2. Conservative Books and "Studies" Alleging "Liberal Bias"

2.2 BOOK: “The Media Elite: America’s New Powerbrokers” by S. Robert Lichter, Linda S. Lichter and Stanley Rothman (a 1986 book that was used extensively by the Right to claim that a “liberal media” exists, even though the authors DID NOT - at that time) 

Brock addressed this book (which was the first serious follow-up from the Right after Efron's discredited book) in some detail (pages 84-89). In an interview years after the book was published, the book's first author stated that the book did not prove "liberal bias", even though many commentators on the Right claimed it did. If anything, as Brock points out, the book proved that journalists views were likely more conservative than the general public on economic issues and on social issues their views were reasonably close to mainstream American views.

Some of the important points made by Brock are noted below (bold text is eRiposte emphasis):

The Media Elite employed a method that was "empirical and systematic rather than impressionistic and anecdotal," according to the authors. The first section was an "ideological profile" that compared the voting habits and personal beliefs of 238 working journalists at the nation's top three newspapers and newsmagazines, and the three TV networks, to those of CEOs and other top executives at six Fortune 500 companies. The findings that headlined the study were that the media voted more Democratic than the country on the whole and that on a battery of questions measuring economic and social views, the "media elite" was to the left of the "business elite."

The revelation that most reporters surveyed voted Democratic, even in years of Republican landslides like 1972, was one from which the media's reputation for objectivity probably never recovered. Most people are not trained journalists. They either don't know, or don't believe, that the profession aspires to impartiality. They have little idea of how competitive and commercial concerns, pressure to conform, deference to power, a desire to avoid being labeled "liberal" by right-wing critics, and myriad other biases can influence a story at the expense of any personal political beliefs. They do know that news stories are not churned out by a computer and that personal judgments must enter into the equation somewhere along the line; they presume that politics naturally does, too. For many, this one statistic about how workaday reporters and editors tend to vote, and the attendant presumption that voting habits determined any bias in their work, closed the case before the subject of the voting patterns of media owners, executives, and top editors could even be broached. That was a question, among many others, that The Media Elite hadn't bothered to ask.

The Lichters used a very small sample to reach their sweeping conclusions. The study relied on the voluntary responses of 238 print and broadcast journalists out of 210,000 editors and reporters and 47,000 TV journalists then working in the field.²¹ And the Lichters' ideological profiling was slippery. By choosing the "business elite," a traditionally conservative group, as a point of comparison, rather than, say, teachers, or truck drivers, or even a sampling of general American public opinion, the authors seemed predetermined to make the media appear more liberal and out of touch with mainstream values than it actually was.²² 

Nevertheless, the majority of the media was conservative on five of six economic questions. For instance, 63 percent of the media favored less regulation of the economy. The book made the media look liberal on this question only in relation to the business elite, which favored deregulation by 86 percent.

On seven social questions, the study established that the majority of the media favored liberal positions down the line. The media were "strong supporters of environmental protection, affirmative action, women's rights, homosexual rights, and sexual freedom," the authors wrote. Yet the Lichters coded the responses in such a way as to make the media appear more liberal than it was. For example, one question asked whether the government should regulate people's sex lives - something most liberals and most conservatives would likely oppose, although this view was treated as solely liberal. Nine of ten Americans consider themselves environmentalists, a "liberal" position, perhaps, but one that is held by most Americans.

Indeed, though the researchers strongly implied it, they did not assert that the media's liberal social views were out of sync with those of most Americans, which, after all, was the whole point of designating the media as an "elite" in the first place. The plain fact is that, even accepting the Lichters' data as representative of the media as a whole, the personal views of media professionals - favoring racial and sexual equality, working towards a clean environment, tolerating diversity - are shared by most Americans. In the rnid-1980s and even more so today, these social views are thoroughly mainstream. In addressing this point, the authors could say only that the media's social views made them "natural opponents of the Moral Majority."
...
"Liberal bias" was a handy rallying point that the Lichters failed not only to prove, but to even charge.

