How The Liberal Media Myth is Created 
(A series originally published at The Left Coaster by eRiposte)

SUMMARY

Over the years a number of different approaches have been used by different individuals and groups (especially those on the Right) to claim that the "mainstream media" (MSM) in the United States has a "liberal bias" in its news reporting. Here, I systematically examine the most prominent of these claims, as well as other less publicized claims (by breaking them down into different classes), and show how these claims really do not prove that there is a "liberal media" bias (overall) in the United States. 

The main reason why most of the "liberal media" claims to-date don't really prove their case is that such claims don't assess accuracy of the news content at all. Clearly, establishing the accuracy of the content is the most challenging part of media bias analysis, which may explain why critics often attempt to "prove" media bias using other approaches, e.g., "tone" of media coverage, "catch-phrases" in articles, "newspaper headlines", "topics" covered, "think-tank" citations, journalist ideology or voting preferences, and public opinion polls. Of these, the only category that comes even remotely close to addressing a piece of the media bias issue is the aspect of "topics" covered - but even there, proving bias can be quite difficult; indeed, I have shown that the one serious study which used that approach was totally flawed. Another possible indicator of media bias is "think-tank" citations, but it is impossible to prove bias using citations alone - the content and accuracy of citations and associated news reports must be examined for one to make a credible claim of bias of any kind. Thus, a well publicized (on the Right), recent paper claiming "liberal bias" using a study of "think-tank" citations was totally flawed and incorrect because, among other reasons, the accuracy of news reports or citations was not addressed at all. 

Some critics on the Right have attempted to prove "liberal bias" by ostensibly looking at some of the content in news reports. However, even here, claims are often baseless for a variety of reasons: the critic's use of obvious unintentional errors in news reports, the critic's ignorance about the content, the use of opinions to distort straight news, superficial fact checking (and sometimes NO fact checking at all), or the use of various types of silly spin. 

Two other common approaches should also be mentioned. One involves the use of outright fabrications, lies or misleading statements to claim media bias - which has become a cottage industry of sorts, especially with the Far Right. The other involves the use of rank hypocrisy (e.g., claiming "liberal bias" based on actions, which when practiced by conservative media outlets, is not considered conservative bias, by the same critics). 

The sections below provide more systematic coverage of these different myth-making approaches. The bottom line is that, I have yet to see *any* credible study that proves that the mainstream media (MSM) in the U.S. has a "liberal bias" overall. As an aside, let me add that I am fully aware that absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence. Which is why, at Illiberal Conservative Media, I am amassing evidence to show why the mainstream media in the U.S. is not liberal (i.e., it is illiberal) and most often conservatively biased.

SECTIONS

Part 1: Using "tone" of media coverage

Part 2: Using "catch-phrases" like 'right-wing extremist' v. 'left-wing extremist'

Part 3: Using "newspaper headlines"

Part 4: Using "topics" covered

Part 5: Using "think-tank" citations

Part 6: Using journalist ideology or voting preferences

Part 7: Using public opinion polls on media bias

Part 8: Using obvious, unintentional errors in news reports

Part 9: Using [the critic's] ignorance

Part 10: Using opinions to distort straight news

Part 11: Using superficial fact checking

Part 12: Using no fact checking

Part 13: Using rank hypocrisy

Part 14: Using outright fabrications, lies or misleading statements

Part 15: Using miscellaneous spin

DETAILS

Part 1: Using "tone" of media coverage

[Posted originally at The Left Coaster]

How the Liberal Media Myth is Created - Part 1

[Some portions of this post are taken from my existing report on this topic at ICM; * indicates edits made for clarity].

Anyone surprised that there hasn't been much of a mention in the lefty blogosphere about the Kerry v. Bush media coverage analysis from the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ)? I am.

In their annual State of the News Media report of American Journalism for 2004, they have this sound bite in their summary:

When it came to the campaign, on the other hand, the criticism that George Bush got worse coverage than John Kerry is supported by the data.² Looking across all media, campaign coverage that focused on Bush was three times as negative as coverage of Kerry (36% versus 12%) It was also less likely to be positive (20% positive Bush stories, 30% for Kerry).

