Are you one such reasonable man? Do you disagree with that study? If so, why? This is something I’ve tried to get you to address in past and, I think, pretty much the reason why Otto opened this thread.
I’ll reiterate for clarity. What is your opinion of this study and could you please explain the basis of that opinion?
And with all these decades of biased coverage, you’ve got your perception/recollection of Katie Couric’s body language (which I find hard to believe given the gravitas she carried herself with during her run on the Today show) and a celebrity rag that has the credibility of TMZ.
My god Holmes!
I can’t find where it says the same standards weren’t applied to the McCain stories they found. Was simply mentioning the results of a poll (and likewise) not considered negative for McCain?
I can’t tell. The linked article doesn’t give any examples of what they would consider “negative” for McCain. But if the folks doing the survey are willing to overlook positives in stories about Obama, I see no reason to conclude they would not do the same with negatives about McCain. Their judgment is suspect, in other words, based on the examples they give.
For instance, their latest study finds that McCain is the subject of jokes on TV over Obama by something like two to one. One might consider that people telling jokes about you is a net negative. But the Center doesn’t seem to present it in quite the same way as their previous study.
It will be interesting to see, after the campaign, if press coverage overall is net positive (by their standards) for Obama vs. McCain. In all previous campaigns that I can find, the Democrat always received more positive coverage than the Republican (cite - PDF). In 2004, the media hit its nadir for biased coverage, with negative coverage of Bush at more than 60% while Kerry coverage was almost 60% positive. (Cite - PDF.)
So I am afraid I am rather reluctant to accept what the press release says about Obama coverage at face value. Now that the race has tightened up, I fully expect to see a switch back to bias against McCain, as has been characteristic in the past.
Regards,
Shodan
But the overlooking isn’t biased if they do the same for both candidates - they may have what you or others consider a flawed methodology, but if they apply it equally to both then it can be fair (if wrong). IOW it’s not reasonable to conclude the reason for overlooking positives is because of bias without knowing if they were overlooked for McCain, too.
Indeed, we don’t even know if they were overlooked - what if the positives weren’t ignored in favour of the negatives, but included as well? The abstract refers to evaluations, rather than entire articles, which suggests at least that not taking a single evaluation from each article is possible.
Isn’t this their latest study? I checked the link to their webpage and this is the one at the top of the list. Could you cite the one you mean, so I can have a look too?
According to the original cite, they use the same methodology for all of their studies - i’m uncertain why you’re thus citing other studies they’ve done, if you consider them to be either flawed or biased.
What bothers me is the body language on NPR. You can hear Siliva HolyRolyMolyPujoli lean so far left she’s almost on AM.
Why do you trust their studies from 2004 but not their most recent studies? I find no evidence that their staff or methodology has changed over the last 4 years.
Maybe.
I, a Obama leaning fiscal conservative and civil libertarian, personally think the media is biased rightwards. Unfortunately I can no more prove this than you or Starving Artist can prove that it leans left… But I do think that the idea that the MSM is controlled by the left is about as likely as the fact that there is a vast right-wing conspiracy headed by the skull an bones…
Complaining about a MSM conspiracy of either the right or the left is idiotic. The poor whining morons who complain about the conspiracy on either side forget one small fact - ratings.
Run stories, positive or negative, on exciting topics and you get more viewers / readers / listeners. Therefore more advertising, therefore more money.
Oprah puts Obama on her show, she gets better ratings. News shows run stories about him, people watch. The guy’s a celebrity.
Palin (unfortunately) the same - people want to know about her because she’s new and shiny and sexy; they don’t seem to give a damn about the facts surrounding her, the lies she’s told and is telling, or the fact she’s a raving loon with a history of abuses of power who just might wind up in the 2nd most powerful position in the US.
McCain didn’t get equal coverage to Obama before the Palin goat rodeo just because of one thing - he’s boring, and people don’t care about him on either side. It’s like watching paint dry.
Stakeholders in media companies care about profits like anyone else. More viewers / readers / listeners = more interest from advertisers = more ad revenue. Why the mystery and conspiracy?
What exquisite torture for them: having to submit to all that crackpot academic cultural-elite touchy-feeliness.
I bet the GOP wishes there was a giant boot camp where the entire Democratic Party would have their individualism, humanism, etc., broken down by drill instructors, and the hard cases sent to the equivalent of Gitmo.
