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

Great Debates
21

Not what I said, the point that you missed is that in this case we have to take the opinions of the left, otherwise that research does remain a very incomplete one. And in that environmental item I’m putting CNN and FOX in the same column (in this case the corporations are happy to see that media not talking much about it or misguiding people a bout it.)

I look at science and other items to conclude that. One of those other items is history.

Like if I also did not post there too already showing how silly the idea of the OP was, when you have to grasp at straws like that one then it is your position the one that is not supported properly.

22

This is the debate forum, not the joke forum.

23

He’s right, in a way. Their concern is in the opposite direction.

24

I lack the emotional stamina to “debate” on this Board, especially when I needed to start by explaining an extraneous point like peer review. :smack: Nevertheless it occurs to me that there is a simple way to test the hypothesis. Simply compare the headlines of a right-wing news-site with those of a “mainstream” site.

I’ll let those on the other side of the debate suggest “mainstream” news-sites “with a liberal bias.” For the opposite, there are several to choose from; the first I tried was washingtontimes.com

On the Home Page of Wash. Times (not the Politics page, nor the Opinion page, but the Home Page) we see headlines including
*
Michelle Obama sticks taxpayers with monster tab for rental cars in Japan
Jay Leno called ‘kind of racist’ by intern for disliking Mexican food
Suspect in ‘Top Model’ killing was Dreamer approved for Obama amnesty
Was Hillary Clinton running her own rogue intel operation?
Republicans talk of an imperial presidency - and royalty visits the White House
Hillary Clinton should face criminal charges
5 ways Obama camp has shown hatred toward Bibi
IRS blames Obamacare for shoddy customer service
Family secret: What the left won’t tell you about black crime*

(I suppose they change the Home Page frequently, so please click and verify now. Perhaps nothing is wrong with the Jay Leno headline … except it does hint at the site’s priorities.)

Some will argue that these stories are not biased – that the newspaper is doing its job of exposing malfeasance. I won’t argue at all, but just ask impartial observers (if such exist!) to compare this Home Page with that of a “liberal mainstream” newspaper.

25

My simple test comes from a bit of logic: what kind of replacements the media stars get in the big media outlets.

This was from a few years back so I’m not sure how FOX is doing nowadays with replacements, but when I looked at TV news when people like Hannity or O’Reilly got sick or they had something personal to do their replacements on their shows were people like Huckabe, Newt Gingrich or even freaking Chuck Norris. People that very clearly are right wing ideologues.

When at CNN ABC or CBS got temporary replacements for the talking heads we got… Who the heck was this guy or gal? It was usually a plain vanilla in training anchor or host that tried to be fair, and an unknown in the political arena.

If the right was correct about how leftist the mainstream media was/is I would expect something like this:

“Tonight, on CNN’s The Situation Room., substituting Wolf Blitzer tonight: Michael Moore!”

But since we live in the real world I have to say that that does not happen as much as the left would love to see it. (I would like to see it if only to contemplate the heads exploding from the right if replacements like that were happening regularly in the mainstream media.) :slight_smile:

26

You’re measuring the quality of journalism in addition to bias. That isn’t a good test. For someone who feels the need to explain peer review to the class, I would think you would design a better test of your hypothesis.

27

Well, you didn’t produce any scientific evidence in that thread (or this one) showing that the New York Post or FoxNews is biased. You simply waved your hands.

Is this your idea of science?

Regards,
Shodan

28

This was not even a complete list of the right-slanted headlines on the Home Page: Cut-and-paste was difficult and I got tired.

And nobody has posted a comparably slanted list from “mainstream” media.

Answering my own question, I don’t think so. Please re-read the “qualifications” of the two authors.

But in reply I get only.

:smack:

:confused: :smack:

So is the revised hypothesis that “mainstream” media is left-slanted but of higher quality than right-wing media? :slight_smile:

No comment on substance. Doesn’t offer his own opinion, if any. No clue that he even grasped that my post was obviously debatable opinion. Just a useless Pavlovian-reflex jab.

Kudos to intelligent Dopers who do have the patience and emotional stamina to “debate” politics on this Board.

29

Yes. Mainstream media, as a general rule, has better journalistic standards than whacko media, regardless of political leanings.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page is both of good quality and conservative bias. Your typical ThinkProgress story is of terrible quality and liberal bias.

