I can’t really see the billing of this study as much more than laughable. At best, even if NOT flawed, the study used a single concept of how to measure bias in the media. If the media cited liberal think tanks exclusively and wrote articles that praised conservative ideas exclusively, this study would have found 100% liberal bias. That’s crazypants. And then in addition to that, plenty of valid objections have been raised against the methodology that was used.
It’s also worth noting that many legitimately non-partisan think tanks end up being classified as “liberal” over time when they find themselves on the recieving end of attacks meant to besmirch their findings just because they said something the right doesn’t want to hear. At the very least, if they have liberal bias, it’s not an intentional one and not one they actively seek: their goals tend to be research into this or that issue.
Right-wing think tanks, on the other hand, often have things tantamount to “promote right wing causes exclusively” in their mission statements.
This leads to much tears and gnashing of teeth on the right when a right-wing think tank is identified as such (going off their own fricking charter!) but a supposedly leftist outfit is not (because, well, it doesn’t claim to be one!)
Yep, there are far too many serious issues with the study to make it really wirthwhile. Of course what is always problematic is the mere idea that there is the single dimensional spectrum that defines a person or organization political leanings. I would not be surpirsed to find that there are many folks in the media who have the hybrid viewpoints of things like strong national security, lower taxes and also support gay and lesbian rights, the right to abortion etc.
This is more or less what a survey of journalists conducted by the liberal media watchdog group FAIR found. I.e., that reporters’ personal opinions tended to be “left” of the public on social issues but “right” of the public on economic issues. (See here.) They did not in any way look at how this translated into reporting.
One of the most amusing things to come out of the release of this study is this statement by a Dow Jones Co. spokesman. They are apparently none too happy that the Wall Street Journal news coverage was found by the study to be far more liberal than that of any other media outlet in the study!
No, that is a silly remark for you to make, because you do not understand the methods used. This research is old news, in fact, but I only knew of it from another obscure source.
The researchers need to create a proxy in their attempt to get at media bias. What they do is establish a correlation between politicians’ think-tank (&c.) references and their ADA scores; in other words, they attempted to establish the pattern of references used as a proxy for the ADA score. Having established a strong relationship, they then used the proxy on news reports. It’s pretty easy to understand, really, and it makes intuitive sense.
The study I saw was more akin to a pilot study or a working paper and it had flaws in the method; i.e., a poor sampling of news reports. One hopes they have cleared this up.
Another problem they had, which the article suggests they’ve not corrected, is that they assume that the liberal-conservative stance of the average American is the measure by which “unbiased” is calibrated. Thus, if the US is a very conservative nation, then unbiased news will look liberal in the eyes of the study.
It’s an interesting line of research and I hope it is developed more fully.