How liberal is the national media?

[rjung]

A (decidedly biased) editorial on the topic:

Facts vs Punditry

…We’ve heard for a long time about the conservative battle with the “liberal” press – working the umpires, is the popular term. But the reasons why conservatives differ from other observers so profoundly on what a “good” media would look like cuts to the heart of the new conservative movement:

In general, liberals value journalism, or facts, and conservatives value punditry, or opinions. Far-right conservatives are indeed obsessed with the press, because they see the reporting of facts as being inherently “liberal”.

Don’t believe me? Look at Fox News, lynchpin and self-proclaimed shining light of the conservative-style press. Look at any of the “conservative” publications, either on the web, or in print. The first thing you’ll note is that the conservative media revolves around punditry and opinion; conventional newsgathering, when present, is largely relegated to being whatever momentary prop is necessary to provide vague credibility to the point at hand. So-called mainstream journalism attempts, at least, to cleanly separate factual reporting from opinion, even though sometimes (I’m thinking of the Wall Street Journal here) it results in admittedly hilarious juxtapositions. But it is, or was, a core tenet of journalism: report the facts, and expose the truth, and leave opinion out of it. That’s anathema to conservatives. It’s not what they want; it’s not what they have demanded; it’s not what they institute, in whatever “mainstream” media hollows they have themselves carved out.

…
Take this further, and you will see the very nature of the elitist beast that plagues conservatives and threatens to steal their children in the night. Scientists are liberal; the education system in this country is liberal; government agencies are liberal; journalism is liberal; historians are liberal; lawyers are liberal; the medical community is liberal, etc. Everywhere, in every profession that requires a broad span of actual real-world knowledge, the bogeyman of liberalism exists. Is it because those professions are truly liberal, or is it because knowledge itself is considered, by the right, liberal?

[What_the]

@Diogenes the Cynic

If the American media was a politician, it would be a moderate Republican. It was for the war and accepted the White House’s case without criticism or comment.

So that would make all the Dems who voted for the war what??

Just to get some perspective, how would you characterize the make up of the 45 Dem senators. Can you name some that are “very liberal” and some that are “kinda liberal”? Are most of them “moderates”?

How about the Republicans? How many are “right wing extremists”?

[Marley23]

@What the .... ?!?!

So that would make all the Dems who voted for the war what??

Suckers? The “liberal” New York Times sure didn’t debunk the case for war.

[marshmallow]

Isn’t calling the national media “liberal” a little harsh? You wouldn’t use that sorta language in front of your mother, would you?

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

@What the .... ?!?!

So that would make all the Dems who voted for the war what??

They didn’t vote for the war. That’s a canard. They voted only to give Bush the authority to go to war if necessary. There was no direct up or down vote on the war itself.

Still, the Dems were a bunch of nutless cowards for even doing that much.

Just to get some perspective, how would you characterize the make up of the 45 Dem senators. Can you name some that are “very liberal” and some that are “kinda liberal”? Are most of them “moderates”?

Most of them are moderate to conservative. There are very few true liberals left anymore.

How about the Republicans? How many are “right wing extremists”?

Why did you put “right wing extremists” in quotes? I haven’t claimed that any of the Pubs are “right wing extremists.”

I would say that the middle has moved a lot further to the right in the last 5 years and that most of the Republicans in the Senate are conservatives rather than moderates. I don’t know that I’d call that many of them “extremists,” though. It’s hard to really be an extremist in the Senate on either end of the spectrum.

[jshore]

@Marley23

Suckers? The “liberal” New York Times sure didn’t debunk the case for war.

Debunk? Hell, Judith Miller tried her damndest to make the case for war and her stories were even apparently referred to by Rumsfeld as evidence! Even the Times now essentially acknowledges that the reporting was sloppy.

To be fair, there were also a few articles that raised issues about such things as the fact that many people in the intelligence community were not happy with the way the administration was pressuring them to come to the “right” conclusion; however, these stories were always extremely carefully written, bending over backwards to not take any conclusions further than the most extremely narrow interpretation of the complaints meritted, etc.

[Marley23]

@jshore

Debunk? Hell, Judith Miller tried her damndest to make the case for war and her stories were even apparently referred to by Rumsfeld as evidence! Even the Times now essentially acknowledges that the reporting was sloppy.

I was trying to be ironically understated, but you just won’t let me be.

Yes, not everything in the paper was Judy Miller’s hackwork. But as you say, they still admitted they blew it.

[jshore]

@Maeglin

The authors do not make the explicit connection that you attribute to them. From their very first paragraph:

They did not attempt to measure the bias of the American people nor did they assume that the median member of congress represents the median voter. I would reject such an interpretation vigorously. I believe that their conclusions about media bias relative to Congress are in fact pretty good. I interpret these results to mean that the right is overrepresented. This interpretation is not at odds with anything the authors explicitly say.

