The donations are groups as either (D) or (R) for Democrat/liberal cause or Republican/conservative cause.
Some of the names are well known nationally. Some are reporters at local network affiliates.
The only thing that surprises me is that journalists who are reporting on politics are making political donations. It’s certainly not illegal. But it shows the tendency of reporters to take sides and calls into question whether they can truly be non-partisan when reporting the news.
I’d love to find an updated version of this article carrying forward through to the current election cycle.
I would consider the main places Americans get their news- without looking up statistics, my list would include all those above (maybe not including PBS and NPR because their audiences are pretty small) plus news services like AP and Reuters, the cable networks (Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, maybe Bloomberg too), other major papers in major cities like the WSJ, NY Post, etc., talk radio, and big news websites like HuffPo and Drudge, plus big websites with news sections like Yahoo and Google.
Considering all those (weighted by viewership/listeners/readership/etc), I’m skeptical that as a whole they lean to the left.
Shodan- why did you leave out any source typically identified as “conservative” from your list?
Gallup and Pew have done some polls on the perception of media bias. Argue all you want about whether perception is reality.
Pew Research Center report from Jan 2012 on the perception of medias bias in news reporting showed 37% of Americans perceived “a great deal” of political bias and an additional 30% perceive “a fair amount” of bias.
Gallup found 60% of Americans seeing bias in reporting with 47% saying reporting is too liberal and 13% saying it is too conservative. Among Independents 50% say reporting is too liberal, 37% got it about right, and 13% saying it is too conservative.
Looks like Shodan has it right. Independents think the media has a liberal bias when reporting the news.
This is news?! That there are people who think there is a liberal bias? In any case, of course, there is bias; just watch FOX or MSNBC for a few seconds. But to say that the liberal bias is greater than the conservative bias, or vice versa, is a risky assertion to make, because it would be virtually impossible to prove either assertion.
I think I’ve heard one conservative or another mention the “57 states” thing every month for the last four years, and that might be underestimating its frequency. The “Polish death camps” thing got some national coverage and Republicans did their best to make it an issue, but nobody really cared. Saying “corpse” for “corps”- eh, shit happens. Even people who know the right word mispronounce things sometimes. The OP’s column sounds like wishful thinking on a couple of different levels: yes, this stuff does get reported; no, Obama is not an idiot like Dan Quayle; no, the fact that these things have not generally suck to Obama (like they have to Quayle or even Biden) doesn’t indicate media bias.
There’s all kinds of problems with your implied theory that this is a liberal/conservative things, but to name just two:
The media being hard on Dan Quayle, specifically, does not prove they are particularly hard on Republicans. President Bush v1.0 was prone to tripping over words all the time - hell, at times he was almost incoherent - but the media didn’t seem to particularly care or play it up. To demonstrate that the media is showing a political bias you have to demonstrate they are going after Republicans in general, and avoiding Democrats in general, which really does not seem to be true. Earning a reputation for being a gaffester is actually pretty unusual.
Consider what happened to Democrat Howard Dean, whose career was derailed in large part by just one gaffe, and it really wasn’t a gaffe at all. But the media jumped on it like a pit bull on a jittery toddler. Was the liberal media somehow fooled into thinking Dean was a Republican? Or how about John Kerry’s “I voted for it before I voted against it”?
Comparing two guys whose careers were 20 years apart is folly anyway, and
The general propensity of the media to jump on someone for being a gaffemaster tends to be proportional to how smart they otherwise sound. Barack Obama, let’s be honest, sounds smart. When he makes a gaffe, it tends to sound like the exception. Dan Quayle was, as politicians go, a terrible public speaker who even when he wasn’t making an egregious gaffe would stumble over his words like the guy on Sesame Street stumbling down the stairs with an armful of pies; that reinforced his image as a bumbler. Quayle wasn’t actually a moron, he just wasn’t good as sounding intelligent to an audience, which is hardly a common failing but it’s unusual in a politician of that stature.
An example of something along the same lines in the same election Quayle contested would be Michael Dukakis and the tank helmet thing. Despite having nothing to do with anything, Dukakis looking like a dork in the tank helmet was absolutely played to the hilt bythe media; it’s by far the most vivid image anyone has of the poor man. Do a Google search on Dukakis; the tank picture’s there twice on the first row of images. But that frankly was reinforced by his appearance, because Dukakis was a weird looking little guy with a big head, so that visual became a gaffe. Conversely, George W. Bush in a flight suit did not; Bush is a big, handsome guy, so the President wearing a flight suit didn’t seem out of place.
I agreed to Shodan’s number. Did you miss that? And your second sentence doesn’t follow logically. 50% think it does have a liberal bias. 50% don’t. If you can say “independents think the media has a liberal bias when reporting the news” based on that Gallup poll, I can just as accurately state “Independents think the media has no bias or a conservative bias.” And if then I report only 20% of independents identify themselves as liberal, that number becomes even more interesting.
That’s what happens after decades of being told that it does, over and and over and over. And it’s what happens when the country moves so far to the right that anything remotely resembling reality gets labeled “liberal”.
What I find missing in the discussions of media bias is the point that most mainstream media organizations have even-handedness as a goal. Whatever their POV is, they try not to let it get into their reporting. They try to separate editorial from reporting. They may not succeed 100%, but they try.
The right-wing media just says whatever it takes to support their daily talking points, and then accuses the MSM of bias. The RWM is selling anti-information. Too bad people buy it. You’d think the fourth time Fox News listed a Republican congresscritter caught in a scandal as “D” they’d have lots some credibility with their base, but noooo.
The problem with using the views of journalists, the factory workers of media as a measure of how liberal the media is that they don’t have managerial authority about what is actually covered and how. Look at the editors of most media outlets, including supposedly liberal ones and you will find economic and foreign policy right-wingery. Sure, journalists try to do what they can inside the machine but that doesn’t make the machine liberally biased.
If one side says something over and over again, it will eventually take root whether it is true or not.
Funny thing is, people respond that way when you ask them a question posed similarly to the meme being parroted, but if you ask them about the underlying facts, they often have a different perspective.
Indeed and the “agenda setting” media that **Shodan **lists are agenda setting because they have an at least somewhat deserved reputation for sober and factual reporting. Sure, their ability to set agendas probably derives in part from having great resources but again, that is earned by being successful over a long period and that success is in no small part due to deserved reputation for sober and factual reporting.
Once you realise that the facts have a liberal bias, Shodan’s position that MSM is liberal biased becomes self fulfilling. If a media outlet reports the facts long term it will become (a) “agenda setting” and therefore part of the MSM, and (b) liberal biased because facts are liberal biased. Ergo, the MSM is unsurprisingly liberal biased, to **Shodan’s **view.
