If you remember before the war all tv stations were very pro war. No one bothered to do any homework. The stations are all pro business and differ only slightly in news coverage.
PBS is thought of as very left in spite of the fact they have rt and LT represented on every issue and story. We do not recognize the slant any more.Pro business and pro establishment is the news .
Democracy Now is a somewhat left slant. They give stories that will never be covered on mainstream news .The INN news on Link would also be thought of as lefty.
I think you’re overstating the differences between the photos. Two of the Democrats are smiling, the Republicans look more neutral. It’s not like the artificially-darkened OJ photos in Time magazine.
It’s very hard, I think, to get a feel on bias for an entire news organization. It’s a judgment that’s very subjected and easily influenced by confirmation bias. It’s also very easy to read meaning into things where no bias is intended, such as the pictures the OP is talking about. A lot of things can go into choosing a photo, but sometimes it’s just a photo.
“This sort of thing?” In every picture, the candidates are either smiling or speaking. And if you look at all of the candidates, as I’m doing, I don’t think one party looks better than the other. Mike Gravel looks horrible.
I think this is a really good question. The easiest way is to look at what they report about, not the way in which they report it (which is what people usually associate with bias). An outlet which consistently picks up any little scrap of bad news in Iraq and ignores equally minor scraps of good news in Iraq would lean anti-war; likewise, the opposite would lean pro-war.
This 2004 UCLA study quantified media bias by their citations (which I think is a really poor proxy to use, but decent as a first pass).
Good analysis and I see your point. Would you except Moderate leaning and Right leaning instead?
I am confused by your NPR smash however. They don’t cover Unions much at all. They appear very fair in their coverage of politics, they lean strongly Green on the environment. (Which is sadly considered a leftist issue)
Jim
Not even close. Not. Even. Close. If your barometer is that they didn’t question the war at the beginning, I guess that means very few people in Congress lean left.
Oh snap! I like how you cherry-picked a non-story as proof of something, by the way. Just because you think a story’s there doesn’t mean there is one. Of course, if you want to compare individual words used in news stories, I can point you to dozens if not hundreds of right-leaning sources that demonstrate, with frightening regularity, word-bias.
I just find it hysterical that some people take it as gospel that Fox is biased, but all the others aren’t. Well, Fox is biased. And all the others are too.
Sure. I could agree that that is the case.
Admittedly, not many have similar views on NPR. All I can say is that I stopped supporting them and (generally) listening to them during their coverage of the Kerry campaign. They were one of the organizations to falsely report finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Perhaps I expect too much, or don’t see the things that they do that are reasonable efforts to cover a topic or story. To my mind, however, they don’t do much of anything that would make them lean left.
Nonsensical and irrelevant. Are you saying that the political spectrum is determined by the representation in Congress? Is that in both range and by weight? Pure silliness.
Again, irrelevant. I like how you suggest that my providing an example, which I acknowledged as an example, is cherry picking, and then you attempt to undermine my point by cherry picking two examples. Neither of those stories you linked to has anything to do with how often the Republicans are filibustering, and I would bet that Fox news chose to describe Republican obstruction in those cases as filibustering because that type of opposition on those issues might look particularly good for right-leaning viewers of Fox. “Yeah, the Republicans are actively doing something we like!”
I have one more follow-up. Is Jon Stewart and the Daily Show left leaning in your opinion?
I ask only as TDS was not all that kind to Kerry either. I think you are in the minority if you think he was a good candidate. That was an election ripe for winning and I voted for Kerry, who I strongly dislike, but he was a terrible candidate.
Jim
While the NYT is always called left-leaning, the paper also published (and failed to scrutinize) Judith Miller’s highly inaccurate reporting leading up to the Iraq War.
Well, I’m not sure that TDS is really relevant to this discussion, since their purpose is to mock the news media we’re talking about. I think, in part, their mockery points out what I’m talking about, in terms of the nature of news coverage, the he said/she said false equivalence and failure to even attempt to evaluate claims.
However, to go back to your question, it’s generally safe to say that if something or someone is funny, it (or he or she) is probably left-leaning. In support of this point, I would direct you to the “Half Hour News Hour” or to Dennis Miller since roughly 2001.
For mainstream politics, the representation in Congress is a pretty good cross-section of the conservative-liberal spectrum. Of course, there is only one avowed socialist, no communists, and no Green Party members. If you are saying there are few fringe views in Congress and that means the political spectrum is not representative, then I guess you are right. But if you want to condemn the media as conservative for not representing the extreme far left, then we also have to conclude that there is no right-leaning networks, either. After all, none of them represent the views of the extreme right wingers like the John Birch Society or the KKK. By your standards they do not represent the totality of the right-wing spectrum and thus cannot be called “conservative.”