I have no idea how I might have gotten the idea that they were making the claim that the media is biased rather than simply that Congress is biased Right. Really no idea…Okay, maybe besides the title

A Measure of Media Bias

Or maybe it was the quote opening the paper:

“The editors in Los Angeles killed the story. They told Witcover that it didn’t ‘come off’ and that it was an ‘opinion’ story. …The solution was simple, they told him. All he had to do was get other people to make the same points and draw the same conclusions and then write the article in their words.” (emphasis in original) Timothy Crouse, Boys on the Bus, 1973, p. 116.

Or statements like this…

Our results show a strong liberal bias.

(And, for what it is worth, they do have a whole section of the article trying to justify their definition of the “center”.)

I am sorry, Maeglin, but while the interpretation you propose may not be at odds with any of the evidence that they actually present, it is way at odds with the sort of interpretation and spin they put on their results. Personally, I think you are being a bit tone-deaf here.

[What_the]

[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]

Why did you put “right wing extremists” in quotes? I haven’t claimed that any of the Pubs are “right wing extremists.”

QUOTE]

I put all of the labels in quotes. Sorry if that was wrong or confusing.

After all of this time it finally hits me that the problem is the definition of the "L"word so I started a new thread and quoted you (I hope that is OK and is accurate).

[Maeglin]

@jshore

I am sorry, Maeglin, but while the interpretation you propose may not be at odds with any of the evidence that they actually present, it is way at odds with the sort of interpretation and spin they put on their results. Personally, I think you are being a bit tone-deaf here.

The interpretation I propose is the interpretation in the article. Based on some of your remarks in your previous post, I am starting to wonder whether you read it entirely.

The title is “A Measure of Media Bias” because the bias of the politicians is fixed. It is the exogenous quantity. It is constant. If you want to do a study that measures legislative bias, then figure out how to calculate an exogenous measure of the bias of the American people. Maybe we can get a grant from the NAS.

The title is only misleading if you don’t read the article or attempt to draw conclusions from it that the authors do not.

The problem is not that I am tone-deaf so much as you are listening to the music in your head rather than the music that is actually written on the page. You want to criticize some of their anecdotes or what you perceive to be spin? Knock yourself out. I might not even disagree with you. But you are retreating from your original claims that the methodology is itself problematic or that the authors are results-oriented. These critiques could undermine its validity. A critique of the author’s tone or possible conclusions an unwary reader might draw? Not so much.

[Shodan]

@Diogenes the Cynic

If the American media was a politician, it would be a moderate Republican. It was for the war and accepted the White House’s case without criticism or comment. It’s afraid of Janet Jackson’s booby. It panders towards a religious view of the world, especially Christianity, and completely avoids consideration of non-theistic or skeptical worldviews or critiques of religion. It’s tacitly pro-life. It doesn’t come out and say so, but it’s loathe to ever depict abortion rights in a positive light and goes out of its way to show the choice to keep the baby as noble and heroic. It’s becoming more tolerant on gay rights but is still squeamish on SSM and adoption and still tends to prefer gay folks in a harmless, comic relief role rather than to take them seriously as three dimensional people. It thinks that ID is a real theory and that there is some sort of real debate going on with regards to evolution. It’s indifferent to environmental issues. It’s largely ethnocentric and its interest in other countries other than the US range from complete indifference or obliviousness, to paternalistic, to mocking (France) to hostile. It pays some lip service to tolerance of other cultures and religious traditions but doesn’t really mean it. It tends to ignore or gloss over the legal and ethical failings of Republican presidents but is merciless with Democrats, even when the allegations are as petty as a blow job or as bogus as the Swift Boat accusations. It’s pro-capital punishment and idiotically supportive of drug prohibition.

Above all else, it is insanely, slavishly, religiously pro-corporate.

This is rather sweeping, so let’s focus on one point.

Please provide evidence demonstrating that the mainstream media in the US slants its reporting to be pro-capital punishment. “Mainstream media” refers here to CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, PBS, (you can do Fox News if you like, but include the rest as well). Also major newspapers such as the New York Times, the * Washington Post*, the LA Times, and so forth. Since you live in Minnesota, I will include the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and the Saint Paul Pioneer-Press as well.

Let’s see some cites. Objective ones, please.

Regards,
Shodan

[jshore]

@Maeglin

The title is “A Measure of Media Bias” because the bias of the politicians is fixed. It is the exogenous quantity. It is constant. If you want to do a study that measures legislative bias, then figure out how to calculate an exogenous measure of the bias of the American people. Maybe we can get a grant from the NAS.

