Media Bias Is Real, Finds UCLA Political Scientist

[seriousstan]

While the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is conservative, the newspaper's news pages are liberal, even more liberal than The New York Times. The Drudge Report may have a right-wing reputation, but it leans left. Coverage by public television and radio is conservative compared to the rest of the mainstream media. Meanwhile, almost all major media outlets tilt to the left.

These are just a few of the surprising findings from a UCLA-led study, which is believed to be the first successful attempt at objectively quantifying bias in a range of media outlets and ranking them accordingly.

"I suspected that many media outlets would tilt to the left because surveys have shown that reporters tend to vote more Democrat than Republican," said Tim Groseclose, a UCLA political scientist and the study's lead author. "But I was surprised at just how pronounced the distinctions are."

"Overall, the major media outlets are quite moderate compared to members of Congress, but even so, there is a quantifiable and significant bias in that nearly all of them lean to the left," said co‑author Jeffrey Milyo, University of Missouri economist and public policy scholar.

http://www.newsroom.ucla.edu/page.asp?RelNum=6664

[Clarkansas]

1. I stopped reading after "Drudge... leans left." Give me a break,

[sniffa]

2. drudge is a commie

i knew it!

[Warpy]

3. What, this loon never heard of FAIR???

If the NAACP is their idea of a leftist organization, then I think we can safely assume that the whole study had an extremist right wing bias. The article was long on anecdote, short on figures, and claimed an "everybody knows that..." just a little too often.

In contrast, the studies done by FAIR present us with actual numbers of which viewpoints and political parties are represented and which are left out completely.

My guess is that this is a fringe lunatic who poisoned the study from its very beginning by his own prejudice and extreme bias.

On edit, the dead giveaway paragraph: "Five news outlets — "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer," ABC's "Good Morning America," CNN's "NewsNight With Aaron Brown," Fox News' "Special Report With Brit Hume" and the Drudge Report — were in a statistical dead heat in the race for the most centrist news outlet. Of the print media, USA Today was the most centrist."

Give me a fucking break.

[Miss Chybil]

4. When do we get to get off this ride? nt

[yknot]

5. These guys just wont give up

Crap methodology, employed by crap right-wing-poli-sci-hacks, for a
predetermined crap outcome. Here's what FAIR says about this "study":

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2534

[necso]

6. Check out the methodology.

Lol.

[leftchick]

8. you are correct

:rofl:

[Ready4Change]

26. Agreed. They are counting the number of mentions.

Heres how it works.

1. Positive talk about a RW group?
-Then Keep talking about it.
"I agree, we're better off without Saddam."

2. Negative talk about a RW Group?
-Change topic to criticize a LW group.
"Why only mention the GOP? The DNC is just as guilty!"

3. Positive Talk about a LW group?
-Bring up non-sequitor about LW wrongdoing.
"Oh bull. He's no better than CLINTON!"

4. Negative talk about LW group.
-Keep talking about it.
"The democrats lost because they bring nothing to the table."

In 3 out of 4 cases, they are talking about LW groups. If you only count the mentions, it sounds biased in favor of the LW.

However, that is 3 negative LW topics vs 1 positive RW topic. If you count positive vs negative mentions, it is clearly biased in favor of the RW.

Try this:
My dog is a show winner. Your dog is ugly. Your dog stinks. Your dog eats poo.
Whose dog sounds better?

[Walt Starr]

28. THE METHODOLOGY HAS BIAS!!!

OMFG! The study is completely false!

[ProfessorGAC]

39. I Challenge Them To Offer Up The Study For Peer Review

I will guarantee it will not pass muster. No decent statistician or social scientist will concur with these findings. It's prima facie illogical to detect bias in reporting and equate it to bias in the editorial section. It's apples and oranges, and the OPINION section of any news outlet makes the overall tone so obvious that no amount of "bias" in the reporting will make any difference. Well, maybe if you are an idiot political scientist who wanted to find that distinction before the study ever began. What a hack!
The Professor

[GatoLover]

7. I'm an enthusiastic reader of the Wall Street Journal

and it does ring true to me that the editorial page is hard right, while the news pages are left. Counterintuitive, I know, but I believe it.