One of the reasons that the Congress is so unpopular right now is that they are completely failing to live up to the reasons why they were elected, and do not represent the range of political beliefs and opinions. You don’t get a good sense of this, however, because of the very fact that at best the media leans “moderate” and does not accurately convey the reality of most issues.
For a great example of this (perhaps the best encapsulation period of how the current media functions and the story it tells) just look up any information about Joe Klein’s coverage a few weeks back of the FISA bill for Time magazine. In his article, he describes how the Democrats are blowing it on nation security again and how they are beyond stupid because they have proposed a bill that would require a court order to intercept communications between foreign terrorists.
Such a thing is of course, beyond stupid, and is of course, not at all accurate regarding the FISA bill. The FISA bill in fact clearly specifies the opposite. Klein went on Time’s blog to offer a couple of misleading, tepid corrections, and Time only offered a “correction” that says “Republicans see it this way, Democrats do not.” Time REFUSED to publish letters which would have provided corrective information from Democratic authors of the bill and from leaders of the intelligence committees. They refused to publish letters to the editor from regular readers. They have not provided an accurate correction of the bill. In Klein’s own words, he has “neither the time nor the background” to figure out who is correct.
Turns out that Klein’s source was Pete Hoekstra, a Republican who has a history of making fantastic, incredible claims. That’s it.
Who does Time magazine own? Duh! CNN.
What has CNN’s Howard Kurtz, who is designated by CNN to cover the media and politics, had to say on this matter? Next to nothing.
So, a baldfaced lie proffered by a crazy-ass Republican about a crucial issue can be printed in the leading news journal of the country, in a story that calls Democrats stupid and bumbling, by a “liberal” writer, and not only is the correct information never provided, but Democrats who have the correct, factual, information to contradict the story are blocked from doing so.
This is your so-called liberal media in a nutshell.
I wasn’t aware that the “reality of most issues” is to be found on the left side of the spectrum.
The anecdote you mentioned means little to nothing. Give me an afternoon of watching CNN or reading Time or the Washington Post and I’ll come up with a hundred instances of reporting that favors a liberal viewpoint. I’ll also come up with a lot more that which reflect the absolute ignorance of reporters on most issues they cover. For instance, during the SCHIP debate it was continually referred to as “health insurance for the children of the working poor,” a description which reflects the liberal slant on the issue. A more accurate description “a government health program that covers both children and adults who are the working poor as well as middle class” was hard to find. In general, I think that reflected poor reporting but it also reflects a liberal bias.
I know if you are on the extreme left wing then anything to the right of Dennis Kucinich is “moderate” or conservative. For the rest of the world, though, the political spectrum has a more realistic hue.
Youi guys never heard of “war fever”? That’s what happens when they start pounding the drums and everybody’s brains turn to shit. So you gotta take that into account with the NYT and Ms Miller’s (“The Queen of Baghdad”) you should forgive the expression “reporting”. 9/11 drove a lot of otherwise sensible people batshit pizza, recovery is slow. Point is, I don’t think that says anything much about left leaning, right leaning.
Also, you guys are being way too binary. Is the *NY Times * left leaning? Well, maybe sorta kinda. Is Fox News right leaning? What, you fucking kidding me? They lean to the right like the Pope leans Catholic! This whole “lean” approach doesn’t fit the situation, the allegedly lefty media is only centrist, while the right leaning meida is just to the left of Otto Von Bismarck.
Hey, **Hentor ** and I already agreed to redefine the scale as Moderate leaning and Right leaning. 
Where you are standing kind of skews your perception of the issue. I’d say that the NY Times is very liberal, but I’ll bet you and I have a much different perspective about where the middle of the political spectrum lies.
On the conservative wing of the moderately extreme left.
This reminds me of a furious debate surrounding the St. Louis Post Dispatch during the 1988 campaign.
The paper’s style section ran a story on Barbara Bush and Kitty Dukakis and ran photos of each. Dukakis’ photo was quite flattering, Bush’s photo was not. The paper was flooded with complaints that the choice of photos “proved” the paper’s pro-Democrat bias.
The paper’s ombundsman interviewed the editor who selected the photos. He explained that he had gone through the entire file of photos, selected two that were the same size and proportions, in which the women filled approximately the same area of the photo. In other words, he used a set of technical criteria, not any type of content analysis to choose the photos.
Having known a few photo editors in my time, I’m tempted to believe the explanation, but it certainly didn’t satisfy anyone.
Even if true, on some level, he had to look one good picture and one bad picture and not realize there was something wrong. I bet if he were a big Bush supporter he would have noticed.
I don’t understand why everyone goes into a frenzy every time it’s suggested that the media has a liberal bias. It’s possible that liberals examine things more closely and conservatives rely on tradition, and journalism espouses the former. It’s equally possible that liberals are ruled by emotions and conservatives by fact and journalism relies more on an emotional impact of a story rather than complex facts.
Just let your bias determine why the media is biased.
:rolleyes: Duh indeed.