Are you saying that Fox is not strongly skewed to the right, but all other networks *are *strongly skewed to the left?
Are you saying that Fox *is *strongly skewed to the right and all other networks *are *strongly skewed to the left?
Are you saying that Fox is fair and balanced, while … well, you get the picture. There are a lot of options here, which is why I’m asking for clarification.
Oh, and I thought that linked study proved it’s methodology was lacking by putting the Drudge report closer to the liberal side of things – the Drudge report with consistently misleading headlines and careful placement of articles. This (and other flaws) doesn’t mean that because the study was defective, the opposite of its conclusions must be true; it just means that the study isn’t useful as supportive evidence of its own conclusions.
Oh, and I want all politicians to hate the media – and I want the media to ask the most uncomfortable questions possible. This War on the Media, while currently a right-wing tactic (easily adoptable by the left when the time is right) is about as unpatriotic an attack as possible. Yes, there is bias out there, but the “gotcha ya journalism” ad hominem and its ilk is repugnant.
He may very well think he is liberal. There are a lot of pundits and commentators who describe themselves as moderate or liberal who nevertheless routinely express ideas that are anything but liberal. Just like the old saying about stupidity, I’d say that liberal is as liberal does (or says).
I don’t have anything out for Rooney in particular - what I see of him is generally him being an unfunny old grump about some new fangled thing. He seems mostly “get off my lawn” than politically conservative. I was just responding to your assertion that his self-description is necessarily a resolution of the question.
I’m not sure of Rooney’s political leaning, but I vaguely remember seeing him praised highly by the NRA. Not that that venerable organization is at all conservative.
I don’t remember the details. I’ll try to find it (the article) later.
I guess anything short of a “blatant liberal diatribe” is ok? How about liberal biases in what/when/how they report? Have any major media outlets actually done any original reporting at all on Obama/Ayers/Annenburg?
Do you really mean FOX as a network or the FNC? FNC should be compared with MSNBC and the other cable networks. The broadcast networks (and CNN too I think) should be held to a higher standard based on their legacy as the only media outlets that most people once thought were fair in their reporting.
Too bad FNC didn’t choose “Fair and Balancing” as their slogan.
These are non stories, actually, dredged up by a desperate campaign and the general anti-Democrat machine. An attack is just an allegation, not a source of news. That FNC isn’t looking into allegations that McCain is a Manchurian candidate or that Palin is a closet Satanist doesn’t make them any more right wing than they are.
I’m doing what I mentioned I was doing - trying to establish beforehand what standard of evidence is going to be acceptable to prove bias from the right, and then apply the same standard to prove bias from the left.
Because, as mentioned, Dopers tend to assert one of two positions -[ul][li]the MSM in America is generally biased towards conservatives, or [*]Fox News is biased toward conservatives and everyone else is centrist.(See the OP)[/ul]And they tend to accept without question any kind of evidence that Fox is biased, but reject the same sort of evidence in principle with regards to anyone else. [/li]
The reason I mentioned the Halperin memo and the National Guard forgeries is to rebut other common assertions. [ul][li]The first is the idea that reporters are not biased to the left, they are biased towards the truth. As the Halperin memo shows, this is not the case. The memo states that Kerry lied all the time. But if ABC went on presenting rebuttals to both sides, as would be expected if they had an even-handed commitment to the truth, Bush was going to win. [/li]
Therefore, they dropped their commitment to the truth and began slanting their coverage. [li]The second is the canard that “the truth has a liberal bias”. As the 60 Minutes forgeries showed, when the facts do not have a liberal bias, the facts are not presented. Lies are presented instead.[/ul][/li]This kind fo thing is hardly rocket science. What tends to occur is that conservatives perceive a liberal media bias. So do centrists. So do liberals. Extreme liberals perceive a conservative bias.
Which tends to confirm that people see biases that conflict with their own. But it also tends to confirm just how biased the media are, since one has to be pretty far left of center to see a bias in the media that conflicts with your own.
An unbiased moderator should at least ask each opponent the same question.
In this case, Mr Biden got one question, and Mrs Palin another. Moreover the content of these two questions themselves reflects a clear bias on the part of Ms Ifill.
