Yeah, the NYT is not the analog-- especially when there is The New Republic out there. Those are the two big conservative/liberal mags.
We are well and truly fucked.
Shodan, hate to be the one who has to break it to you, but I don’t think attacking Bush is politically indicative any more. Everybody hates the guy.
They don’t. Most are conservatively biased.
And before you get on my case, I have provided at least as much evidence for my assertion as you have provided for yours.
Is not. See my response to John in post 24.
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To John Mace, Mr. Moto (just watched one of your movies last night, BTW, good work), and Evil Captor collectively, regarding liberal or conservative bias on local paper editorial pages:
Cite?
.
Here’s a peer-reviewed UCLA study that might just be a tad less biased than the Media Matters study:
Media Bias Is Real, Finds UCLA Political Scientist
So even if Media Matters found one small aspect of media coverage, syndicated punditry, that happens to marginally tilt to the right, it doesn’t come close to making up for the big leftward tilt of the rest of the media.
Your editorializing about quality aside, the point is that it is suspect for Media Matters (or anyone, for that matter) to make conclusions about an individual’s politics based on their serving as editor on a particular publication. I suspect that NR’s editors are probably all right of center politically, but that assumption is not exactly scientific, and such assumptions become even more doubtful when applied to publications that are not as obviously and consistently conservative as National Review. As previously noted, news coverage in the Wall St. Journal sometimes reflects centrist or even left of center views. Is it logical to assume that all the editors at the Journal are right-wing? Wait, I forgot that you pretty much are assuming this.
Journalistic ethics (a changeable construct) apply to editors just as well as reporters. And if you don’t think reporters are willing to tilt their stories in order to influence public opinion, you don’t know much about the news business.
It is possible that many papers have center/left/“progressive” staff op-ed people, with one or a few conservative/right syndicated columnists tossed in for “balance.” That is, it is possible that we have many left-leaning papers staffed by a super-majority of left/center people, with conservative/right “balance” provided by “outsourcing” the conservative/right stuff to syndicated people.
There are many ways that bias can infect the reporting of news. It doesn’t have to be a ‘slant’ to a story. It doesn’t even have to be intentional. For example, it could affect a person’s honest perception of what is or isn’t newsworthy. If you’re convinced that capitalists are robber barons driving the country to hell, then a story about a crooked businessman may seem very newsworthy to you. A story about a crooked union leader, on the other hand, may not seem that newsworthy because you believe unions are fundamentally honest so one bad apple doesn’t really change anything.
It can alter the way in which you perceive the validity of a claim, and hence the level of fact-checking you feel is appropriate. If you believe that a Republican politician is more likely to be a scumbag than a Democrat politician, you may be less skeptical of a claim of scum-like behaviour on the part of the Republican, and less likely to check the facts behind it before publishing. Now, you might be doing your level best to be scrupulously honest, but your own biases color the way you perceive things.
This is of course why scientists go out of their way to conduct double-blind studies - bias creeps in where you might not expect it, regardless of how honest everyone is trying to be.
It would be interesting to do a study on the political stories that major newspapers and television networks have had to issues retractions for in the past few years, and see how many of them tilt left, indicating a higher level of scrutiny on right-leaning stories. Of the few I can think of offhand, all tilted left (but of course, that could be my own bias - I might not remember the right-tilting mistakes - selection bias is another common form).
Subject to the caveats mentioned earlier, that seems like a reasonable conclusion.
Understood. Nonetheless, I don’t think this can be used as evidence of “media bias”, without some analysis of both the unsigned, daily editorials in the papers mentioned, and especially with addressing what Sam Stone mentioned about “slanting” news coverage.
When people complain about media bias, they don’t mean (usually) editorials. That is legitimate comment, from either side. What they - or at least, I - mean by complaining about media bias is things like one of the directors of ABC News instructing his reporters to slant their coverage against one of the candidates in a recent election. (Cite.)
Publishing an editorial for or against a candidate is perfectly legitimate. Publishing an editorial and calling it a news article is what constitutes media bias.
Or because the rise of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News meant that an editorial page of unrelieved leftism was less likely to attract readers who had alternatives. Heck, maybe the editors put Will there to draw in readers to as to get them to read the other, unsigned editorials in hopes of converting them. 
And perhaps the conservative editorials are there because they attract readers in a way that liberals don’t.
“Conservative syndicated columnists are more popular and successful than liberal ones”. Is this an indication of bias by the editors, or an indication that the columnists provide a better product? If the success or failure of a news medium is simply a choice by the editors, why does conservative talk radio succeed and Air America goes bankrupt?
Nicely put (as usual). That goes to what was mentioned earlier - what Media Matters labels as “centrist” may not be what the rest of the US thinks of as centrist. And my experience is that the term “progressive” means “liberal to the point of being marginalized and therefore trying to sneak it in by the back door”. YMMV.
Regards,
Shodan
Actually, that is a link to a press release about the study, not the study itself. Can you provide a link to the actual study? (Not meant snarkily - I’d really like to read and evaluate it).
