No, Virginia (and the rest of you states), the media is not all that 'liberal'

Great Debates
1

Doing a favor for Septimus.

Per request, some content:

I noticed, back when I was still watching ABC’s* This Week* (that’s the USA ABC, not the one in Oz) that this show, on a non-Fox “lamestream liberal media” channel, had a definite GOP bias. Their panels tilted very GOP, just in the overall numbers. They would have a token Democrat most weeks, usually a woman, which nicely reinforces the idea that the center-left is for girls.

I remember whatsername from the Nation being on, and saying something that was odd for that show. I don’t remember what it was, it wasn’t insane, it was just* really* outside the box. And the panel (male, conservative, GOP, conventional-looking) basically ignored her, because it was just too much not a thing to be considered. So the voice was there, but was “dumb girl” to most of the panel.

Now, you can say that’s one show. Yeah, it is. But it’s what passes for a serious politics show on a network that is ostensibly moderate and not movement conservative.

I got into the right wing when I was younger thanks to my PBS (state-sponsored commies!) pimping Wm. F. Buckley as a public intellectual.

(And honestly, I miss those Firing Line debates. But I guess having your party’s face be someone like Buckley, and calling for debate, is only for a party that’s losing. The Republicans win all the time now. Why risk giving other ideas a hearing?)

PBS has given Tucker Carlson airtime, they’ve given John McLaughlin airtime, they take money from Sheldon Adelson and the Koch Foundation now that federal funding has dried up. They’re not anywhere near as communist as their caricature. But I know that because I have watched a lot of PBS. And of course, the sort who hold that caricature probably don’t watch PBS lest their tender ears be assaulted by words not approved by the preachers of conservatism, or however it works.

Is that enough content?

Yeah, I haven’t even looked at the link yet, but it’s kind of a “no kidding, water is wet” conclusion.

2

A peer reviewed research article from a UCLA professor published in the The Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2005 showed a pervasive liberal bias in the media.

That is peer reviewed research. The Daily Kos article seems to conclude that the media isn’t biased because it doesn’t focus on what the author thinks a liberal media should focus on.

I thought this board was supposed to favor a scientific approach. Fighting ignorance and all.

3

That article effecitvely defines “liberal” as “to the left of a U.S. median.” U.S. is dominated by right-wing views.

Of the study’s two authors, Jeffrey Milyo is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, formerly known as Charles Koch Foundation; and Tim Groseclose is author of the paperback Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind. Do these sound like the “objective political scientists” we should listen to?

ETA: And for those who don’t particiapte in the “peer review” process, please note that peer review is grossly overrated as a certificate of validity.

4

You have a better system of assessment than being reviewed by your peers in the field? I’d like to hear it.

5

:confused: Which side of the peer-review process have you participated in? At best, peer review catches blatant errors, but can’t be expected to change bad judgment into good judgment. I can attest that in lower-quality computer-science conferences the peer review process is a pathetic joke.

And may I suggest you click this link to educate yourself a bit on the efficacy of peer-review.

Hope this helps fight your ignorance.

6

Sorry if that seemed snarky, but in response to the specificity of

… we get the non-insightful

Taking longer than we thought, indeed!

7

So in your estimation, are Republicans right wing, Democrats centrists to center-right, and therefore the media are not liberal?

8

My comment which you’re commenting on was NOT directed at OP, but was directed at the comment about the comment published by two right-wingers.

If you’d prefer to debate the topic of OP, feel free to do so.

9

In which that one UCLA-published study from 10 years ago has its own biases systematically addressed. There are too many issues to summarize here, but basically the strange methodology misses how things get cited, and what’s available out there to be cited.

10

I am. There’s quite few people who believe that Democrats are a center-right party. If one believes that, then it bears further examination of how we all are using the term liberal.

If you want to bring of ideas in one post and not discuss them any further, why even post on a message board?

11

[QUOTE=septimus]

Of the study’s two authors, Jeffrey Milyo is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, formerly known as Charles Koch Foundation; and Tim Groseclose is author of the paperback Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind. Do these sound like the “objective political scientists” we should listen to?
[/QUOTE]
If “objective” is the standard for those to whom we should listen, then we cannot believe a word Daily Kos prints and you don’t have much of an OP.

If you have a consistent standard, then by all means post it. But let’s be consistent here - if a standard of evidence applies to one side, it applies to the other.

Regards,
Shodan

12

Using that logic, Shodan, we also have to discount Fox News. Not saying that you were suggesting otherwise. Just making sure that everyone’s on the same page.

13

Sure, as long as our standard is consistent.

If partisan sources may not be used, then they may not be used. And we don’t have a credible OP.

Regards,
Shodan

14

The central issue is that there’s no objective standard to what’s liberal and what’s conservative. For example, one person might say the CBS Evening News is liberal and another person might say it’s conservative and both would be correct within their own not unreasonable definitions of the terms.

At most you can try to objectively place things within their context. If you line various media up along the ideological spectrum, half are going to be on the conservative end and half are going to be on the liberal end - regardless of what their views are.