[Thaddeus]

9. Totally Bogus n/t

[IChing]

10. The fourth most centrist outlet was "Special Report With Brit Hume" on Fox

OK, now someone give me a reality check
Brit Hume the centrist.
I must be out of touch with
Faux news since I don't watch
them.:wtf: :puke:

[GatoLover]

12. There is one very balanced feature of "Special Report with Brit Hume"

The closing segment, usually less than sixty seconds, plays some parody short from Letterman, Leno, Kimmel, Stewart, et al. They don't hesitate to poke fun at Bush, Cheney, or anyone in the Administration. It's usually hilarious. And, once in a while, Fox actually runs some tape of its own which ridicules them. Even Fred "The Beetle" Barnes usually laughs.

[Up2Late]

11. This way this "Political Scientist" defines the argument is twisted.

"...Overall, the major media outlets are quite moderate compared to members of Congress, but even so, there is a quantifiable and significant bias in that nearly all of them lean to the left," said co‑author Jeffrey Milyo, University of Missouri economist and public policy scholar.

Yeah O.K., the News media is left when you compare it to members of Congress, The MAJORITY in Congress are Right-wing politicians, quite a few EXTREME Right! Of course the News Medias is left of the RWer's in Congress, Duh.

[orleans]

35. exactly what i was thinking

the quote you used: "the major media outlets are quite moderate compared to members of Congress"

and then this quote:

"Past researchers have been able to say whether an outlet is conservative or liberal, but no one has ever compared media outlets to lawmakers," Groseclose said. "Our work gives a precise characterization of the bias and relates it to known commodity — politicians."

the study is flawed from the onset
you can't take the members of congress and use them as a baseline for being centrist--well, i guess you can and then you end up with this bullshit research.

the only thing this study may have proved is that the media, overall, tends to be more liberal than congress--which ain't saying much!

i believe the media used to be more liberal than it is now. i agree that a possible majority of reporters might be more liberal than conservative but i also think they've been so busy overcompensating and trying to be "fair" that they have tiled the news and messages in favor of the right.

and that headline may be true: "media bias is real" but it sure as hell is not bias in our favor.

[FormerDittoHead]

13. UCLA College research Bias is real, Finds DU reader

I suppose the "researchers" are trolling for cable news interviews - they're sure to get more than their share...

[sallyseven]

14. Give me whatever they are drinking.

[pschoeb]

15. Author is Republican

Gave money to Herman Cain's campiagn

Also an Olin Faculty Fellow
Hoover Institute National Fellow
Lambe Fellow (Koch Family)
Center for Study of Public Choice (James M Buchanan, conservative economist)

[still_one]

23. thank you, I was looking to see where he came from

[Moochy]

29. Thanks!

Always good to FOLLOW THE MONEY back to the institutes and non-think tanks. Fucking mouthpeice of Sauron this guy is. :)

Too bad CBS can't put up every talking head's credentials in the interest of full disclosure.

[NashVegas]

16. Wall St. Journal #1 in Liberal Reporting?

I don't read the pages. But let's face fact: the Journal's readers demand reality-based converage, they depend on it for their investments.

Else:

Groseclose and Milyo then directed 21 research assistants — most of them college students — to scour U.S. media coverage of the past 10 years. They tallied the number of times each media outlet referred to think tanks and policy groups, such as the left-leaning NAACP or the right-leaning Heritage Foundation.

Just because a paper is referring to the Brookings Institute or what have you, it doesn't mean the story is being given a positive slant.

[agincourt]

17. Whatever,

Just do a study that proves smoking abestoes prevents cancer, and that SUVs use less fuel than bicycles, it's all good. What the hell is condidered "leftist"? Child labor laws? Abolition of poll taxes? What pray tell would be considered rightwing? Reinstating a monarchy along with feudalism? Legalizing slavery again? I wonder who financed this "study"?

[high density]

18. What a hilarious news release!

"If viewers spent an equal amount of time watching Fox's 'Special Report' as ABC's 'World News' and NBC's 'Nightly News,' then they would receive a nearly perfectly balanced version of the news," said Milyo, an associate professor of economics and public affairs at the University of Missouri at Columbia.

That's the dumbest thing I've read today.

[Triana]

19. duplicate post...

...and not LBN

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=5621602&mesg_id=5621602

[RoyGBiv]

20. Methodology is flawed ...

This researcher is committing some fairly flagrant acts of intellectual dishonesty. He directed his research assistants to "scour" news from the past 10 years and give a score to the liberal side if the news outlet cited a liberal source in the story. The editorial slant of the article means nothing, i.e. the conclusions or actual message. It's about sources and something he calls citation patterns. By this measure, a flat-out racist editorialist could cite the SPLC or NAACP and then proceed to disagree with every point cited, and the author would "lean left." That's how Drudge ends up with a "leans left" rating.

