There was recently an interview with McCain on Fox following his grandstanding pseudo-campaign suspension in which the interviewer said something like, “That was certainly selfless and made a big difference in negotiating…” I expected the interviewer to go on and ask, “Mr. McCain, your campaign has the momentum of a runaway freight train. Why are you so popular?”
They’ve also repeatedly said “Osama” for “Obama” then “corrected” themselves.
And one of their reporters recently called for Obama’s assassination.
If you want your media to be Pravda-like instruments of pro-government, one-party-loyal rhetoric, you might have to settle for Fox because no other network comes close. Even if they aren’t biased enough to your liking, just yet.
What amazes me, cricetus, is that some intelligent and well educated people lap that crap up. Even worse, they quote it as fact to support their adoration of McCain and Palin.
I gotta say, the media is doing a pretty good job of covering this race. Witness their reporting of Palin’s renewed insinuation that Obama is somehow a terrorist. :rolleyes:
I encourage everyone to check out this link, where you will find that the memo (which will shall assume to be authentic) does not at all say what the headline writer, and Shodan, claim it does.
The article is titled “ABC News Director Tells Staff Not To Hold Kerry ‘Equally Accountable’ to Bush .” Patently unfair, no? Clear evidence of bias! A smoking gun! Except… what the memo *actually *says is:
“We have a responsibility to hold both sides accountable to the public interest, but that doesn’t mean we reflexively and artificially hold both sides “equally” accountable when the facts don’t warrant that.”
A subtle difference, to be sure. If necessary I’ll be glad to explain it to those, like Shodan, who apparently missed the distinction. Most readers will not need it explained to them.
I think it can generally be chalked up to confirmation bias. If you’re conservative, you tend to notice (and be annoyed by) any perceived liberal slant while thinking any conservative slant is “as it should be”. Same on the liberal side. I will point out, however, that the OP offered nothing but his own unsubstantiated opinion to support his thesis.
I listen almost exclusively to NPR (National Communist Radio) because I like their programming.
In my opinion NPR is a great example (and there are examples on both sides) of how a media element which probably thinks it is being fair and balanced in fact represents the view of the staff doing the reporting, albeit unwittingly.
For this reason the debate will never be resolved.
Here’s a typical example of the problem:
Last week I heard an NPR report on the Presidential campaigns. The Obama reporter gave an update on the campaign which was essentially a selection of soundbites from a speech given that day by Mr. Obama. The McCain reporter included only a couple soundbites from Mr. McCain along with the reaction to those statements by the Obama campaign. Individually, both reports were entirely appropriate and unbiased. Juxtaposed they represented a clear Obama bias. I am sure the producer did not deliberately skew the news toward one campaign or the other.
It is simply not possible to be an unbiased journalist unless you have no personal opinions. To ascertain whether “The Media” is biased or not would require knowing how the individuals responsible for the content voted, or would vote, or will be voting. As of now, that’s apparently considered verboten, for reasons which are unclear to me. It should, instead, be a requirement so that the listener may be better able to filter any bias.
This is quite telling. It seems to me that some people will call the media biased if they report FACTS and do not give equal time to the other parties DISTORTIONS.
In other words, if you find a picture of the Republican eating a baby, you don’t have to go find a picture of the Democrat eating lamb chops so you can write your story, “Candidates dine on young”.
Even more telling: as evidence of the media’s dishonest slant, we are presented a dishonestly slanted article about a media memo decrying dishonest slant.
My feeling is that for all the complaints by conservatives of media bias, they don’t really want the media to straighten up and fly right and reflect a truly objective point of view.
No, what they’re trying to do is cast doubt on all the facts that they find inconvenient, as well as browbeat media outlets into giving undeserved equal time to their viewpoint. After all, whereas the liberal–make that left-wing–viewpoint is not completely immune to bias, conservatism and objectivity are complete strangers.
I have found a general trend that those who assert that media bias is conservative do so based on kinds of evidence that they reject when it comes to liberal media bias. I’m trying to forestall this.
You have asserted (I think) that Fox is biased to the right, but that none of the other media you mention are biased at all. OK, what evidence do you consider probative about Fox? That way, I will know what you will consider as real evidence.
If it is no more than your opinion and you are not interested real debate, fine. If you are, then let’s see on what you want to base the discussion.
Well, it would be nice to see a peer reviewed study that was not so clearly flawed in its design and execution. (An expert is a person who avoids the small errors while sweeping on to the grand fallacy. Peer review generally is good for reducing (not eliminating) the small errors.)