30

No, that was just using logic, but as usual no conservative wants to deal with the implications that that bit of logic does to their cosy idea of what the bias is in the media nowadays.

The science bit was for other subjects, and regarding climate change the examples are legion regarding what party is more correct, as I posted before in other threads, I do not care much about bias, I care more about who is more correct. (And that shows what bias should be criticised more)

And I also pointed many times before that bias in the media exists, what we have to do is to check who is more correct, as Jefferson would say because we do need an informed citizenship.

As for the New York Post, they do give a lot of space to deniers of climate change:

Yep, George Will and the Post never learn.

And FOX news also gets into pants on fire lies territory regarding that subject:

31

First of all, you should post in the correct thread. It’s very confusing when you post a reply to one thread in a completely different one.

Secondly, when we’re required to offer an opinion in every post we make, you’ll have a point. Since we aren’t, you don’t.

Thirdly, if you want to make a bunch of claims and then slink off with the excuse that the claims were “obviously debatably opinion”, I guess that’s fine. At least you’ve admitted it.

Fourthly, if you don’t like being asked questions about your posts, then maybe GD isn’t the forum for you.

32

Here is what journalists have to say about liberal bias:
Washington Post Book World Editor Marie Arana:
"“The elephant in the newsroom is our narrowness. Too often, we wear liberalism on our sleeve and are intolerant of other lifestyles and opinions…We’re not very subtle about it at this paper: If you work here, you must be one of us. You must be liberal, progressive, a Democrat. I’ve been in communal gatherings in The Post, watching election returns, and have been flabbergasted to see my colleagues cheer unabashedly for the Democrats.”

Seattle Times Executive Editor David Boardman:
“If we wore our politics on our sleeves in here, I have no doubt that in this and in most other mainstream newsrooms in America, the majority of those sleeves would be of the same color: blue. Survey after survey over the years have demonstrated that most of the people who go into this business tend to vote Democratic, at least in national elections. That is not particularly surprising, given how people make career decisions and that social service and activism is a primary driver for many journalists.”

Juan Williams formerly of NPR:
“If you were going to events during the primaries, what you saw was that the executive editors and the top people at the networks were all rushing to Obama events, bringing their children, celebrating it, saying they were, there’s this part of history”

Washington Post reporter Thomas Edsall:
“The mainstream press is liberal…Since the civil rights and women’s movements, the culture wars and Watergate, the press corps at such institutions as the Washington Post, ABC-NBC-CBS News, the NYT, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, etc. is composed in large part of ‘new’ or ‘creative’ class members of the liberal elite — well-educated men and women who tend to favor abortion rights, women’s rights, civil rights, and gay rights. In the main, they find such figures as Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Pat Robertson, or Jerry Falwell beneath contempt…If reporters were the only ones allowed to vote, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, and John Kerry would have won the White House by landslide margins.”

New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller:
“If the 2012 election were held in the newsrooms of America and pitted Sarah Palin against Barack Obama, I doubt Palin would get 10 percent of the vote. However tempting the newsworthy havoc of a Palin presidency, I’m pretty sure most journalists would recoil in horror from the idea.”

Jim VandeHei reporter at Politico:
“Are reporters biased? There is no doubt that — I’ve worked at the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and worked here at Politico. If I had to guess, if you put all of the reporters that I’ve ever worked with on truth serum, most of them vote Democratic.”

New York Times public editor Arthur Brisband:
“So many [reporters and editors] share a kind of political and cultural progressivism — for lack of a better term — that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of the Times. As a result, developments like the Occupy movement and gay marriage seem almost to erupt in the Times, overloved and undermanaged, more like causes than news subjects.”

Washington Post Ombudsman Deborah Howell:
“I’ll bet that most Post journalists voted for [Barack] Obama. I did. There are centrists at the Post as well. But the conservatives I know here feel so outnumbered that they don’t even want to be quoted by name in a memo.”

New York Times Public Editor Daniel Okrent
These are the social issues: gay rights, gun control, abortion and environmental regulation, among others. And if you think the Times plays it down the middle on any of them, you’ve been reading the paper with your eyes closed."