Utter horseshit.

Oh, and this comment is a gem:

"If viewers spent an equal amount of time watching Fox's 'Special Report' as ABC's 'World News' and NBC's 'Nightly News,' then they would receive a nearly perfectly balanced version of the news," said Milyo, an associate professor of economics and public affairs at the University of Missouri at Columbia."

The researcher reveals his fundamental flaw in the way he approches the subect right there. He's bought into the idea that if you have two extremists in the room and listen to the same account of an event from both of them, their biases cancel each other, and you somehow arrive at the truth.

Of course, none of this is the point. He did what he calls an "objective study" with numbers and everything. It'll be cited from here until doomsday regardless of whether other political scientists trash his conclusions.

BTW, this isn't LBN.

[roguevalley]

21. bs. a leftie would print the truth no matter what and they don't.

[still_one]

22. the drudge report leans to the left!!!???!!@#$#$%%^%$#@@!#@

WHO IN THE F*CK is TIM GROSECLOSE and JEFFREY MILYO?

DOES THEY HAVE A BIAS

You can't tell me that these pukes won the last elections, including the swift puke crap, and that it is a liberal bias

bring on bernard goldberg, paid by the RNC

Unless I know what their credentials are then they are nothing but manure

[pretzel4gore]

24. tim groseclose, jefferey milyo, gopig activists fronting as polsci's

just the facts (names) ma'am, that's all that's needed from this....

[Jim__]

25. A response from the Left Coaster to this article.

A bit of the response:

(a) The approach G-M use establishes media ideology indirectly, by using the media's think-tank citations and comparing those to think-tank citations by legislators in order to find the legislator whose citations are the closest match. Thus, if a legislator is liberal and the media's think-tank citations match that of the liberal legislator, they would declare the media to be liberal. Momentarily setting aside the fact that this definition of media bias is itself incorrect, their claim would make sense only if it can be independently proven that the think-tanks cited by the liberal legislator are actually liberal. Their study does not prove this at all, considering that their methodology to establish think-tank ideology is itself deficient. Thus, at a fundamental level, their entire conclusion on media bias breaks down. (NOTE: It is not at all implausible that left-leaning legislators may cite more centrist think-tanks in public than progressive/liberal ones, especially considering how the liberal advocacy groups and think-tanks are tarred negatively by the GOP in the illiberal conservative media).

(b) The use of weighted-average ADA scores (for the House and the Senate) is slightly more meaningful than the Median (which they used in the original version of their paper), but even this is completely deficient and incorrect because the ideological center is set not using an independent, objective measure of ideology but based on the (political) positions of the people in Congress at a given point in time. Thus, their model simultaneously assumes that ADA scores can provide an absolute picture of a legislator's ideology but that media and think-tank ideology should be determined not using the same absolute reference but a relative, moving reference that is highly dependent on who's the majority in Congress and how they think or vote. This is not an acceptable model, for, if the minority party becomes the majority party in the next election, the derived ideology of think-tanks or the media could change significantly even though their actual positions underwent ZERO change.

Put another way, if the Republican majority suddenly decides to become 100% conservative, guess what happens. The weighted-mean ADA score would drop, even if the Democrats in Congress DID NOT change at all, and even if the media outlets that are considered "liberal", by the G-M definition, remain STATIC (i.e., no change in their think-tank citation ratios and that of the corresponding "liberals" in Congress). In this case, even though the media's ideology has NOT changed at all, it's adjusted ADA score(s) will artificially look more liberal compared to the lower weighted-mean ADA score. (BONUS FOR LEFTIES: This is right in line with one of the long-time Republican strategies of declaring the media (and Democrats) to be too "liberal" by moving the country to the Right). This is not a partisan issue though. The opposite could occur when we are talking about media outlets that are considered "conservative" because they match the citations of conservative Republicans and if the Democrats decide to become 100% liberal.

