All Blog Posts from Public Eye

"The vast majority of American voters believe media bias is alive and well – 83% of likely voters said the media is biased in one direction or another…Nearly two-thirds of those online respondents who detected bias in the media (64%) said the media leans left, while slightly more than a quarter of respondents (28%) said they see a conservative bias on their TV sets and in their column inches."

--Results of a IPDI/Zogby Interactive poll.

BONUS QUOTE: "26% speculated that the reason news organizations are placing blogs on their Web sites is that 'blogs give news organizations a chance to promote a political agenda they could not promote in their regular broadcasts, cablecasts, or publications.'"

Bruce Bartlett, writing in the conservative National Review Online, has written the kind of piece that one rarely sees these days: One that tries to take an evenhanded and non-hysterical look at the issue of media bias.

Bartlett notes that charges of media bias used to come almost exclusively from the right; today, "[w]hile conservatives still believe that the major media are biased against them, one hears more and more criticism coming from the left." He argues that the media used to exhibit a left-wing bias, but that this bias has largely disappeared. And that, he claims, is what has liberals upset – they've lost their advantage. Well, that and the fact that "conservatives have become better at using the media, taking advantage of its institutional biases to spin stories in conservative directions."

I'm not endorsing Bartlett's position, though it sure is nice to read a discussion of this issue that goes beyond "the msm is liberal/conservative/corrupt/run by a cabal of Jewish financiers who live at the center of the earth."

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A new study on media bias, "What Drives Media Slant? Evidence From U.S. Daily Newspapers,” is getting some press today. I haven't read the study, but among the articles I've read about it is the New York Times piece, which (oddly) was written by a professor of economics at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Since the study comes from a pair of University of Chicago economists, I'd wager the Times piece is a fair representation of the study's contents.

There are two main points in the Times piece. The first has to do with the way in which the study determined how a news outlet is biased. Authors Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro looked through the 2005 Congressional Record to find the "1,000 most partisan phrases" that year, a determination based on how often a phrase was used by Republicans or Democrats.

Phrases like "death tax," “illegal aliens,” and “Terri Schiavo” were found to have been used most often by Republicans, while “minimum wage,” “public broadcasting,” and “middle class” were used mostly by Democrats. The authors looked at how often newspapers used these phrases to determined which party they were biased toward.

To some extent, this makes sense. One could argue that a newspaper that uses "death tax" over "inheritance tax," for example, is to some extent tipping its hand. (My favorite such tip-off has to do not with words but punctuation – that is, the decision by the Washington Times to put quote marks around the phrase "gay marriage.") At the same time, if a newspaper were to run a story with the headline "Why The Republicans' Handling of the Terri Schiavo Case Proves Their Incompetence," it's probably not the best evidence that the paper is biased toward Republicans.

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Jack Shafer at Slate has written about a new study out of the University of Chicago that takes a fresh look at media bias. It's hard to summarize the study in a short post, and I recommend you read Shafer's piece for more, but here are the three main points he focuses on:

1) If a media outlet cares about its reputation for accuracy, it will be reluctant to report anything that counters the audiences' existing beliefs because such stories will tend to erode the company's standing. Newspapers and news programs have a visible incentive to "distort information to make it conform with consumers' prior beliefs."

2) The media can't satisfy their audiences by merely reporting what their audience wants to hear. If alternative sources of information prove that a news organization has distorted the news, the organization will suffer a loss of reputation, and hence of profit. The authors predict more bias in stories where the outcomes aren't realized for some time (foreign war reporting, for example) and less bias where the outcomes are immediately apparent (a weather forecast or a sports score). Indeed, almost nobody accuses the New York Times or Fox News Channel of slanting their weather reports.

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