This seems to be a decent summation of comments from several conservatives here. Since you say “if”, let me ask: do you think “Media Matters found one small aspect of media coverage, syndicated punditry, that happens to marginally tilt to the right” or not? What I’m trying to get at (similarly with John Mace earlier), is what do you think of this study?
I don’t find this to be a compelling argument. Look at it the other way: Sam Stone claims there is a “big leftward tilt of the media.” By your logic above, that would be because the obviously liberal news is hugely popular and successful. Somehow I doubt you would agree with that hypothesis.
Here’s a link to the paper (in PDF)
http://www.polisci.ucla.edu/faculty/groseclose/pdfs/MediaBias.pdf
I travel around the country quite a bit, and always buy local papers, and always read the op-ed pages and the letters to the editor. I may be subject to selection bias, but I have never seen a letter to the editor from a liberal writer cancelling their subscription because of something that reactionary son-of-a-bitch George Will said. I have seen many letters to the editor from people cancelling their subscriptions because that traitorous commie Ellen Goodman (for example) said something bad about our Commander-in-Chief. Often these letters are organized campaigns by some group.
Whether you like it or not, conservatives are more organized about these campaigns, and they exert the kind of pressure that editors, and more importantly, advertisers, respond to. That’s the way the free market works.
I made no assertions. I specifically said that the data was missing. I suspect that we’d find the editorial pages to be more liberal, but I really don’t know. But here’s the thing-- this study looked at 1/2 of the equation, namely the Op-Ed pages. Without examining the other 1/2 it’s really impossible to make any conclusions about which side is getting more newspaper exposure.
If they want to make the claim that the Op Ed pages lean right, then I say: So what? Tell me how both pages lean, and then we might have something meaningful.
Many thanks!
One admittedly unscientific observation I’ve made is that conservatives are willing to follow editorial rules, while liberals prefer to make their own. Thus, if an editor says, “I’ll only give you 500 words to explain your point of view,” the conservative will say “Okay, five hundred words” while the liberal will say, “I’ll just hand you my five thousand word manifesto; oh, and by the way, you’re not to edit it.” Because newspapers have no obligation to print anything, guess which viewpoint in this scenario will see print and guess which will see the inside of the round file?
As I said, not a very scientific observation, but after hearing many stories from left-of-centre letters-to-the-editor writers about how their letters are never printed (such letters being 2000-word “do not edit” essays when the paper’s policy states “no longer than 200 words and we reserve the right to edit for space”), I wonder if there’s any merit to it.
To establish that, you would need to compare relative success for media with an obvious slant to those with a different slant in markets where the consumer had a choice - not one-paper towns, or in an era where there was no mainstream medium that did not lean one way. That was the idea behind my comparison of Air America vs. Rush Limbaugh.
Certainly there are other factors behind the rise in popularity of new media like blogs, and the overall reduction in popularity of newspapers, but when you compare, say, FoxNews with PBS, and see that Fox News has more viewers even though PBS gets subsidized, or the success of conservative talk radio and the relative lack of success of Air America, you have to wonder if a point of view besides fairly consistent liberal has something to do with it.
Back in the sixties, the opportunity cost of trying to start a TV network or a newspaper was too high for the MSM to have much competition, and therefore they could push their ideas almost by default. If you didn’t like watching TV news with a liberal slant, what else could you watch? But nowadays, where the cost of starting an Internet outlet is so minimal, 60 Minutes can’t get away with a story using falsified documents even for a few days - Internet bloggers have the word out about the fraud within a few hours.
That was part of the genius of Rush Limbaugh. He saw a market (conservatives) that was under-served, saw that talk radio was cheap and under-utilized, and started a trend that continues to this day. And part of the reason for the success of people like Bill Bennett and Michael Medved and the failure of Air America is that the market for liberal news is not underserved - liberal media have to compete with the New York Times and PBS and ABC and CBS and NBC and all the others who have been at it for decades.
Certainly if the opportunity cost is low enough, liberal outlets can spring up - withness the SDMB and the vast number of liberal blogs. But the most successful start up of traditional media nationally is Fox News. CNN started it with 24-hour coverage and a traditional agenda. Then Fox News comes along with a similar coverage style and a moderate right of center vewpoint - and beats CNN consistently.
Regards,
Shodan
An interesting facet of this debate (to be settled by some highly objective academic peer-reviewed study 
) is how perceptions of media bias are affected by the degree to which the complaining party(ies) are out of power.
Much of the complaining about leftist bias which formerly came from the right (not the only source of complaint, but a major part of it) diminished due to electoral successes as well as the rise in non-traditional sources of “news”. It’s only been since Bush II entered office that we’ve seen numerous claims from lefties about supposed right-wing media bias here and IRL.
Attempts by people on the left to sustain complaints about right-wing bias have run afoul of the same problems that hampered their right-wing counterparts - a dearth of professional, peer-reviewed published studies by persons without an obvious axe to grind, and poorly defined, subjective criteria for establishing bias. Largely due to these factors, it is far easier to defend againsst bias charges than it is to press a successful offensive on the issue, as leftist advocates have found to their dismay.