(c) The final, and perhaps most serious, problem with their analysis is their attempt to derive a conclusion of media bias using this study - because their definition of media bias, is in itself, completely flawed. Their confident conclusion that they have demonstrated "liberal" media bias is wrong because the study does not examine whether the media's news reporting is accurate. Their assumption that "seldom do journalists make dishonest statements" is also fatally incorrect. The focus on think-tank citations completely ignores what the media communicates to viewers or readers when it is NOT citing think-tanks, which is a big chunk of the time. The irony of the authors' citing serial liar Brent Bozell's claim that there is "rarely a conscious attempt to distort the news" is incredibly ironic! Their claim that "the citations that they gather from experts are also very rarely dishonest or inaccurate" also suggests that they are very un-skeptical when it comes to absorbing news.

More...

[VOX]

27. Check out NewsMeat -- Tim Groseclose is a right-wing tool...

http://www.newsmeat.com/fec/bystate_detail.php?city=ENCINO&st=CA&last=Groseclose

In 2003, he donated to the campaign of Herman Cain for Senate in Georgia. Check out Herman Cain's Web site: http://www.hermancain.org/liberal.asp
You Might Be A Liberal
By Herman Cain

If you believe there is no Social Security crisis...you might be a liberal.

If you believe government can spend your money better than you can spend your money...you might be a liberal.

If you believe we can save Social Security by raising taxes and reducing benefits...you might be a liberal.

If you believe the economy would be as strong as it is without President Bush’s 2003 tax cuts...you might be a liberal.

Etc., etc.
<snip>

So, of course, Groseclose comes up with his brand of horseshit "research." What really bothers me is that it carries UCLA's imprimatur.

[Protagoras]

30. So which way did they quantify TRUTH?

Kinda curious that news apparently isn't measured by ACCURACY...now it's either LEFT or RIGHT.

Sounds like some kid has been swilling Edith Efron again.

[Cleita]

31. Somebody ought to drag him out of his ivory tower and

show him what left is.

[proud2BlibKansan]

32. How does he explain the conservative monopoly that OWNS our media?

Murdoch
Scaife
Moon


Need I go on?

[rman]

37. easy: ignore it

[Media_Lies_Daily]

33. They lost me at the comment that The Drudge Report "leans left".

[Josh]

34. Sometimes it's measured in voting, which is not accurate -

sure, a bunch of reporters who are on the front lines of the issues they report on, like hurricanes and wars, may see the devastation and be inclined to vote Democratic, but their corporate bosses are conservatives, and they are the ones who set the tone of the news and have final publication approval.

[rman]

36. Nice, except that reporters don't decide what gets published

It's the same argument on which the original claim of liberal media bias is based.

The editor and the owners of the corporation that owns the media outlet (ie General Electric in the case of MSNBC) decide what gets published.

Selection of what gets published starts with journalists not writing about certain things because they know from experience that it "doesn't help their career".

There are so many liberal issues that get virtually no coverage in the MSM. Ie poverty in the US and all that's related, the disaster of Free Trade Agreements, US govt support for RW dictators the world over.
If you want to hear about those things you'll have to go to the real left-leaning media such as Democracy Now and certain AAR programs.


What Liberal Media?
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20030224/alterman2


The Myth of the Liberal Media
The Propaganda Model of News
Noam Chomsky
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6435.htm (real video)

[MannyGoldstein]

38. Let's Pretend We're Scientists

This piece 'o poop's been around for a year or so - it is absolutely pretend science. If anyone is interested, I just wrote an analysis on my own blog site, BlueWorksBetter.com.

My conclusion from the analysis:

As far as I can tell, here are the only conclusions that one might possibly draw from this work:

1. Most media outlets studied are pretty close to one-another, bias wise. (Seems correct)
2. Drudge is significantly to the right of "the pack". (Seems correct)
3. Fox is significantly to the right of the Drudge. (Seems correct)
4. So, either all outlets are biased, or only one of the above three groups is unbiased.
5. Based on ADA ratings, Republicans in Congress are far further to the Right than Democrats are to the Left. (This supports the observation that the Republicans have become an extremist fringe element.)

To read the entire post: "Proving" Media Bias - The Right Pretends To Do Science

[MrMonk]

40. Bias

These are just a few of the surprising findings from a UCLA-led study, which is believed to be the first successful attempt at objectively quantifying bias in a range of media outlets and ranking them accordingly.

It's a UCLA news release puffing a UCLA study. There's yer bias.

[sam sarrha]

41. after checking on your history. this logic is to expected from you..

:rofl: ..