She could have said to Mr Biden for instance:
“Mr Biden, why do want to tax those making $250,000 even more when they already pay a greater percent of their income than any other group?”
The completely different question she posed to Mrs Palin cannot be distilled into “taking it out on the poor” and the one point she associated with it about throwing “five million more people onto the roles of the uninsured” does not accurately reflect the core proposal: http://www.factcheck.org/mccains_5000_promise.html
But the main point I am making is not the relative merits of the candidates’ positions. It’s that each was asked a completely different question, and the phrasing of those questions reflects a deep bias on the part of the moderator. Ms Ifill distills arguments against increased taxes into their potential for “class warfare” rather than, say, their negative effect on economic growth. Class warfare is a very weak reason to avoid taxing the wealthy, and as such is easily swatted down by Mr Biden. (And I’d bet that Ms Ifill herself swats it down in her own mind as being of no real consequence to the correct position that the rich should be taxed more and not less.)
She associates Mr McCain’s health plan with “some studies” suggesting it will toss 5 million poor out on the street rather than, say, quoting arguments in favor of it.
Your failure to see a bias that is obvious to me is a good example of how impossible it is for any third party to decide the extent to which the media is biased. Few of us are objective third parties; we ourselves are all biased.
Actually, it was 50. Still haven’t read the actual study?
Except that, by selecting very small samples from the print media, they ignored the think tanks studied most frequently by sources such as the Wall Street Journal.
So what?
You are correct that they “computed an ADA score for each of the media,” but they did so merely by counting which think tanks the media cited and then comparing this to which think tanks were cited by particular members of Congress. It’s not a reasonable measure of what constitutes bias. The basic assumption that underlies their whole study is at best questionable, and at worst completely bunk.
Never suggested otherwise.
The problem is that the ADA does not award its scores simply by counting think tank citations. It looks at the Congresscritters’ actual voting record. Quite a different thing.
But this “avowedly liberal organization” has made no determination whatsoever about the media.
I take the ADA’s word, for the most part, about which members of Congress are conservative, liberal, and centrist. But the ADA has made absolutely no statement about which media organizations are conservative, liberal, and centrist. The study is simply a matter of two academics transposing the ADA measure from one group onto another, using flawed assumptions and reasoning. That’s quite a different thing from the ADA making its own determination based on the actual politics of the parties involved.
Perhaps, but i’m pointing out the flaws in the overall methodology. Also, i note that you conveniently ignore the fact that, in the study, the RAND Corporation is listed as considerably further on the liberal side than the ACLU is on the conservative side. You think that’s important, or not?
Furthermore, while in some cases the study’s authors use think tanks that might act as paired examples, in other cases there is no conservative equivalent to the liberal think tank, thus adding an inherent tendency in their own study to find the media more liberal.
For example, if they look at news stories about taxation issues, they can look for citations of Citizens for Tax Justice (very liberal) and Americans for Tax Reform (very conservative). It’s not unlikely that a story about tax policy might quote one or both of these, sometimes in rebuttal of one another.
But what about, for example, issues related to race? The NAACP is categorized as a very liberal organization, so whenever the NAACP is cited, this pushed the study’s measure further towards the liberal end of the spectrum. But there are many cases where the NAACP is cited that are either not especially political at all, or where there is no countervailing “pro-racist” interest group.
For example, a story about the James Byrd murder in Texas in 1998 might quote the NAACP decrying the horrible racism that led to such an act. This story, absent any quotes from any of the other think tanks on the list, would then count towards the “liberal bias” of the news organization.
That sort of methodology is only tenable if you’re willing to concede that liberals care more about racism and violence against blacks than conservatives do. Are you willing to make such a concession? Actually, even if you are, it still doesn’t make the methodology valid.
I’m confused.
First you poo-poo people’s own perceptions, and say that we should look at peer-reviewed studies and journalists’ own opinions. But now that your peer-reviewed study has shown to be, ahem, problematic, you’re happy to trot out the vox populi as a measure of media bias. Which one is more important to you?
Sorry, but you stating this with such confidence doesn’t make it true.
