What are the commonly known political slants/biases of the major news sources, including TV and newspapers? For example, I know that FOX’s motto is ‘fair and balanced’, but is it commonly known that they slant their news towards the right or left?
I’m so I’m so bad about that about that 
I don’t think it’s possible to answer this question without drifting into GD territory. Still, I think it’s fairly non-controversial to say that Fox News slants their stuff towards a conservative bent.
That said, I still maintain the old stereotype of a “liberal media” is so much horse poop – four years of watching the major American news outlets treat George W. Bush with kid gloves should put that notion to rest, IMO.
YOURE NUTS!!! I will agree if you say they are offset by the right radio media, but television and largley newspapers are smothered with lefty ideals/propaganda. Just tonight I saw something on soliders getting welcomed home by family and friends and as soon as the story ended I was imediatley inundated with casualties numbers, one guy who lost his legs, one guy who lost his vision, and a slighted comment about the “cost” of war. All of which was COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT to the first 20 minuets of a hald hour show. AND, PLEASE NO-ONE TRY TO DEFEND THAT COMMUNIST PETER JENNINGS.
I think this is more of a debatable question than a factual one, so I’ll move this thread to GD. I’ll fix the thread title as as requested.
bibliophage
moderator GQ
The best way of assessing this is simply to take in news sources from around the world and compare them. I always thought that CNN was highly US-centric and tended to favour the US or its allies in the way it reported certain stories. (What I have seen of Fox seems to me an absurd parody of CNN in this respect.)
Truly international news sources such as Reuters, News International, Yahoo etc would probably be viewed as “leftist” in the US, but only because the US lies far to the political right of the rest of the industrialised democratic world. The BBC World Service also has a reputation for in-depth, rigorous and unbiased treatment.
Do you even know what a Communist is?
Or, one may say, Europe is far to the left of America and the (mostly more conservative in a non US-centered way) rest of the world. Replacing America with Europe as the ideological center doesn’t make it any more balanced 
One cannot dispute that the New York Times has a definite liberal bias. Time (?) and Newsweek (definitely) have a left-leaning tendancey, but US News and World Report is pretty balanced. World magazine (www.worldmag.com) is definitely far right.
One way to detect slants, if you’re not really attuned to that sort of thing, is to find the distribution of ideology in the op-eds. Generally, they reflect, in an exaggerated fashion, the ideological slant of the rest of the paper.
One egregious leftist news item in CBS news was their story about one homeschooler who was abused. They basically used 1/2 of the story to talk about that, the rest to less-than-subtly trumpet the benefits of the public school system and generalise about the unsafety of homeschooling.
That depends. If you ask a liberal, the media has a conservative bias. All media. If you as a conservative, it all has a liberal bias.
Me, I’m more or less a moderate. I know the truth. The media is biased towards…
(Wait for it…)
…making lots of money.
Okay, so maybe I don’t have a good answer to your question, but the fact is… if a person is left of most of the major media, he’s going to complain that they’re conservative. Because they’re not as liberal as he is. Ditto with the reverse.
Me? I can’t be bothered to remember the proper definition of conservative or liberal anymore, and tend to read only news stories having to deal with science, technology, or entertainment.
My personal feeling is that FoxNews is extreme right, MSNBC is moderate right, CNN is moderate left. CBS is moderate left, NBC and ABC I think are about in the middle.
I made no mention whatsoever of Europe. I spoke of “the rest of the industrialised democratic world”, thus including Australasia, Canada, Japan, S. Korea and Malaysia and, if we stretch “industrialised”, South Africa, Brazil and India. You are free to name industrialised democracies which sit as far to the right as the US but I doubt you could get much further than Israel, and even it differs from the US substantially in areas of its social and economic ideology.
I’d say that The Times is about as centrist as news comes. If anything, the news is slightly to the right. I can’t believe how harsh Times was on Clinton, and why they are so easy on Bush. The editorials are slightly left-wing biased. But one must look at the substance of the editorials. Dowd and Safire are ramblers who cancel each other out. While they are both liberals, Krugman and Herbert are almost always on point. Brooks is very right-wing and Friedman seems to be shifting in that direction.
Left-wing media bias? Ba-lo-ney. It’s one of those things that people repeat enough times so others begin to believe them. Soon enough, a good 50% of the population believe it.
I dunno. I can think of one issue where the mainstream media displays a distinctly left-wing bias - and is proud of it. We aren’t gonna hijack this thread down that road, but that issue is: gun control. You’d be hard-pressed to find a single story in the mainstream media, with the possible exception of FOX News, about the benefits of an armed citizenry.
