I am not surprised. Even an item that the report lists as “surprising” – that NPR is not particularly biased – isn’t a surprise to me, since I’ve always said NPR was very close to being neutral.
So – what to attack this study on? Internal bias?
Methodology?
What else?
I question their methodology.
So mentioning the NAACP makes you left of center? With such a silly premise, how can the results be meaningful?
Outcome.
This study accuses both the Wall Street Journal and the Drudge Report of being “left leaning.” That’s about all we need to hear. We may safely disregard this bullshit.
Quoting the NAACP approvingly as an authority is a very reasonable indicia of left-leaning bias.
It’s interesting, but I’m not clear on the significance of their methodology. Why is the mentioning of think tanks the best standard by which to judge the media’s similarity to lawmakers?
Because congress is currently dominated by conservatives, conservative groups have an easy way to get power: they can go straight to congress. They may therefore be represented in congressional speeches in a manner disproprtionate to their support among civilians.
Because congress is not currently dominated by liberals, liberal groups may end up not ahving as much direct access to the halls of power, and they may need to try to get media attention as an end-run around direct access. As such, they may be disproportionately represented in the media.
It certainly seems to me that the NAACP does more to get media coverage than the Heritage Foundation. I may be wrong on that, but I’d want to adjust for such a dynamic before trusting such a study.
Daniel
The study acknowledges the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page as being conservative.
I’m curious to see this reaction.
Isn’t it more appropriate to show WHY it’s bullshit, rather than say, “Well, the study doesn’t fit with my pre-conceived notions, therefore the study is bullshit.”
Now THAT is a legitimate comment on the study.
But that’s not what they did: they counted the times that “each media outlet referred to think tanks and policy groups.” A report that said, “NAACP embroiled in financial scandal” would count as a liberal reference, if I’m reading this correctly, as would a report saying, “NAACP March on Washington Contains Few Violent Incidents.” I’d consider the first to be a neutral reference, and the second to be a conservative reference (with its implication that the violence is the newsworthy portion of the march, and that the real newsworthy portion is that the march had so few violent aspects).
Daniel
But do they differentiate between quoting the NAACP approvingly as an authority and a mere mention? If a newcast mentions that the NAACP had a meeting in New York, does that constitute approval? I don’t think they’re looking at context, some grad student hits a clicker every time certain words come up.
Bricker, I thought about mentioning this study when I heard about it yesterday, but decided that I would be tilting at windmills. I admire your effort.
The only two things required to see liberal bias in the national media are a decent knowledge base and intellectual honesty. Those who deny it lack at least one of those.
You know, the study is interesting to discuss. Your smug preconceived notions? Not so much.
Daniel
Where do you get “approvingly” from?
I had read something the day before yesterday that went into a bit more detail - a precis of the study, not an article about it.
I’m trying to find that again now. Stand by.
The only thing necessary to see any bias, either left or right, is the intellectual arrogance to believe that only you know the truth, and any view differing with yours is biased.
No, I don’t agree.
“Bias” does not refer only to a variance from the truth. It refers to variance from any given standard.
Therefore, it would be perfectly correct to refer to the LA Times as “rightward biased” if the neutral standard is “Mother Jones”. When I refer to the LA Times as biased left, I mean to compare it not to “objective truth” but to the average view of the US. If compared to the world’s political views, the LA Times is biased to the right again.
And so forth.
If the US was way, way to the right of the rest of the industrialised democratic world, then wouldn’t any any international (or even internationally “minded”) institution be considered “leftist”? I’d be interested to see what the particular scores were for, say, referring to the UNHCR.
In any case, I consider that the job of the media in an industrialised democracy is to criticise the government, whoever it may be in charge. Absence of criticism is an enemy of open society.
Well, I think that a study such as this has to pass a few sanity checks. And, one sanity check involves the WSJ. I agree that the WSJ news section is very different than the editorial page but their study finds the news section to be much further left even relative to all the other media outlets that conservatives regularly harp about. This seems a bit strange.
At any rate, although the press release on this study just came out recently, the study in some form has been out on the web for quite a while and we in fact discussed it most recently in this, thread starting in post #19. I won’t reiterate in detail all of the criticisms that I went through there but just touch on the highlights:
(1) What they really measured was how the media cited various think-tanks and advocacy groups relative to how members of Congress cited them. So, they just found a measure of things relative to Congress. I think a lot of independent observers believe the makeup of Congress tends to exaggerate political leanings…so that, say, when the Democrats controlled Congress in the 1970s it tended to be Left of the American people and in the more recent decade it has tended to be Right of the American people.
(2) The method they used is biased in such a way that it will tend to define the media as leaning in the one direction if the Congresspeople on that side tend to cite more objective, unimpeachable sources than those on the other side (which can happen, for example, in a climate where “liberal” is a dirty word or where one side is more consistently abusing science or economics than the other). For example, related to climate change, I have little doubt that if the authors had come up with a rating for the IPCC or the National Academy of Sciences based on Congressional citations, that rating would have been left of center…probably significantly to the left of center. So, a news outlet that didn’t also cite a clearly right-wing group like Cato, NCPA, or the Competitive Enterprise Institute when they also cited the National Academy of Sciences or the IPCC would come out looking biased.
(3) While the fact that the authors themselves have a bias may not necessarily mean the study would have one, it is important to know what possible biases the authors might have (particularly since, like drug companies who publish only favorable studies, the authors could selectively choose methods that show what they believe to be true). Along these lines, it telling is that Tim Groseclose has scored a trifecta in fellowships from conservative think-tanks, getting the Hoover Fellowship from the Hoover Institution, the Olin Faculty Fellowship from the Olin Foundation, and the Lambe Fellowship from the Institute of Humane Studies. This suggests to me that the way they have chosen to phrase their results (and the fact that their study has become a darling of the right) is not entirely an accident.
In that spirit…I worked in TV news for 10 years, many of those as a producer with absolute control over the content of newscasts. As such, I was hyper-aware of current events.
The reason the references to think tanks are used is because many national stories, both broadcast and print, use them as jumping off points.
“Children are being eaten at alarming rates in red states, says the Center for Political Justice”.
The two key issues here are (a) to choose to do the story at all and (b) to take everything the “Center for Political Justice” says as fact. As anyone beyond age 10 realizes, these groups have an agenda for releasing these “shocking” studies…and the groups a news organization chooses to be spoonfed from reveals their political orientation.
The research cited is usually in the third paragraph (or lower) in newspapers and is a quick throwaway line in broadcast reports.
"African American prisoners on death row are being executed at a rate ten times their white counterparts. In 2005 alone, 47 were put to death nationwide. The figures, compiled by the “Capital Punishment is Bad Society”, show that (insert shocking fact here and continue).
As a producer, I always looked to find the agenda behind someone choosing media coverage. The fact that this is not done at the national level indicates that the people covering the story agree with the agenda of the information being presented.
For those of you who are wondering, this sort of thing filters down to the local level after those who don’t look carefully take it as gospel on the national level and try to “localize” it.
OK. I had an e-mail with a link, and I’ve now deleted the e-mail. Google is useless.
But I’m reasonably sure of what I read. So I’d ask, at least for the moment, that we proceed on the assumption that my memory is correct. I certainly concede that if I’m wrong, and the mere MENTION of the NAACP is enough to garner a point on the liberal side, this study’s conclusions are not worth much.
(“Those bunch of idiots at the NAACP are ruining the country! The NAACP are traitors and every last one of 'em ought to hang!”) Bing! Bing! Two points for the liberal view! — doesn’t make much sense at all.