That also meant Bush coverage was less likely to be neutral (44% of Bush stories, 58% for Kerry).

Do a Google search for one of these passages and you'll see articles mentioning this (like this one on MSNBC saying: "Study: Election news negative toward Bush" or Howard Kurtz in WaPo saying: "A few readers have complained that I failed to mention, in Monday's column about a Project for Excellence in Journalism report, the finding on pro-Kerry bias last year..."); you'll also find other GOP or Right-oriented sites (example) touting it as (partial) vindication for their claims about the media (partial because the Iraq stats were not exactly "unfavorable" to Bush). 

If you consider just the Kerry v. Bush data, is the report really vindicating a "liberal media" claim? NO.

One of the follow-up articles in the Sydney Morning Herald (via this site) has this stunningly weak statement from the survey's director, Tom Rosenstiel:

Mr Rosenstiel said these figures did not necessarily reflect bias but, instead, the fact that coverage was always more intense and questioning when it came to the incumbent.

Is that the best explanation that a credible journalism organization could muster? Rosenstiel (or Kurtz or other media outlets) do not seem to understand that something is not right when an organization ostensibly measuring the quality of American journalism decides to report statistics using measures used by politicians, rather than the measures that should be used by journalists. 

Here's why:

• It is not measuring ACCURACY of news content, only TONE. The terms "positive", "negative" and "neutral" say nothing about whether the coverage was accurate or not. The coverage could be negative but accurate, and positive but fiction (as it was with Bush in most cases). It could also have been positive but accurate, and negative but fiction (as it was with Kerry in most cases). Although they don't actually say this, PEJ seems to implicitly fall for the fake spin (usually from the Right) that somehow "fair and balanced" coverage requires balance in tone, rather than accuracy in reporting!

• For example, Bush did get negative coverage on Iraq, but everything that happened in Iraq was his creation. Lack of WMDs, lack of a real Saddam-Al-Qaeda link, depraved indifference to the lives of Americans and Iraqi civilians, Abu Ghraib, unsecured arms dumps and nuclear sites, mismanagement of taxpayer dollars through massive corruption, and an endless amount of other incompetence and mendacity was all fact. Sure, schools may have been built and hospitals re-opened and Iraqis "liberated" after enduring serious bombing followed by a major cronyism-privatization campaign. Covering that objectively (however "negative" that was) is a requirement for good journalism and not something to feel "negative" about. What is distressing is that the media let the Bush administration go scot-free on lying to the public about WMDs, the Saddam-Al Qaeda link, the cost of war, and a lot more. Very little critical coverage actually occurred particularly on the first two topics. So, while some of the coverage on Bush may have been "negative", it was almost always FACT. [Sec. 4.5 at ICM covers some of the media's extremely poor coverage of Bush's AWOL record in the Texas Air National Guard].

• On the other hand, a lot of negative coverage against Kerry was FICTION - think "swift-boat-veterans" or Kerry being labeled as more of a "flip-flopper" than Bush (yeah, right) [*sentence edited for clarity]. This is analogous to what happened with Al Gore.

Bottom line? This kind of a survey is worthless to assess the quality of journalism. It is useful to assess "tone" of coverage but that is a very crude measure whose usefulness is highly limited. Being "fair and balanced" does not mean being "positive" and "negative" about the same amount. It means being factual ALL the time.

On top of this, PEJ also noted this in a footnote:

2. The analysis of election coverage begins after March 1 (Super Tuesday) after John Kerry emerged as the all-but-official Democratic candidate. The cross-media comparisons of campaign coverage included stories focused at least 50% on one candidate or the other so that deriving a sense of tone about the candidate was logical. Those totaled 250 stories. The findings, moreover, reinforce what the Project found in a separate study that looked at tone in the final month of the campaign, surrounding the debates, and in a pre-convention study using a different methodology that mapped coverage of different character themes about the candidates. The findings on tone also mirror those of Robert Lichter and the Center on Media and Public Affairs, which employs a different approach to studying tone.