In this case, the entire study was just odd. They did not examine any other content except reference to think tanks. However, it is entirely possible for the WSJ or the Drudge Report to mention Center for American Progress twice as often as the Heritage Foundation, but it does not make them left leaning if 99% of their citations to Center for American Progress are negative (which is quite likely in terms of Drudge, since the focus and technique of Drudge is to express shock and horror at the events of the world (at least if they arise on the Left). The Scientific American study would seem to have actually made some genuinely interesting observations (although we probably have to dismiss it since it noted Senator Obama was the target of much more negative press than Senator McCain at the time that various Right leaning pundits were pretending that the MSM was canonizing Obama as well as that Fox is way off to the Right in its presentation ).
It is far more realistic to note that various news outlets lean slightly Right on some issues (military, business economics, political parties) and slightly left on some issues (abortion, marriage, sexual mores) while noting that they are basically driven by a desire to pander to readership with the ancient “if it bleeds it leads” mentality.
Claiming any strong, across-the-board bias in the media–in either direction–appears to be little more than whining when one’s ox is gored.
I was struck by this example from Gwen Ifill during the VP debate:
“IFILL: OK, our time is up here. We’ve got to move to the next question. Senator Biden, we want to talk about taxes, let’s talk about taxes. You proposed raising taxes on people who earn over $250,000 a year. The question for you is, why is that not class warfare and the same question for you, Governor Palin, is you have proposed a tax employer health benefits which some studies say would actually throw five million more people onto the roles of the uninsured. I want to know why that isn’t taking things out on the poor, starting with you, Senator Biden.”
Call it whining if you must, but for me it’s an egregious example of bias.
You flip Mr Biden a question that makes a point for him about (only) raising taxes on people who earn over $250,000/yr. Then–under the pretense of asking the other candidate the same question(!)–you raise the spector of the second candidate “taking things out on the poor” and you throw in a gratuitous reference implying that there is good third party objective evidence the McCain position will throw five million more people onto the roles of the uninsured.
These are very complex issues and yet the bias of the questioner is absolutely clear: Mr Biden’s problem is he wants to tax the rich–that reduces to "class warfare. Mrs Palin’s problem is she wants throw five million people onto the roles of uninsured and take things out on the poor.
Now a listener for the Dems may agree that these positions are correct and accurately summarized. Nonsense, says the Repub supporter.
But for the moderater to phrase a supposedly even-handed question that way? She doesn’t even get her own bias, for goodness’ sake!
Well, tomndebb beat me to it, at least regarding the main flaws in the Groseclose and Milyo study. But i’d like to add a few things.
The great thing about conservatives is that they would never do that.
That’s not a peer-reviewed study. It’s a press release summary of a peer reviewed study, and quite a poor summary, at that.
Not only does it give little more than an overview of the study, but it crucially fails to discuss in any detail the methodology used by the authors, or to analyze whether (and why) there might be problems with the study. Now, i don’t really blame the UCLA newsroom for that. They probably figure that when they release a statement about a peer-reviewed study, interested parties will take the trouble to read the study for themselves and think about its merits. Obviously they overestimated you.
I’ve read enough summaries and news reports of peer-reviewed and academic studies to know that, if you really want to understand what the study is all about, you probably should read the study itself, rather than relying on second- or third-hand accounts. Anyone who’s spent any time on this message board should know this too. I guess you just didn’t have the time.
For those who are interested, you can read the study here (pdf).
Firstly, as tomndebb notes, the only measure used here is references to a particular group of think tanks, with no evaluation of other (non-think-tank) sources of information, nor of the rather large number of think tanks that were not included in the study.
This particular methodology, among other things, resulted in a statement by the Dow Jones company, owner of the Wall Street Journal. The statement noted that…
So, in choosing their think tanks, the authors of the study simply ignored some of the largest and most frequently cited representatives of industry and labor in the United States, and yet included an animal rights group that even most liberals consider to be crazy and outside of mainstream political discourse. Of to a good start already.
So, for example, if a news story quoted Citizens for Tax Justice (a think tank defined as liberal by the study) on an issue related to small business taxation, and then offered a quotation from the National Association of Manufacturers as a rebuttal, the article would count as having a liberal slant simply because it mentioned CTJ. Because the NAM was not included in the study its participation would not weigh on the conservative side, even if it made a conservative argument.
Furthermore, even if we move beyond think tanks, there are plenty of other sources of information out there. For example, what if you were writing an article about foreign policy, and one of your sources was the Bush White House. If you reported the White House position on the subject, and then reported the opinion of the (according to the study, liberal) think tank, the Center for Defense Information, your story would again be tagged as “liberal,” even if it was written in a manner very sympathetic to the White House and the Bush Administration. All it takes for the story to get recorded as having a liberal bias is the mere presence of a quote from a liberal think tank.