We seem to have come full circle. You appeal to studies in order to support what you claim is the popular perception, and now you pull claims about bias out of the air in order to support the studies. Classic circular reasoning. And just about what i’d expect from you.
Actually, you are correct - it was fifty. Your statement is still wrong, though.
Thereby establishing what they said.
I’m sorry, but this is just silly.The notion that left-wingers are no more likely to cite left-wing sources than anyone else goes beyond “counter-intuitive” and into “come on, be serious” territory.
False dichotomy, of course. I mentioned the widespread realization that the MSM is biased to the left to show that it is not merely a question of whose ox is being gored. Everyone can see it (except the far-lefties).
Nice cherry-picking, Shodan. I notice that you refrain entirely from responding to the most substantive criticisms, and offer nothing but homilies and bromides in response to the rest. I’m done with you in this debate, as you clearly have no intention of taking the whole thing seriously, or addressing the substantive issues.
I like to approach this issue from the opposite directiomn and there are a couple of different ways to do that.
One is to ask that, if journalists–well educated people who are trained to be objective–are more likely to be liberal or vote Democratic, then what does that say about liberalism and the Democratic party?
Another is to look at a good chunk of representative MSM news content, say, several issues of the New York Times plus several days’ of CNN programming with episodes of the major networks’ nightly news thrown in. Then ask yourself, “that’s your liberalism? That’s what’s so terrible?” If that’s how the scourge of liberalism is defined, then color me underwhelmed.
It’s pretty obvious when media wishes to add bias to politics. My local newspaper has a nationally known cartoonist who attacks Republicans on an almost daily basis (when he’s not attacking religion). This is presented in the editorial section so it carries with it the sponsorship of the newspaper.
There are many techniques to add bias to news. Some of the usually techniques involve quoting someone with no obvious background to render opinion.
Case in point: I was watching a piece on the elections and a number of people were presented in video clips that were clearly not any form of political analysis. They were all Republicans who were voting for Obama. It was nothing but an Obama ad presented as news.
Other methods of skewing the news is the classic “but is it really” piece. This has been around for a long time and consists of taking a good piece of news and spinning it the other way with the words “but is it really”. Again, it usually involves an interview with someone who has no expertise on the subject. It’s fabricated news.
I take a similar approach when conservatives complain about liberalism in academia.
I’ve always conceded that university faculty tends towards the liberal end of the spectrum, especially in my own discipline (history) and other humanities subjects. But rather than seeing some sort of conspiracy to keep conservatives out, i wonder whether it simply might be that liberals are more likely than conservatives to fulfill all the following criteria:
Be an “A” student (you won’t get into, or remain in, a decent PhD program without excellent grades, and you need a PhD to be an academic, in most cases)
Be willing to spend 4 years in college, then another 4-10 years in grad school (depending on the discipline, the subject of your dissertation, etc.).
After 8-14 years in post-secondary education, during which you’ve demonstrated consistent excellence in your academic work, an ability to teach, and to conduct and present original research, be willing to take a job that starts at $40,000 to 60,000, and that will probably top out (at full, tenured professor level) at about $100,000 to $140,000.
When first year out lawyers are pulling in high five figure and low six figure salaries, when bankers and finance whizzes are making six figures in their sleep, when engineers are making high incomes early on, and when doctors have the possibility of seven-figure incomes down the road, it could simply be that it’s mainly liberals who are willing to spend over a decade in post-secondary education in order to take a comparatively low-paying job.
I’m not saying this is definitely the answer, but it seems at least as plausible to me as the conspiracy theories floated by some conservatives.
I wonder. This doesn’t sound like any attempt at analysis to me. I’ve seen the same scenario, but with Democrats voting for Palin, er, I mean McClain*.
There seems to be an awful lot of crossover voting this time. This is being the funnest election in my lifetine. Except for maybe Clinton’s 2nd.
*How about that one? the old fake faux pas.
Anyway, I hope they never do start using only experts.
How about liberal biases in what/when/how they report? Have any major media outlets actually done any original reporting at all on Obama/Ayers/Annenburg?
the old fake faux pas.