Anyway, here’s a pretty good place to begin researching the question the OP asks: http://www.stats.org/record.jsp?type=page&ID=26 As an added bonus they’ve got the Straight Dope in their table of useful links.
Your perception of bias is going to come from the baseline of your own positions. If you’re way over on the left, a slight left bias in the media is going to look like right wing bias. If you’re way over on the right, a slight right or centrist bias is going to look left.
But here’s an example of something that’s been bugging me, that I’ll chalk up to bias: When the Democrats attack Bush in the most vitriolic ways, the media portrays it like this:
“Kerry questions Bush’s Guard Service.”
“Bush under fire for lapses in guard record.”
In other words, honest, tough questions that put Bush on the defensive.
But once Bush started criticizing Kerry (in VERY mild ways compared to the charges of treason, lying, desertion, etc coming from the left), suddenly the ‘attack dogs’ are out. The Bush ‘attack machinery’ is in play. The campaign is suddenly ‘dirty’, whereas before Bush got in the game, all we had were endless ‘tough questions’ for Bush. It’s all a matter of perspective.
NPR is about as far left as you’re going to see in the radio or TV service. Fox, I don’t argue, is pretty far right. Talk radio is obviously to the right. Most of the major news outlets, though, really, I don’t see much difference in and they are fairly moderate. They just try not to piss anyone off because they want they most viewers, so they stay in the middle.
College newspapers, definetly liberal. Some of the larger newspapers its hard to say anymore, I think, because they are being bought out by larger companies. The Indianapolis Star, for example, where I live, being owned by the Dan Quayle family formerly, was pretty conservative. Then they were bought out by the Gannett and now is not as bad as far right as it was.
I would argue that as long as there is some variety out there to satisfy everyone's tastes AND no individual gets stuck in a rut in ONLY getting their news from one source AND you are at least somewhat aware that any news source is biased, it doesn't really matter. NPR pisses me off sometimes, but if so, I just change the channel and stop listening so much. Same goes for Rush or local talk radio.I think the Times is usually regarded as being “the Democratic paper.”
On the first day of the only political science class I had to take as an engineer, the professor said that the two most important papers in the country were the NYT and the WSJ: the NYT being the Democratic mouthpiece and the WSJ being its Republican analogue.
Not to criticize either–the NYT is the only paper (in the literal, honest-to-god made of actual newsprint sense of the word) I subscribe to, and I pick up the WSJ occaisonally. I definately agree with the professor regarding the biases, though.
Metacom: Those biases apply to the editorial pages. (And I think the WSJ editorial /op-ed page is more consistently Right than NY Times is Left.) The reporting tends to be more balanced…In fact, it is sort of amusing to see the WSJ reporters writing articles in which they contradict the lies on the WSJ editorial page.
Here is a link to FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) which is the left-wing media watchdog group (which apparently operates on a shoestring budget compared to the right-wing Media Research Center). Admittedly, their views reflect their biases, but it is useful for people to see the beefs that the Left has with the reporting that appears in major media including supposedly-left-wing biased outlets like the New York Times.
I think the Times is mostly centrist, but it got pulled seriously to the left by Howell Raines. Remember his crusade against Augusta’s refusal to allow female members? No one cared about that but the Times, and they tried to move that story on the front cover almost every day. Finally they gave up, and the issue vanished. Raines was also responsible for the Jayson Blair fiasco, and he was apparently hugely unpopular in the newsroom.
But that problem has been corrected, and the Times seems to me to have been making more effort to be balanced.
As for television, I’d say Fox leans to the right, the big three networks lean slightly to the left, and cable as a whole is pretty centrist when you throw in CNBC, MSNBC, PBS, and CNN.
Print media as a whole is still biased slightly left, but then radio is overwhelmingly right. And the Internet’s a bleemin’ free for all.
I’m not sure if I’d use stats.org as a resource to determine the leanings of the major news sources, as it is affiliated with the Center for Media and Public Affairs, Inc.
Here are their primary supporters, most of which make Murdoch seem like a liberal:
The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
H. Smith Richardson Foundation
Link to the Straight Dope or not, they are not exactly the most impartial bunch in the world.
No, you’re all wrong. Media bias isn’t a subjective thing at all and this has been PROVED using a scientific floating point system.
Or should I say ascertained? Damn those highly-crafty liberals…