It is only constant quantity because the authors chose to define the media relative to Congress. They could have instead called it “A Measure of Congressional Bias” and talked about the conservative bias in Congress relative to the mainstream national media.

The problem is not that I am tone-deaf so much as you are listening to the music in your head rather than the music that is actually written on the page. You want to criticize some of their anecdotes or what you perceive to be spin? Knock yourself out. I might not even disagree with you. But you are retreating from your original claims that the methodology is itself problematic or that the authors are results-oriented. These critiques could undermine its validity. A critique of the author’s tone or possible conclusions an unwary reader might draw? Not so much.

(1) I gave you a few quotes from that paper. One can find many more. I don’t deny that the authors are fairly careful to state that they are defining media bias relative to Congress. But, having said this, they are pretty cavalier in then talking about this a measure of “media bias” not “Congressional bias”…And, as I noted, the quote that they use to open their paper is very telling in terms of their point-of-view.

(2) Also quite telling is that Tim Groseclose has scored a trifecta in fellowships from conservative think-tanks, getting the Hoover Fellowship from the Hoover Institution, the Olin Faculty Fellowship from the Olin Foundation, and the Lambe Fellowship from the Institute of Humane Studies. This suggests to me that the way they have chosen to phrase their results (and the fact that their study has become a darling of the right) is not entirely an accident.

(3) No, I am not retreating from my critiques of their methodology. (And, by the way, I did not find their measure of the quality of scholarship at the various think-tanks to be very compelling. I never doubted that Heritage doesn’t have credentialed people on its staff but one can still question the quality of the reports that they produce.) And, while I am not claiming that they have in any way fudged their results, I do think that their backgrounds strongly suggest that they were not completely neutral toward what result they were hoping to find from their study.

[Maeglin]

@jshore

It is only constant quantity because the authors chose to define the media relative to Congress. They could have instead called it “A Measure of Congressional Bias” and talked about the conservative bias in Congress relative to the mainstream national media.

No, jshore, they could not have. They would have to calculate media bias according to some fixed, objective standard. We all agree that this is difficult to do. The advantage of taking congressional ideology as exogenous is that it is relatively easy to aggregate yes/no/abstain votes into a neat measure. This is the baseline because it is cheap to construct, calculable, and the aggregation rule used to map many votes to a single ADA number has formal properties which most people consider to be fair.

Attempting to measure media ideology from news reportage, not editorials, in this way is fraught with methodological problems. They are too obvious to enumerate.

(1) I gave you a few quotes from that paper. One can find many more. I don’t deny that the authors are fairly careful to state that they are defining media bias relative to Congress. But, having said this, they are pretty cavalier in then talking about this a measure of “media bias” not “Congressional bias”…And, as I noted, the quote that they use to open their paper is very telling in terms of their point-of-view.

Again, I lose no sleep here. The reason why they talk about media bias is because, by definition, politicians are not “biased.” I know this is counterintuitive, but with respect to this study, it is true. Congress is used as the yardstick, not the quantity measured. I am getting the impression that this is something you intuitively reject, but it is useful and methodologically sound.

(2) Also quite telling is that Tim Groseclose has scored a trifecta in fellowships from conservative think-tanks, getting the Hoover Fellowship from the Hoover Institution, the Olin Faculty Fellowship from the Olin Foundation, and the Lambe Fellowship from the Institute of Humane Studies. This suggests to me that the way they have chosen to phrase their results (and the fact that their study has become a darling of the right) is not entirely an accident.

Research grants are not easy to acquire in academia. I was a grad student in political science recently: one of my mentors is a fellow of the Hoover Institution and he is progressive as the day is long. The vast majority of formal political scientists I have encountered are quite liberal. But when the money talks…

(3) No, I am not retreating from my critiques of their methodology. (And, by the way, I did not find their measure of the quality of scholarship at the various think-tanks to be very compelling. I never doubted that Heritage doesn’t have credentialed people on its staff but one can still question the quality of the reports that they produce.) And, while I am not claiming that they have in any way fudged their results, I do think that their backgrounds strongly suggest that they were not completely neutral toward what result they were hoping to find from their study.

It seems to me that you are trying to have your cake and eat it, too.

Quality people are defined by quality work. If the work stinks, so do the authors. How can you question the integrity of the studies without questioning the integrity of the authors? How can you use the integrity of the authors, which you presume by their affiliation, to judge the work?

If you aren’t claiming that the work is fudged, then what does questioning their “neutrality” mean? Personally, I don’t care if they found what they were looking to find. The authors used rigorous methodology and hypothesis testing to drive their results. If you are a physicist and your results confirm your intuition, does this somehow cast doubt on your work? If you are compensated by a firm to produce X and you do, is this necessarily bad science? Why apply different standards to political science?

MR