And how do we determine whether think tanks are liberal or conservative in the first place? Well, lets hear from the authors themselves about how they work this all out:
Note that there is no attempt to make any independent determination about whether these think tanks are liberal or conservative in their policies. The political slant of the think tanks themselves, and then of the media outlets being investigated, are determined in the study purely by a measure of how often they are cited by liberal or conservative members of congress.
The authors of the study recognize that this might be a problem, and note that…
Some think tanks might be relatively easy to categorize. For example, few would quibble with the idea that the American Conservative Union is a conservative think tank, or that Citizens for Tax Justice has a liberal policy outlook, and that’s how each one comes out in the study.
But what about some of the others on the list? According to the measures used by the authors, the ACLU is a slightly conservative think tank, while the RAND Corporation qualifies as a considerably liberal think tank. As the Dow Jones critique mentioned earlier notes:
That is, as the Dow Jones folks recognize, a pretty fucked up set of measures.
Let’s look at a particular think tank and consider why the study’s methodology might be flawed. The study measures each think tank on a scale of 1 to 100. 1 is most conservative, 50 is center, and 100 is most liberal (the ACLU gets a score of 49.8; the RAND Corporation gets a 60; Citizens for Tax Justice gets 87.8; Americans for Tax Reform gets 18.7). The libertarian Cato Institute is given a score of 36.3 by the study, marking it as solidly conservative. But it’s very hard to place an organization like Cato on the liberal/conservative axis.
Many people consider its economic outlook to be conservative (low taxes, etc.), but many of its social and cultural positions resonate very strongly with liberals. The Cato Institute has been whipping on the Bush Administration non-stop for the last 7 years for its big spending and its curtailment of liberty. About the only Bush policy Cato supported was the tax cut. The Groseclose and Milyo study misses all these nuances in its absurdly simplistic methodology.
One of the problems with the study’s evaluation of the media outlets is raised by the Dow Jones critique, and can be found on page 57 of the study. While Groseclose and Milyo looked at over 13 years’ worth of CBS Evening News, 9 years’ worth of ABC News, 12 years’ worth of NPR Morning Edition, and almost 4 years’ worth of PBS Newshour, it only looked at 10 months of New York Times coverage, and 4 months (!) of Wall Street Journal coverage. The other newspapers in the study had similarly small time windows.
Not only that, but the period covered for most of the newspapers (January through April, 2002) was well outside of the big political stories like elections. While the TV portion of the study was sustained enough to cover several election cycles, and thus perhaps to give a good overall sense of how the media work in different situation, the study devoted to the press was so small as to be almost useless, especially considering that the think tanks chosen for the survey were chosen based on the number of times they were cited by the media. If the study had covered, say, 10 years of the Wall Street Journal, chances are that the NAM or the AFL-CIO might have made the list.
There are more problems with this study; so many more in fact, that dealing with them all would exceed the maximum characters allowed in a single post. Some of the key issues can be found in this critique, but i’ll give the last word to the folks from Dow Jones. Talking about the study, they note:
Why is it that, for you, asking Palin about “taking it out on the poor” is an example of bias, but asking Biden about “class warfare” is apparently not?
Both of those terms are ones that each party throws around regarding the opposition. Republican often accuse Democrats of “class warfare” whenever taxation and similar issues of wealth redistribution come up; Democrats often accuse Republicans of “taking it out on the poor” when these issues are raised. I think that using each party’s rhetoric as the basis of the question was fair. Maybe not especially intelligent or nuanced, but fair.
Same here as for tomndebb’s nonsense. The people qualified to critique the study are the peer-reviewers for the journal in which it was published, not one of the subjects studied.
More hand-waving. This was a study of bias, therefore they covered the ten most commonly cited think tanks in the media. So your statement that they ignored the “most frequently cited representatives” is demonstrably false.
So, even if you take an avowedly liberal organization’s word for it as to who is “conservative”, “liberal”, and “centrist”, the media is clearly biased towards the liberal end.
This is the kind of thing that makes it difficult to take these objections seriously. Even if you count the ACLU as conservative, the media is biased significantly to the liberal side. How much more obvious do you need?
THe trouble being that, there has not been a Presidential election for the last twenty years or more that the Democratic candidate has not received significantly more positive coverage than the Republican. Not one. Not when the Republican was the incumbent, not when the Democrat was the incumbent, not one.
so that the listener may be better able to filter any bias.
).