Except we know you think I have, because when I ask what it is later, you tell me.
I’m sorry, I thought we were discussing liberal media bias, not having a mock shareholder meeting for Fox News.
I am not of such a mind. I am of the mind that people who need to be unbiased broadly can be and if you think that journalists should be unbiased they’re probably broadly up to the task for that reason. But I would not say, even if we agreed journalists were biased in the aggregate, that they couldn’t help it because “everyone has bias.”
I am not in the habit of supporting positions other people make up for me.
On economic issues The New York Times has reported on the growing income gap.
The Wall Street Journal has even acknowledged that from the administrations of Lyndon Johnson to that of George W. Bush there was more job creation under Democratic than Republican administrations.
Nevertheless, on economic issues most newspapers are reluctant to anger advertisers and those who belong to the same country clubs as the publishers.
On the matter of the killing of Trayvon Martin most of the press has indicated a liberal bias. The early news stories presented an old photograph that made Martin look like a choir boy. George Martin was portrayed in a photograph that made him look like a thug.
More recently the fact that two whites in Tulsa, Oklahoma killed several blacks has received national coverage. Black on white crimes seldom receive national coverage.
On October 12, 1998 Matthew Shepard was killed by two men who picked him up at a bar. This was given national coverage. At about the same time a fourteen year old boy was raped and tortured to death by two adult homosexuals. I only read of this once, several years ago.
For the sake of those who have not abandoned the thread, I’ll go ahead and state my position on the matter.
The only issue to me worth wondering about is this: Why is journalism apparently such a strong selective pressure for people left of the American center? I accept that many professions will show some political tendencies. Engineers seem to be righties for some reason, for example (not me, I promise, but my colleagues). And I think that’s also an interesting question: what selective pressures are there for engineering that might also select for the political right? Economists, too, are usually right of center, even in “liberally biased” academia. :rolleyes: But I don’t think that means economists are biased. I think most economists have a large measure of integrity and absent a compelling reason I think we should grant them that.
So: why are so many darned journalists apparently lefties (except when they’re not, which we ignore)? Journalists are interested in the issues the whole world faces. They’re interested in people’s problems, and how to solve them. This kind of concern for one’s fellow man, even if in a distracted iPad-and-Starbucks sense, is itself a leftie position, whereas the right’s concern is one of individualism and community but not institutions. (Broadly, people. Broadly.) These aren’t always opposed to each other, but you could imagine a job where being successful at it involves a measure of setting aside one’s individualism and community to understand another’s would tend to select people who already thought that was a good idea.
I’d therefore expect that anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists would also be, as a group, composed mostly of lefties. The requirements of the job strongly select for them. I wonder if it is true?
Today, though, we’ve started to try to shove soapboxing and “entertainment” into the news, with the predictable result that now the selection pressures for people to enter “the media”—now nearly an all-encompassing term—will admit a wider range of political opinions into the fray. The difference is that soapboxers really are biased: the whole point is to throw around their opinion to the detriment of other opinions. Glorified vloggers, basically. And entertainers may or may not be biased but they know who their audience is and will play to that audience—and that audience could be biased, which would “taint” the entertainment. Some may be of the soapboxing variety but you could also have a Colbert type which is entertaining or soapboxing indirectly. Colbert in particular couldn’t even exist without the way paved ahead of him by other soapboxing entertainers.
So, anyway, to summarize:
I don’t think bias is clearly found in aggregate groups because I don’t think there is a good way to determine it (emphasis on “found”)
The real question is why would a particular line of work select for a certain political opinion, if it did at all
The mixing of reporting with entertainment has resulted in a very confused situation
Your logic is flawed. You might as well say, “I don’t thing there’s a definitive, definable area contained by a parabola because I can’t think of a good way to determine it.” The second half of your sentence is not a valid reason to claim that bias exists in specific groups. If only someone had looked into this and then someone else posted the results in this thread. Oh wait—both those things happened!
Interesting question in another thread, yes. The fact is—as you just opined yourself—that different lines of work do correlate with political bent. Engineers for instance, as you mentioned. You might want to refer to the study results that I supplied earlier. And this time, maybe even read them.
I didn’t assert there was no bias in the media. I did say that I would not be willing to commit to the issue without a measure. I cannot help it that you have failed to understand this point repeatedly. I am not aware of how I could make it more clear.
Your commitment to a priori existence proofs is honorable. Alas, I’m more of an empiricist. If you want me to accept there’s bias in the media, I’m going to require you find some kind of measure. The only thing that links your soup of facts together is the assertion that everyone is biased. But that bowl is wide enough and deep enough to hold anything; I have already stated why I feel such an assertion is pointless. The one study which created a measure, when I brought it up you got pissy about it. This leaves literally nothing for us to go on in the conversation.
