Dr Grump said:
I look forward to you backing this up...
Oh, dear. RATFLMAO..boy oh boy...read a couple of biographies on Rupert Murdoch that are available at your nearest book store, then get back to me..
Sure.....
Oh nice ad hominem too...
A Measure of Media Bias
“The editors in Los Angeles killed the story. They told Witcover that it didn’t ‘come off’ and that it was an ‘opinion’ story. …The solution was simple, they told him. All he had to do was get other people to make the same points and draw the same conclusions and then write the article in their words.” (emphasis in original) Timothy Crouse, Boys on the Bus, 1973, p. 116.
Do the major media outlets in the U.S. have a liberal bias? Few questions evoke stronger opinions, and we cannot think of a more important question to which objective statistical techniques can lend their service. So far, the debate has largely been one of anecdotes (“How can CBS News be balanced when it calls Steve Forbes’ tax plan ‘wacky’?”) and untested theories (“if the news industry is a competitive market, then how can media outlets be systematically biased?”).
Few studies provide an objective measure of the slant of news, and none has provided a way to link such a measure to ideological measures of other political actors. That is, none of the existing measures can say, for example, whether the New York Times is more liberal than Tom Daschle or whether Fox News is more conservative than Bill Frist. We provide such a measure. Namely, we compute an ADA score for various news outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, the Drudge Report, Fox NewsÂ’ Special Report, and all three networksÂ’ nightly news shows.
Our results show a strong liberal bias. All of the news outlets except Fox NewsÂ’ Special Report and the Washington Times received a score to the left of the average member of Congress. And a few outlets, including the New York Times and CBS Evening News, were closer to the average Democrat in Congress than the center. These findings refer strictly to the news stories of the outlets. That is, we omitted editorials, book reviews, and letters to the editor from our sample.
To compute our measure, we count the times that a media outlet cites various think tanks and other policy groups.[1] We compare this with the times that members of Congress cite the same think tanks in their speeches on the floor of the House and Senate. By comparing the citation patterns we can construct an ADA score for each media outlet.
As a simplified example, imagine that there were only two think tanks, one liberal and one conservative. Suppose that the New York Times cited the liberal think tank twice as often as the conservative one. Our method asks: What is the estimated ADA score of a member of Congress who exhibits the same frequency (2:1) in his or her speeches? This is the score that our method would assign the New York Times.
A feature of our method is that it does not require us to make a subjective assessment of how liberal or conservative a think tank is. That is, for instance, we do we need to read policy reports of the think tank or analyze its position on various issues to determine its ideology. Instead, we simply observe the ADA scores of the members of Congress who cite the think tank. This feature is important, since an active controversy exists whether, e.g., the Brookings Institution or the RAND Corporation is moderate, left-wing, or right-wing.
Some Previous Studies of Media Bias
Survey research has shown that an almost overwhelming fraction of journalists are liberal. For instance, Elaine Povich (1996) reports that only seven percent of all Washington correspondents voted for George H.W. Bush in 1992, compared to 37 percent of the American public.[2] Lichter, Rothman and Lichter, (1986) and Weaver and Wilhoit (1996) report similar findings for earlier elections. More recently, the New York Times reported that only eight percent of Washington correspondents thought George W. Bush would be a better president than John Kerry.[3] This compares to 51% of all American voters. David Brooks notes that for every journalist who contributed to George W. BushÂ’s campaign, 93 contributed to KerryÂ’s
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/groseclose/Media.Bias.8.htm