Newsweek’s Evan Thomas:
"There is a liberal bias. It’s demonstrable. You look at some statistics. About 85 percent of the reporters who cover the White House vote Democratic, they have for a long time. There is a, particularly at the networks, at the lower levels, among the editors and the so-called infrastructure, there is a liberal bias.

An analysis of Federal campaign contributions for people working in the newspaper and print media industries over the past 10 years found that 84% of people donating money to candidates gave money to liberal candidates.

33

People have a vested interest in arguing that the media is not favoring them.

34

Seen them before, not impressed as it does not contradict what J.David Stern the owner of the New York Post reported in the 1930’s and what Noam Chomsky noted in Manufacturing Consent. Reporters still have to work for the corporation and there are limits about how liberal they can be in their reporting. And usually those limits come because no matter how liberal a reporter is they already have the knowledge and experience to know what the filters are and how not to get removed by running into those filters.

One documentary to see how that works is the one called “Spin” from back in the 1990’s. It was based on the raw feeds that cable TV used to have, it was embarrassing how uncontroversial corporate media tries to be. To the extreme that very bad news are just “obtuse” as a reporter advised a Dr. Bob Arnot from a Hospital in L.A. to not to get into ugly truths that could make people wonder about the then current policies.

The Dr. said on the raw feed (those bad bits were not used in the final piece) that his South LA hospital treated more gunshot wounds than all of the American doctors in western Europe (during the Kosovo crisis) and that the military actually sends medics tho the hospital for training! He added that many areas there are “like third world countries without the hope”. And with very inadequate health care too.

After the advise from the reporter to drop those “obtuse” very bad news the actual report was very plain and unlikely to be used as a reference to push any actual liberal issues, like health care reform.

The documentary had many other examples and a very memorable one was how all the team of reporters assigned to the 500th anniversary of the discovery of America decided to not show an interview of a native American that did told the truth about what Columbus did with the Indians. “What does he know?” they told each other.

35

We talked about this report when it came out. I encourage you to read that thread (it’s just two pages). Turns out there are some mighty shaky assumptions underlying the report, as well as some very strange findings (e.g., that the ACLU is more conservative than the NRA).

36

Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent was published by Random House, a large corporation. How is it that his ideas were allowed to be broadcast by this corporation?
Chomsky’s problem is that he is going to see bias in every news report that does not start off “Good Evening Comrade” and half that do.
In reality four times as many reporters identify as Democrats than Republicans. This probably understates the problem as many don’t identify as Democrats because they don’t think the party is liberal enough. Plus the survey is self reported and many want to hide their bias. In an objective measure like donating to political candidates seven times as many print media members gave to liberal politicians as conservative one.
Media members believe in a liberal agenda. They also have power to influence their customers. To believe that they refuse to use their power to advance their agendas is to disbelieve in human nature.

37

Peer review:

Now, all of that appears to be about the natural sciences; don’t know if peer review for an economics journal is in any way different.

38

Journalists may have some liberal bias based on their liberal-arts educations, and some based on a journalist’s professional inclination to play Jack the Giant-Killer (though labor unions can also be giants, and not to be spared scrutiny).

But journalists are not their own masters. Reporters answer to editors. And nowadays, editors answer to MBAs in suits who sit on the boards of interlocking directorates and care nothing for journalism as such. As the article linked by septimus notes:

39

I’m reminded of sports fans insisting that their team hasn’t historically benefited from questionable officiating.

40

Honestly I think it comes down to a matter of term definition.

Are folks who work in the media liberal on social issues such as race and gay rights and women’s rights? Sure: the media tend to side with equal rights in all these cases.

Are the media liberal when it comes to workers issues and environmental issues? Yeah, not so much. Here, they tend to side with not rocking the boat.

Compare two issues: teaching unions, and same-sex marriage. The former is a workers issue, and the media are decidedly conservative. The latter is a social issue, and the media are fairly liberal.

Compare two issues: climate change caused by burning fossil fuels, and the choking death of Eric Garner. Which do you hear more about, and why?

Compare two issues: conditions in iPhone factories, and possible racism in Taylor Swift’s “Shake it Off” video. Which is a more important issue? Which gets more coverage? (Hint: which one includes footage of shaking butts?)