Just for the record, I don’t think anyone contends that the media is ‘controlled’ by the left. It’s more a matter of the media being populated almost totally by people who are lefties themselves.
Sure, maybe, in the same way that you could say the majority of the US population, voters and otherwise, are lefties. The people who own and run the various media outlets are most likely righties however…
Maybe a more accurate gauge of the concentration of righties and lefties in media could be obtained by looking at the majors of the various employees. The people with business or engineering degrees probably lean right while those with journalism or broadcasting degrees left… Regardless, I still believe that the conservative meme of left-wing MSM is BS; no one has ever come remotely close to proving it exists for me.
I agree with GomiBoy; MSM is driven by profits and ratings. The people in the MSM are driven by salary, position and fame. Political ideologies, both for the organizations and the individuals, is secondary to these base considerations and probably plays a very small role…
Which is equally moronic. They would only keep their jobs if they generate a profit; it’s not like companies hire people to political checklists.
Well, except for Fox News, of course.
You think Katie Couric wasn’t helping turn a profit for the Today Show? You think Keith Olbermannnnnn hasn’t been turning a profit for MSNBC? You think Dan Rather wasn’t helping CBS turn a profit? You think Oprah isn’t turning a profit for herself? You think the Dixie Chicks aren’t turning a profit? You think US Weekly isn’t turning a profit for Jann Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone (well, maybe that one isn’t, but Wenner has money to burn and he’s going all out for Obama)? I could go on and on.
Mostly the ones who aren’t turning a profit are newspapers like the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and that’s because they’re losing viewership to the internet.
The idea that the media is owned by conservative businessmen who call the shots in favor of Republicans is utterly laughable for no other reason that the pool of t.v. news reporters, newspaper journalists, actors, talk show hosts, magazine writers and editors, etc., are all overwhelmingly liberal to begin with. Do you really think people like Dan Rather, Katie Couric, the editor of the New York Times, etc. are going to deliberately slant the news conservatively because their bosses tell them to? And look at Hollywood, a tried-and-true bastion of liberalism if there ever was one. Why aren’t producers and investors concerned that the overwhelmingly liberal messages their movies espouse are going to lose them money?
It’s specious to the point of absurdity to think that profit motive disproves liberal media bias.
Reading comprehension problem? I said there was no political bias, period, not that Conservatives control the media. The only bias is profit.
And you can trot out all the left-wing hosts you want; I’ve got Fox News, the New York Post, ClearChannel, and talk radio to prove that Conservatives aren’t exactly being underrepresented either.
The New York Post? Who the hell reads that outside New York? Clear Channel radio? Please.
And now, if you’ll permit me…
Ahem:
ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, Newsweek, Time, Cosmopolitan, Playboy, Vanity Fair, Gentleman’s Quarterly, Esquire, Oprah, Hollywood (movies and celebrities), The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, US Weekly, most of the nation’s colleges and universities, etc., etc., virtually ad infinitum. To one degree or another, all of these entities either actively promote or subliminally encourage liberal politics and way of life.
So yeah, we got Fox and we got Limbaugh.
So what does it say for your side that with all you got goin’ for ya, enough to take liberalism from a population density of about six or seven percent in the early sixties to approximately 50 percent, Fox and Limbaugh have effectively stopped your progress cold?
I’ll tell you what it says: that people can be pursuaded to adopt liberal ideology when it seems that that’s what everyone is espousing. Once they get to hear the consevative side of things, even if by comparison the conservative side is tiny, and they’ve had a chance to hear both sides and weigh the pro and cons, liberal ideological progress seems to come screeching to a halt?
As a result this country has elected Republican presidents overwhelmingly since 1980, and turned even turned Congress over to the Republicans in 1994.
The fact of the matter is that you guys’ politics sounds all well and good on the surface, but when people look around and see rampant drug use and its concommitant crime and misery; a woefully inadequate educational system; criminals in their early thirties walking around committing murders with 35 previous convictions on their rap sheets; a 25% teenage female STD rate; a rude, crude, sometimes combative and ill-mannered society; etc., etc., they realize that liberal politics just doesn’t work.
Sure, you guys liberated women and you love to lay claim to championing racial equality (though IMO the civil rights movement, which started on its own in the early sixties and was well underway and making great strides by the time liberalism exploded in the late sixties, would have undoubtedly succeeded on its own anyway and rightly so), but the thing is, those birds have flown! Everything else is more fucked up than it was before and people have grown woefully tired of it.
