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December 19, 2005
UCLA Political Scientist: 'Media Bias Is Real' And It Leans Left
Topics: Political News and commentariesNo big surprises here - academe has confirmed what most Americans already knew. The media is basically a left-wing mouthpiece that sees everything through a left-colored glass.
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.Groseclose and 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.Of interest here is that this may the first successful attempt at objectively quantifying bias in a range of media outlets and ranking their left-leaning bias.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.
Also of interest is the fact that surveys show that reporters tend to vote more Democrat than Republican, and that the major media outlets are "quite moderate compared to members of Congress." So as far left-leaning as the news media may be, Democratic members of Congress are more so (actually, I would never have thought otherwise, given the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid).
This study conducted by Groseclose and Milyo jives with the 2004 admission by ABC that their news has a left-leaning bias, Bernard Goldberg's, "Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News," the numerous examples available at the Media Research Center site, and many other examples of our American media being what amounts to a mouthpiece for the left-wing Democratic agenda - and speaks to why so many Americans are turning to blogs for news and perspectives.
After all, blogs tend to identify their bias, if any, and attempt to provide as many resources for the reader to arrive at their conclusions. To that regard, don't forget as you read this - Hyscience is a center-right blog, as if you hadn't already figured that out.
Hat tip - Jawa Report, Dread Pundit Bluto
Posted by Richard at December 19, 2005 7:07 AM
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