JustOneMinute: Media Bias

You gotta be kiddin' me. THIS is the methodology?

"To compute our measure, we count the times that a media outlet cites various think tanks. 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."

Bad data in, bad data out.

Posted by: Jeff | June 22, 2004 at 07:15 PM

What a bunch of lazy academics. Howz about they just perused the corrections of the major papers and tabulated by category and direction of error -- as they define the spectrum -- and present that? (how many times has the NYT had to retract the "imminent threat" b.s. -- three of four? I forget)

For anecdotal input, they could closely examine coverage of selected high-profile events. Say, last week's 9/11 staff memo and the entirely separate and unrelated "coverage" thereof by all major media. Track it from outrageous and false first story to sneaky, sideways slither away from the original distortion (my favorite, the NYT noting that a review of "public comments" tended to "bear out" the WH complaint about misrepresentation of their position -- i.e., we fucking lied about a well-known subject that most observant people remembered without checking, but when busted we backed away without fanfare or apology).

But I'm not sure how you'd do either a quantitative or anecdotal analysis of a situation in which -- to choose just one recent example -- the first stories of the murder of Nick Berg in Iraq by terrorists cited the killers' own lame and ridiculous justification IN THE HEADLINE AND LEAD PARAGRAPHS. This is way, way beyond bias. Imagine December 8, 1941: "In Retaliation For Oil Embargo, Japs Attack US Fleet in Hawaii". Or September 2, 1939: "Reacting to Provocations, Nazis Invade Poland."

When consumers of elite media are still anxiously awaiting the arrival of the post-ABM Treaty arms race, the final tally of the Jenin Massacre, and to see whether US forces can ever emerge from their March 2003 sandstorm quagmire and overcome the Stalingrad-like defense of Baghdad, how can we be bothered with silly tabulation of cites for different think tanks? I mean, really.

Posted by: IceCold | June 22, 2004 at 09:58 PM

They are comparing apples and oranges. News stories and partisan speeches are going to be different in the way they cite think tanks. Even if we accept their measure of bias, they compared the media with the median congressperson, who would be a Republican. The media is to the left of the Republican party? Obviously that must mean that it is biased.

Posted by: Tim Lambert | June 23, 2004 at 01:48 AM

As an aside, if we had this pattern of evidence (most reporters poll liberal, vote Democratic, are based in the liberal urban bastions of NY and LA, and cite think-tanks in a similar manner to Congressional Democrats) but on a different subject - did Bush and Rumsfeld approve torture, or did Bush lie about WMDs, for example - would our friends on the left resist the obvious conclusion so strongly? One man's straw in the wind is another man's brickbat... or something.

Anyway:

News stories and partisan speeches are going to be different in the way they cite think tanks.

I give this a maybe/maybe not. It occurs to me that the media may cite a think tank merely because a Congresssperson did; if 9in the current situation) Reps are being cited based on, for example, Treasury Dept studies, and Dems are rebutting with think-tank studies, a truly "fair and balanced" story presenting both sides may score as biased. That methodological flaw would shift in an era when Dems controlled the Gov't. (Heaven forbid).

However, sometimes the story will just cite a think tank as the authority on a subject, which seems fine to me.

And a bonus query - look at the time periods studied for Drudge, the NY Times, the USA Today, and the LA Times - less than a year in each case. Troubling.

Posted by: TM | June 23, 2004 at 07:16 AM

Hey, a quick example to illustrate my point - the NY Times recently quoted a chap from the Economic Policy Institute on the subject of Kerry's minimum wage. The offsetting quote was from the Bush campaign. Hah! That liberal media!

But in fact (as the Times explained), the EPI chap was one of the authors of the report; fair enough, Kerry has to find his experts somewhere.

Now, my guess, if I understand the methodology, is that this story would score as tilting left, given the one liberal think tank citation. But I am a skeptic as to whether the story really does tilt left.

And yes, this is just one story - it happened to be the first one I checked, but one example proves very little.

Posted by: TM | June 23, 2004 at 07:26 AM

The difficulty with these kinds of studies (there was one a while back by a Harvard guy that demonstrated conservative bias--of course, HIS methodology was fine, heh) is that they're attempting to quantify a quality. It's not possible. Any such study depends on assumptions, and from a methodological point of view, these are always highly tenuous.

A liberal (me, for example) would argue that we live in a deeply conservative age and nearly every article is biased to the right--because it doesn't approach a topic from a nice, lefty collectivist, civic, labor orientation. Obviously, this will not pass muster with most of the readers of this blog. We all start from very different assumptions, so any approach will fail basic objectivity measures. What we should really be discussing, I suppose, is not whether the press is liberal or conservative, but what we think those things are. That might be more revealing.

Posted by: Jeff | June 23, 2004 at 12:14 PM

I found the study very interesting. A possible source of bias is that most Democrats get ADA scores in a very tight range with very little movement from year to year, while Republicans tend to vary quite dramatically. Obvious question: Does the ADA notify politicians when a vote is going to be considered for their score? One of my best friend's sons interned for a politician and he indicated that most lobbying groups tell politicos beforehand that they will be graded on this particular vote, which skews the result and the rating.

That said, the answers arrived at seem fairly non-controversial. Even Katie Couric admits that the media are liberal. My sense is that these guys did the best they could to come up with an objective way of judging the bias and their answer conforms with my own personal observations.

Posted by: Brainster | June 24, 2004 at 12:56 AM

Let's get real. Does anybody really care if a reporter is liberal or conservative? I don't think so. What we really want is honest reporting. Over the past couple of years the thing we have been noticing is not bias, it's dishonesty. (Not a shred of evidence of an al Qaeda-Iraq connection?) If roles were reversed and conservatives the entrenched power in the press, we would very likely detect a flavor of conservative dishonesty in the presentation of news. As it happens that's not the case at the moment.

Posted by: Tom Bowler | June 24, 2004 at 01:19 AM

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