You know what’s clear, your disingenuousness during this whole discussion. You call yourself an empiricist, but when presented with actual evidence, you ignore it. It seems to me that an empiricist would adopt the fair position of “Well, it may be or not be true, but we just have our differing opinions to go on.” But when an empiricist is presented with actual evidence that indicates that he might be wrong, he would seek to 1) demonstrate specific flaws with the evidence presented and/or 2) present evidence to support his position. But, no, not Erislover The Empericist. What does he do, he just ignores it, hand waves, and utters, 'how could we possibly know?
I accept it as true without even questioning it. What I question is: does this evidence support the hypothesis? I do not think it does. I explained why I do not think it does.
Thankfully empiricists are not bound by how things seem to you.
All I have said was that suggested measures of bias don’t seem to serve that role in an acceptable way to me, and that I don’t see any way to rectify that problem. I have not said that there is no bias in the media. Since I have said I don’t know how I would make such a measurement, it would be really fucking stupid to then turn around and claim there is in fact no bias. But, that’s just what you keep reading into my statements.
Why would I dispute facts? Are they questionable? Now you have me wondering. So far I have taken them at face value, but now you’re making me wonder if I should dispute them as factual.
The positions you’re making up for me?
Really, man, you’re fucking irritating the shit out of me. I’ve put forth a lot of work trying to make my problems clear with the assertions that the media is biased. This is not identical with an attempt to say that the media is unbiased, your repeated strawmanning of me notwithstanding.
Years ago a Brit commedian described the American political parties thusly:
The Republican party is about the same as our Conservative party and the Democratic party is roughly the same as our Conservative party.
There really is no equivalent in America of a Labor or Social Democratic party. Yes, the Democratic party is closer, but compared to the democracies of Western Europe it is a center-right party.
The American usage of liberal is incorrect in the original sense of the word. I suppose the Democratic party is slightly more libertarian than the Republican party on social issues and vice versa for economic issues, but neither is very libertarian at all.
I recently saw a video in which a presumably left wing commentator complained that there was no media coverage of the fire bombing of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Wisconsin. When I checked last week, it actually was covered in a few places, mainly blogs and on-line versions, but not on air. But note that the guy on air is using a Fox station. He sounds like a righty in his complaints, but he’s probably about equally inaccurate.
No one was killed or injured so “it bleeds it leads” did not apply.
Mags, your situation is impossible. You cannot empirically prove bias because you cannot apply an objective measure to a subjective thing. There is no such objective measure, it is absurd to say that Fox News is 17% more biased than MSNBC, just for an example. You can believe it, you can swear to it, you can daub yourself with shit and set your hair on fire, but you cannot prove it.
On the yes/no question of whether the MSM has liberal bias, I’ll say yes. Guilty.
But my rule of thumb is that the average MSM outlet is about as biased to the left as the average big city police department is racist. That is, a little bit, but greatly exaggerated by their opponents, in part because they want to avoid confronting certain facts about their own group.
Now above I conceded a point, but conservatives in discussions like this refuse to give an inch in acknowledging any special bias on their part? So even though there’s a non-equivalence in obsequiousness, conservatives tenaciously cling to equivalence with regards to who’s biased.
This despite the fact that religious fundamentalism is a major component of the conservative world view while the viewpoint that drives the MSM tends to respect science. So if it comes down to that distinctions, how can any reasonable person maintain that there’s always perfect equivalence?
You know, for a guy with a calm and unbiased position, you spend a lot of time yelling real loud. Do you put in lot of time at message boards for the deaf?
There was a study done of the political orientation of guests interviewed on the major network news shows regarding the Iraq War in March-April of 2003.
“Nearly two thirds of all sources, 64 percent, were pro-war, while 71 percent of U.S. guests favored the war. Anti-war voices were 10 percent of all sources, but just 6 percent of non-Iraqi sources and 3 percent of U.S. sources. Thus viewers were more than six times as likely to see a pro-war source as one who was anti-war; with U.S. guests alone, the ratio increases to 25 to 1…”
“…Of a total of 840 U.S. sources who are current or former government or military officials, only four were identified as holding anti-war opinions–Sen. Robert Byrd (D.-W.V.), Rep. Pete Stark (D.-Calif.) and two appearances by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D.-Ohio).”
“…While the percentage of Americans opposing the war was about 10 times higher in the real world as they were on the nightly news (27 percent versus 3 percent), their proportion of the guestlist may still overstate the degree to which they were able to present their views on U.S. television. Guests with anti-war viewpoints were almost universally allowed one-sentence soundbites taken from interviews conducted on the street. Not a single show in the study conducted a sit-down interview with a person identified as being against the war.”