Um, how is all this the fault of liberalism? It’s well-established, for example, that Bible Belt states, which (presumably) are not bastions of teh eevul liberalism, have higher STD rates than the US average.
And US News and World Report. Wall Street Journal. National Review. The Economist. Fox News 24x7 probably compares with 5 hours a week of Oprah. Rush and Michael Savage and Anne Coulter. And you’re flat-out lying with your claim of institutional bias from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, and PBS. Or does telling the truth now count as a liberal bias?
I’d call that a lie. Or a misguided dream on your part. Fox and Limbaugh have far less to do with this than you’d hope - it’s more about the dirty politics your boys have chosen as their prime tool for winning elections.
Or that when people get told a lie often enough, big enough, and from enough sources including their pastors and local government (Democrats are bad for the working class, weak on defence, and tax and spend Liberals are trying to destroy Christianity and make your kids gay - those kinds of lies) then they start to believe it. It’s well-known Republican strategy, since before 1994, to focus on local elections rather than National ones, and to further ensure their grip on power the Republicans gerry-mander the hell out of their districts after winning them like they did in Texas.
YMMV, of course, since you seem to support the liars and the corruption.
And then returned it to the Democrats in 2006 since the Republicans managed to completely fuck it up since 1994 resulting in record debts and ever-further encroachment of personal liberty, but don’t worry - this is the party of smaller government (which has presided over the largest increase in the size of government in nearly 20 years), and with spending far in excess of anything the Democrats could ever possibly imagine leading to ever greater deficits while at the same time cutting taxes to pay for it all, neglecting infrastructure, and actually making the country lesssafethan 7 years ago.
My, you’ve certainly bought the big lie hook line and sinker, haven’t you? I’d like to see a single cite that any of those things are directly, or even indirectly, the result of liberal politics. And I’d like a further cite showing how any of those things have gotten better under Republican stewardship.
You are such a shill you can’t even give credit where it is due, can you? Republicans fought tooth and nail against de-segregation, equal rights, and women’s rights, yet you seem to think they would have just happened anyways without help. You, sir, are a joke, and a liar to boot.
Doncha know, everything bad is the fault of teh eevul libruls and everything good flows from the sphincters of the Godly Republicans.
Let not facts corrupt this, or any other debate - tell the lies louder and longer and people will believe.
I’m going to take your word for it that this is so, but even if it is (28%, 30%, whatever) it isn’t germane to my point, which is that before liberal influence came to so thoroughly dominate American society beginning in the late sixties, the rate was much, much lower, probably in the 3% range or less…though I don’t have a cite so I could be wrong. Whether it’s 30% in this state or 25% in another is really insignificant. Bible Belt states still have large non-conservative populations, and perhaps there is a rebelliousness among the children of actual Bible Belters who are influenced by what they see going on in the rest of the country and go too far in attempting to emulate it, and when combined with the children of the less conservative population, it boosts the overall rate, but that’s just a guess. Still, like I said, when compared to the halcyon days of this country the current rates are atrocious, whatever they might be.
I, sir, have known a great many Republicans over the course of my life, and none of them…not one!..even so much as resisted civil rights, much less fought against it tooth and nail. No, they, like I, recognized immediately the unfair, demoralizing way that blacks were having to live back then. Some came to favor de-segregation more quickly than others, but that was mostly due to how attempts were made to eliminate it, forced bussing being one example. Many people who were simpatico with the civil rights movement still didn’t like the fact their kids had to get up and hour-and-a-half early to be bussed across town when their previous school was nearby. Many blacks I knew didn’t like it either!
The fact of the matter is, had Republicans and old-line Democrats in the general population dug in their heels, civil rights would never have gotten beyond the demonstrations stage. You are taking highly-publicized actions and efforts by a small minority of the Republican party (and a pretty damn fair number of Democrats at the time) and assigning them to all Republicans in general. It required willing cooperation on the part of most of society to make the civil rights movement succeed, and if the majority of the population at the time had fought it tooth and nail, it would never have succeeded.
You could not be more wrong, though one can hardly blame you, given the anti-Republican Kool-Aid the media and educational system in this country has been feeding everyone since that time.