Though the book's reviewers suggested the opposite, the authors concluded that the media was not liberally biased - a concept the authors defined as calculatedly unfair. They stated flatly that the media's social liberalism did not manifest itself in coverage of Democrats or Republicans, of legislative debates, or even of liberals and conservatives. They pointed to the great ideological diversity within news organizations, claiming that the Washington Post was more "pro-environment" but far more economically conservative than the New York Times. Many years later, in a 1997 interview with the Moonie magazine Insight, Robert Lichter said: "Conservative columnists all over the place were saying that we proved that there was a liberal bias in the press, which at the time we had not."
...
To prove that reporters' personal views played some role in their stories, the researchers analyzed media coverage of nuclear power, school busing, and the oil industry, using a putative empirical device known as "content analysis." While significant differences among the news organizations suggested that the media was hardly an ideological monolith...the authors claimed to find a pattern: Media sympathies were with nuclear safety and busing to achieve integration and against price gouging by the oil industry. 

The Lichters did not say why these so-called biases were objectionable. But in any case, the authors were unable to prove the truth of their claim, as the methodology they employed was dubious. For example, the survey was conducted during the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. With the authors counting every story on reactor safety during the period as biased against the nuclear power industry, the results were predictable...

At several points in the book, the authors knocked down entirely the idea that the media's "ideological profile" biased its coverage. For example, they wrote: "When leading journalists confront new information, they usually manage to process it without interjecting their own viewpoints." When book was published, and its scientific claims were challenged, the authors backed off further. "The findings that should be understood tell us only about the backgrounds and attitudes of journalists as individuals. They do not tell us about the content of the news they present, nor indeed whether the content is affected by their personal views at all," Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman wrote in the Washington Post.

Additionally, Brock refers to this study/report from Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR):

Press Release (6/1/98)

Executive Summary

The conservative critique of the news media rests on two general propositions: (1) journalists' views are to the left of the public, and (2) journalists frame news content in a way that accentuates these left perspectives. Previous research has revealed persuasive evidence against the latter claim, but the validity of the former claim has often been taken for granted. This research project examined the supposed left orientation of media personnel by surveying Washington-based journalists who cover national politics and/or economic policy at US outlets.

The findings include:

• On select issues from corporate power and trade to Social Security and Medicare to health care and taxes, journalists are actually more conservative than the general public.
  

• Journalists are mostly centrist in their political orientation.
  

• The minority of journalists who do not identify with the "center" are more likely to identify with the "right" when it comes to economic issues and to identify with the "left" when it comes to social issues.
  

• Journalists report that "business-oriented news outlets" and "major daily newspapers" provide the highest quality coverage of economic policy issues, while "broadcast network TV news" and "cable news services" provide the worst.

I am not reproducing the detailed stats from FAIR's report. Click here to review them.

Additionally, studies like Lichter's usually sidestep the issue of how the bosses of journalists vote or what their ideology is - which has been shown in studies to be a more accurate predictor of bias (see Sec. 4.1). Brock quotes former Associated Press CEO Louis Boccardi, who said in 2003: "Most media are owned by Republican conservatives." More on the topic of how media editors/publishers/owners vote (among other things) in Sec. 4.1.

UPDATE: Lichter also runs the Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA). As I've shown elsewhere, the approach they use to assess media bias is not credible and their reports are often highly misleading.

For example, Lichter seems to like misrepresenting the conclusions of his studies. This is evident from this post by Heather at Here's What's Left, on a separate "study" on "liberal bias" in academia:

Our new hobby is writing letters to people that are sure to disregard us.  Today's letter is to the Washington Times with regard to their coverage of a study on the political orientation of university faculty.  We talk about it here and here, and Ezra talks about it here.  The study itself is problematic (more on this later), but what caught our attention is that the Wash Times article quotes one of the study's authors as drawing conclusions that are the exact opposite of what he himself said in the study.  Here's the letter, with emphasis added:

On March 30, the Washington Times published a piece by Joyce Howard Price, entitled “Study Finds Liberals Dominate Faculties.”  The article quotes one of the study’s authors S. Robert Lichter as saying the following: "…this is the first study that statistically proves bias [against conservatives] in the hiring and promotion of faculty members."

However Lichter’s study itself says: “The results do not definitively prove that ideology accounts for differences in professional standing.  It is entirely possible that other unmeasured factors may account for those variations.” (p. 13)

The claim Lichter makes in your article stands in direct contradiction to the statements he makes in his own study.  Isn’t it the job of your publication to point out this sort of inconsistency?

Heather

Just after I sent this letter, I looked at the Wash Times article again and realized that not only had they not (apparently) read the study, or checked into potential issues with it, but they also hadn't even presented a opposing viewpoint. 

More on this particular study in Sec. 3.3.