While I find it difficult to believe that it's possible to quantify bias accurately, I am of the opinion that the majority of media outlets lean to the left. That said, I had a political science class last semester in which we were able to name just as many right-wing as left-wing media sources, so it's difficult to say. Anyway, what do you all think?
Posts: 143 | Registered: Sep 2005
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I think this is interesting, but they used as their basis for comparison, congressional speeches. I would think that given the right wing majority in congress now, that it would skew the results toward finding the press to be more liberal.
It also runs into circularity. If all reporting is biased, then what of the reporting of this particular story? Can we assume this is completely unbiased reporting that we're reading right here?
On the other hand, if it is true that academia and the press tend to be liberal, then might that be because the more knowledgable you are, the better educated, the more you know about the news and current events of the past century, the more likely you are to be liberal in your political leanings? It's something I suspect may be true, but I don't know for sure.
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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Yeah, that's what I was thinking, as well as the friends to whom I showed this. I wonder if they used only the current Congress or looked at past ones as well in order to balance their findings by using Democrat-controlled Congresses.
Posts: 143 | Registered: Sep 2005
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quote:That said, I had a political science class last semester in which we were able to name just as many right-wing as left-wing media sources
"Media sources" is pretty ambiguous. If you were counting people like Sean Hannity or Al Franken, I'd say it's meaningless -- the problem is bias within sources that are at least nominally supposed to be objective, i.e., newspaper reporting & television news broadcasts. I think there is a substantial, disproportionately left-wing bias there.
Posts: 326 | Registered: Aug 2005
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I think there is, too. Just because we were able to name that many left- and right-wing media sources doesn't reflect the influence each has. Left-wing could have a much larger base of exposure, or it could be the other way around. I personally would believe the former, but I have no way of backing that up.
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The media sources two people of differing political views can agree easily are biased are the ones least likely to cause a serious misinformation problem.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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...I think they corrected for the Republican/Democrat controlled Congress because that Congress reflects an American people that is further to the right or left at any given time. The question is whether they adjusted the score when they used media articles from ten years ago -- when the mean ADA score for Congress may have been higher (more liberal) than 50.1.
Posts: 1784 | Registered: Jun 2001
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Another major issue with methodology here is the effectiveness of various think tanks in promoting their agendas to politicians and/or media outlets. If liberal think tanks tend to send press releases and conservative think tanks tend to pay lobbyists to contact specific congresspeople, we'd see the same results.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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Well, I sent a note off to the lead researcher, suggesting that he might be missing the bigger picture when it comes to bias - at as far as some news stories are concerned:
quote: When it comes to euthanasia/assisted suicide/mercy killing, the overriding bias in the media is to frame the issue as a "pissing match" in the "culture wars" - and ensuing coverage leaves out parties who don't fit that framework.
I directed him to two URLs with pertinent commentary on the topic:
An article and interview with me about coverage of "Million Dollar Baby" (toward end of page):
Besides, on Iraq, some of ratings might get kind of arbitrary. Strangely, these days, Republican Senator Lindsay Graham is sounding more "liberal" on Iraq than Democrat Senator Joe Lieberman. (I keep thinking Graham is positioning himself for a presidential run.)
Posts: 4344 | Registered: Mar 2003
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Other articles have covered this one. Basically, here's what they did:
1) Check a Congressman's ADA rating to establish his political leanings. (Note: this is not necessarily an effective measure, but we'll let this one slide.)
2) Count his citations of various think tanks.
3) Assign a "bias" value to the think tanks based on the number of times they're cited by Congressmen with a given ADA.
4) Count the number of citations of the same think tanks in various media.
5) Aggregate the bias value of the cited think tanks for each media outlet, on the assumption that the choice of citations in Congress and the choice of citations in the media are equally likely to be influenced by bias. Assign this aggregate value to each media outlet.
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