All Blog Posts from Public Eye

That UCLA-led study we alerted you to earlier this week purporting to find liberal bias in the media is taking quite a bit of heat for its methodology – in our comments section and in the blogosphere. And Romenesko has a round-up, including a statement from Dow Jones, parent of The Wall Street Journal, taking strong exception to the study:

“The research technique used in this study hardly inspires confidence. In fact, it is logically suspect and simply baffling in some of its details.



First, its measure of media bias consists entirely of counting the number of mentions of, or quotes from, various think tanks that the researchers determine to be ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative.’ By this logic, a mention of Al Qaeda in a story suggests the newspaper endorses its views, which is obviously not the case. And if a think tank is explicitly labeled ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ within a story to provide context to readers, that example doesn’t count at all. The researchers simply threw out such mentions.



Second, the universe of think tanks and policy groups in the study hardly covers the universe of institutions with which Wall Street Journal reporters come into contact. What are we to make of the validity of a list of important policy groups that doesn’t include, say, the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the AFL-CIO or the Concord Coalition, but that does include People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals? Moreover, the ranking the study gives to some of the groups on the list is simply bizarre. How seriously are we to take a system that ranks the American Civil Liberties Union slightly to the right of center, and that ranks the RAND Corp. as more liberal than Amnesty International? Indeed, the more frequently a media outlet quotes the ACLU in this study, the more conservative its alleged bias.”

Read full post…

We’ve received some e-mails this morning pointing to a new academic study which says that media bias is real. A summary of the study says:

"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.'"

Groseclose and University of Missouri economist Jeffrey Milyo

"based their research on a standard gauge of a lawmaker's support for liberal causes. Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) tracks the percentage of times that each lawmaker votes on the liberal side of an issue. Based on these votes, the ADA assigns a numerical score to each lawmaker, where '100' is the most liberal and '0' is the most conservative. After adjustments to compensate for disproportionate representation that the Senate gives to low population states and the lack of representation for the District of Columbia, the average ADA score in Congress (50.1) was assumed to represent the political position of the average U.S. voter.



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.



Next, they did the same exercise with speeches of U.S. lawmakers. If a media outlet displayed a citation pattern similar to that of a lawmaker, then Groseclose and Milyo's method assigned both a similar ADA score."

Read the entire summary for all the results and let us know what you think.

Read full post…