I think a better attempt at establishing an objective standard would be to first establish what the ideological views are of the American population as a whole. Then you could placee the ideological views of various media next to that standard and determine if a particular medium was conservative or liberal in comparison to the general public.

15

The problem IMHO is that Milyo and Groseclose did a very lousy job when they did not ask many on the left about what was their opinion. As I pointed many times in the past when bias is the issue this is just about the only time when the opinion a group has should be looked at as a data point. One should bother to check what is what most people in the left do think about this issue.

So in this subject one has to take into account what the liberals consider “their” news: once Fox appeared in the scene, conservatives considered it the “fair and balanced” news. I have seen both the irrational and reasonable liberal groups out there and many liberals don’t consider outfits like CNN “their” news for the simple reason that many subjects the left considers important are not talked much about it.

I do consider the network news (except Fox) more balanced overall, but the whitewash seen coming from them regarding many items (e.g. news regarding the conglomeration and weakening of rules so the mainstream media outlets get bigger and less diverse) makes them IMO more in favor of the conservative side thanks to misguided false equivalences. Nowadays I can see that there is more liberal content on MSNBC but that is just one cable outlet.

Elsewhere, no matter how liberal reporters or owners can be, they cannot talk day in and day out about matters that the left considers important, while the right wing continues to pound on the Benghazi dead horse every day.

To see why even liberal owners can not talk about issues that they consider important all the time I pointed before to a very early example from the book Witness to a Century- By George Seldes in the "Spain broke the heart of the world.” chapter:

J.David Stern was the owner of the New York Post. In a conversation, George Seldes mentioned that Stern was a liberal, and that liberalism was not being reflected at all in the obvious conservative slant that the news from the Spanish civil war were getting. Stern replied:

“What do you want me to do, take a quixotic stand, print the truth about everything including bad medicine, impure food and crooked stock market offerings, and lose all my advertising contracts and go out of business- or make compromises with all the evil elements and continue to publish the best liberal newspaper possible under these compromising circumstances?”

Amazingly, that was in 1936, and it looks like things have not changed much.

Except that New York Post now spews more right wing propaganda with very little counter points thanks to owners like Rupert Murdoch.

16

Just 7% of journalists identify themselves as Republican vs 28% Democrat.

Most journalists seem to do a good job on trying to remain professional but some bias unavoidably seeps in. To me, the biggest and most noticeable effect is that journalists are able to describe liberal positions as if it were their own but have a harder time describing conservative positions in a way that’s not distancing.

17

That DailyKos post is pretty dumb, as DailyKos posts are wont to be. First of all, right at the start, it conflates two different issues: the media’s political bias, and the media’s focus on entertainment and making money. I doubt anyone would dispute that most of the news media is very focused on raking in money by getting the biggest possible audience and has dumbed down quite a bit with that end in mind. I think liberals and conservatives would broadly agree on that.

As for the list of things which supposedly would be covered if the media were liberal, all of them are covered. Whether it’s Colony Collapse Disorder or the incarceration rate, a quick search will turn up plenty of news articles about the topic.

Lastly, the author of that post gives no reason why any of the issues should be considered liberal issues. Conservatives, in my experience, are at least as concerned about the incarceration rate than liberals. So if it truly were absent from the media, that would just as well be an example of liberal bias.

Not a convincing “debunking”, to say the least.

18

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is not a “lower-quality computer-science conference” but “is the oldest professional journal of economics in the English language, edited at Harvard University’s Department of Economics” and is the second most influential economics journal.

Besides, if your definition of liberal and conservative is not the standard American definition but rather the far-left standards of Europe or academia, you need to state that clearly in the OP. What you’ve done is shift the goalposts once your favorite blog post was rebutted by actual facts. Besides, if the American media is consistently more liberal than the American people, it would only make sense to describe it as liberally-biased, since its effect on the voting preferences of the American people is really the only thing that matters in this discussion. If the media is consistently pulling Americans left or right, that’s important, not how it ranks in comparison to other countries.

19

That IMO does not counter much about the main point, that does not lead to an informed citizenry that is the strength of a democracy. The point here to me is that there are a lot of powerful groups on the right that prefer that dumbing down to remain the usual state of affairs.

Well, there is reason why that is called a Google Vomit, in reality it offers more evidence to what the OP is on about (and the Daily Kos article was not the only item he mentioned BTW) looking at the fist pages of the search names like Forbes or The Fresno Bee paper popped to me as sources with a bit of a wide audience. All the rest were reports coming from places like The Smithsonian that are not widely used as information sources like FOX, CNN, ABC and others that BTW were hard to notice in that Google Vomit. (and most of those sources are indeed on the left side of things, like Bill Moyers)

What is happening is just that I do know that the mainstream does talk from time to time about issues like that one, but as a person with experience in education I have to say that not pressing issues like that with regularity only leads to general ignorance of those issues.

20

But there’s the problem again - if we cannot use partisan sources, then we can’t establish any bias on the right either.

By what standard of evidence do you conclude that FoxNews and the New York Post are biased to the right, and does that same standard apply to other media?

Also have a read thru one of the most clarifying threads in SDMB history.

Regards,
Shodan