All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Liberal media watchdog group Media Matters has posted a complaint about Wednesday's installment of "Katie Couric's Notebook," which centers on Barack Obama's background. You can watch the Notebook by clicking on the video box.

"Is America ready to elect a president who grew up praying in a mosque?," Couric asks at the outset of the Notebook. She goes on to say this:

Barack Obama has arguably the most diverse religious background of any candidate ever. He was raised in Indonesia by a Christian mother and Muslim stepfather and attended a Catholic school -- but while growing up, also studied Islam. That background sparked rumors that he had studied in a radical madrassa, or Quranic school -- rumors his campaign denied, declaring that Obama is now a practicing Christian.

As Media Matters notes, on Jan. 23 CNN posted a story headlined "CNN debunks false report about Obama," noting "[a]llegations that Sen. Barack Obama was educated in a radical Muslim school known as a 'madrassa' are not accurate, according to CNN reporting." Other media outlets followed.

Media Matters is making a fair point here: To bring up the madrassa rumor and note only that "his campaign denied" it leaves open the possibility that the claim is true. Since we know that it is not, Couric would have been well served to have pointed out as much.

Left-leaning media watchdog group Media Matters is criticizing CBS News Chief White House Correspondent Jim Axelrod for mischaracterizing the debate over domestic surveillance in his May 8 "Evening News" report on the forthcoming Senate hearings over Michael Hayden, who has been nominated to become the new CIA director.

Writes Media Matters:

[Axelrod] noted that "[t]he White House believes it wins any time there's a debate on electronic eavesdropping of terrorists and would welcome the grand stage for Hayden to defend" the Bush administration's warrantless domestic eavesdropping program. However, the debate over the surveillance program is not a question of whether the government can conduct "electronic eavesdropping of terrorists," but rather whether the government can conduct warrantless surveillance of residents of the United States in apparent violation of federal statute.

I asked Axelrod to respond.

"I don't think these are inconsistent points," he said. "Warrantless surveillance is a subset of the general issue. The White House believes anytime the debate turns to electronic eavesdropping, it plays to their advantage."

"I didn't go through every subset of the general topic that I introduced," he continued. "This was a subset of a larger topic. I don't think there's any conflict."

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Running the risk of beating this subject into the ground (I know, too late), I feel compelled to once again address this recurring proposition that grand conclusions can be drawn about bias based solely on sometimes arbitrary and often meaningless labels. Media Matters is at it again, this time with a study about guests who appear on MSNBC’s “Hardball.” Last month, the organization whose self-described mission is “dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media,” offered a similar study that concluded Sunday shows unfairly broadcast more conservative messages simply because more people labeled Republican or conservative appeared on them.

I’ve called that methodology into question here and since Media Matters repeated the exercise for “Hardball,” I wanted to offer a couple further thoughts. First, the “Hardball” study counts only the first two months of this year, hardly long enough to draw broad conclusions. More importantly, those who appeared on the program were once again assigned labels – either Republican, Democrat, conservative or progressive – rather than being judged on anything they actually had to say. That practice remains a fatal flaw in this methodology.

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The liberal media watchdog group Media Matters has responded to my take on their new study about the ideological makeup of guests and commentators on the Sunday morning shows. The study’s author, Paul Waldman, writes:

You take issue with the fact that our study focused on the simple question of who gets on the Sunday shows, while ignoring "the intra-party dynamic" -- the fact that a few prominent moderates like Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Joe Lieberman (D-CT) make frequent appearances. While this may be an interesting topic to explore, it has no bearing on our fundamental findings: that Republicans outnumber Democrats, and that conservative pundits outnumber progressive pundits.

Please read Waldman’s entire response and make your own judgment about the critique. He raises some interesting points that to me illustrate how some of the guests – like McCain – and some of the journalists – like columnist David Broder – may be viewed differently by those coming from different perspectives. While I don’t think my views are “laughable” or “ridiculous,” I’m certainly willing to acknowledge there is a difference of opinion.

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Sunday morning public affairs shows on CBS, ABC and NBC are responsible for the fact that “our national debate – with all its consequences for policy and public opinion – has been pulled unmistakably to the right.” At least that’s the conclusion made in a new study released by Media Matters, which has found that the nearly 7,000 guests that appeared on those three networks’ Sunday morning interview programs skew heavily toward the right-side of the political spectrum.

Media Matters – the media watchdog organization “dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media” -- looked at each guest on CBS’ “Face The Nation,” ABC’s “This Week” and NBC’s “Meet The Press” for the years of 1997 through 2005 and classified each with one of the following designations: Democrat, Republican, Progressive, Conservative or Neutral. Among the findings:

The balance between Democrats/progressives and Republicans/conservatives was roughly equal during Clinton’s second term, with a slight edge toward Republicans/conservatives: 52 percent of the ideologically identifiable guests were from the right, and 48 percent were from the left. But in Bush’s first term, Republicans/ conservatives held a dramatic advantage, outnumbering Democrats/progressives by 58 percent to 42 percent. In 2005, the figures were an identical 58 percent to 42 percent.

You can read the entire report and its findings here (Adobe Acrobat required), but I want to focus on the methodology for the moment, particularly this part:

Our goal in designing the methodology for this study was to ensure that the classifications would be as unambiguous and defensible as possible, even to those who profoundly disagree with the goals of our organization.

Readers should be clear on what we did not do: These classifications do not represent an analysis of what each person actually said when she/he appeared on a show on a given date. Coding each guest’s comments for their ideological slant would have introduced enormous difficulties and opportunities for subjectivity. Instead, we simply classified each guest based on her/his general partisan or ideological orientation.

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We didn’t think it possible, but the bias debate has actually, literally, reached a point of inertia. Media Matters for America and Media Research Center have pointed out where it is apparently possible, within a single news segment, for a network to express bias against both Democrats and Republicans.



Both organizations posted criticism on their Web sites about a report on the “Evening News” on Sept. 28 regarding Tom Delay’s recent indictment. You can watch it here:

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