to include material, hosts, and topics that the other side would either like to hear or would rather not hear.
So, let’s say that a majority of the right on these boards prefer Fox and a majority of the left prefer NPR (remember, a majority may be 51%), wouldn’t that be enough proof of network bias?
Now, that also doesn’t mean that the network is trying to lean to one side or the other…
Well, the ADA evidently has a scale from 0 to 100 and uses votes on issues to place politicians on the scale. I don’t know that much about the ADA’s measure, I did a google-scholar search for “americans for democratic action” and got back quite a few hits; however, I didn’t look through the articles (no time).
In the paper they use think-tank citations from politicians to place think tanks on the scale, and then reverse the process for news outlets. IIRC, the methodology ain’t the best (e.g., not a large enough sample from each outlet to really be representative, IMO), but that was the earlier draft that I’m recalling. Regardless, the method can come up with at least an ordinal ranking without being biased by the ADA’s method, I think, because the authors are making a connection to the ADA’s ranking of legislators and that ordinal ranking should (I think) be independent of slant. (The cardinal ranking may not be.)
As I mentioned before, the measure is flawed as a proxy; e.g., it doesn’t include a lot of things that are relevant to bias. But it is an interesting attempt to get at something objective.
Since the link isn’t working for you, try googling for “a measure of media bias.” That should bring back plenty of hits.
Thanks to everybody who takes a look at the paper!! I agree that outlets can be (or are) biased, and that discussion about it is quite difficult and frustrating. I just think it is important to be objective as possible and the paper’s method is an attempt to inject objectivity, even if the method is incomplete. Thanks again!
Now I don’t think the media is biased, at least politically. I’ll even go so far as to include fox news on that list. What it is biased towards is sensationalism and ratings. Anything to get attention an all, but that’s just my.02, and a hijack.
I would like to state that I am disappointed that many of our lefty strongarms aren’t playing Bricker’s and Shodan’s game. They implicitly set forth a perfectly reasonable premise: If Fox news is biased and NPR is not, then a consistent set of tests applied to each should show that. This seems an excellent way go about it. Anything else relies purely on individual impressions which quickly devolves into a matter of opinion and, as several posters have pointed out, cannot be proven one way or another.
So, what metric to use? We need something that will not only take into account overt commentary, but the more subtle bias found in the choice of which stories are reported at all. There are even more subtle forms of bias present in such things as the order in which stories are reported. Take a look at Bush’s speaches where he would separately talk about 9/11 and Iraq, but blurred the transition between the two. Though no direct connection was made, it was unclear that they were separate issues and this resulted in many people linking the two in ways that were not accurate.
I suggest then that the best way to approach all of this is the method used in the links provided by Sophistry and Illusion; the resulting misperceptions of the viewing public. Obviously this is not perfect as people do not get all of their information from one source (I imagine that a higher than average percentage of FOX viewers listen to Rush Limbaugh and therefore misperceptions initiated by him would bleed into the FOX demographic) so statistical corrections for these factors would be better but probably not readily available.
If we accpet this, Sophistry and Illusion’s links tell us that FOX is indeed biased towards the current administration at least, and likely towards the Right (one does not necessarily mean the other). As the misconceptions polled in that study were in favor of the current administration, the study is only useful in determining bias towards the administration, not against it. Now what we need to do is find a study that does the same thing, but with misperceptions more likely to be held by the Left (or anti-current administration people) and poll people on them while noting what their primary source of news was. I do not know of any such study, and am even having a hard time thinking of such misperceptions (which makes sense as being a Liberal myself I am more likely to share in them). The only thing that comes to mind are crackpot conspiracy theories, or maybe some mistakes about what connections may or may not exist between certain voter fraud claims and the Republican party. If anyone could find such a study I think we could move the debate forward greatly.
Lastly,
andros is here talking about the press. The answer to why the press has a special obligation is found here:
The Bill of Rights specifically gives the press (media) certain rights because they recognized the abosulte necessity of a well informed public to the stability of the union. With extra rights come extra responsibilities, such as accurately informing the public.
In the sense of Absolute Rights, no, but those can only come from some sort of higher power (which I do not happen to believe in) like Absolute Morality. However, in the sense of rights as a citizen in the United States of America they do.
Why not from nature? If we define rights as propriety, then you are born as the owner of your body (the right to life) and the owner your mind (the right to give or withhold consent). From these, all other rights may be deduced.
Perhaps at first blush, yes, but when discussing them, you can show how concepts like “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” are desirable concepts, and sensible, while you can not do the same with many concepts from the bible, such as, you should not wear poly-cotton blends, which some would think makes sense, but actually doesn’t.
They think it makes sense. Why should I take your word over theirs? But more importantly, if they attain sufficient political clout, your opinion won’t matter one bit. Perhaps it is better to take a different approach than the one they take.
What it is biased towards is sensationalism and ratings. Anything to get attention an all, but that’s just my.02, and a hijack.