I am highlighting this to emphasize that the "tone" report from Robert Lichter's CMPA for the 2004 election is likewise flawed because it ignores the factual content of the coverage.

I can understand why conservative groups like the CMPA pump money into studies of "tone" of coverage because they can use it to (unjustifiably) claim "liberal bias" at every opportunity. What I can't fathom is why reputed organizations like PEJ spend so much resources studying something which says woefully little about the quality of journalism in this country. 

[Incidentally, Ron at Watching The Watchers also emphasizes the point I have made (not shown above) about the very limited sample size of the PEJ study.]

Part 2: Using "catch-phrases" like 'right-wing extremist' v. 'left-wing extremist'

[Posted originally at The Left Coaster]

How the Liberal Media Myth is Created - Part 2

In Part 1 of this series, I covered myths created about "liberal bias" using "tone" of media coverage. In this part, the creation of "liberal media" myths by the Right using "catch-phrases" is highlighted. The basic MO of the Right here is to:

• Either mine databases for "words", without looking at context or usage (let me call this "Type A" BS, for convenience)
• Or to mine databases for "words" without establishing any controls for comparison ("Type B" BS)

Let's start with a couple of examples of "Type B" BS.

Here's Bob Somerby of The Daily Howler:

Trembling over his acolyte’s brilliance, Sullivan quoted at length:

RUFFINI, AS QUOTED BY SULLIVAN: Since 1996, the Washington Post has used this loaded term ["right-wing"] more than twice as frequently as "left-wing"…This disparity was even more palpable at the New York Times, where 80.2% of the left-right mentions on the national news pages since 1996 have spotlighted the right. The research also found that the more loaded and derogatory the phrase, the more likely it was to be associated with the political right. The term "conservative" outpolled "liberal" by 66-34% in New York Times news page mentions, while the aforementioned "right-wing" clocked in at 80% in a similar measure. However, the term "right-wing extremist" was used at least six times as frequently than "left-wing extremist" (at 87.4% since ’96 in the Times). [emphasis added]

If that didn’t prove it, nothing would. At the New York Times, "right-wing extremist" was used much more often than "left-wing extremist." Case closed.

But duh. Does unequal usage of those terms show a liberal bias? We were dubious, so we did a test—we checked out the use of these terms at the Washington Times. How many times did the Wes Pruden rag use those terms in the last five years? Our finding? The Washington Times reeks of liberal bias! In fact, its liberal bias is even worse than that found in the Times of New York!

...According to NEXIS, if you start your search at 1/1/96, here’s how the Times Two stack up:

The Washington Times:
Right-wing extremist: 86 uses
Left-wing extremist: 9 uses

The New York Times:
Right-wing extremist: 75 uses
Left-wing extremist: 9 uses

According to Sullivan’s brilliant technique, the WashTimes has slightly more liberal bias. Question: Where in the world—where on earth—did we ever come up with this dud? 

Somerby provided another example while reviewing the book "Slander" by the anti-American Ann Coulter:

COULTER (page 166): Despite the constant threat of the “religious right” in America, there is evidently no such thing as the “atheist left.” In a typical year, the New York Times refers to either “Christian conservatives” or the “religious right” almost two hundred times. But in a Lexis/Nexis search of the entire New York Times archives, the phrases “atheist liberals” or “the atheist left” do not appear once. Only deviations from the left-wing norm merit labels.

In a footnote, Coulter extends her complaint. “In a one year period (roughly corresponding to calendar year 2000), the New York Times found occasion to mention either ‘Christian conservatives’ or the ‘religious right’ 187 times. Not once did the paper refer to ‘atheist liberals’ or ‘the atheist left.’” To Coulter, of course, this is all a sign of gruesome bias. She goes on to claim that the terms “religious right” and “Christian conservative” are now used “[j]ust as some people once spat out the term ‘Jew’ as an insult.”

It certainly makes for high excitement, but does it make any sense? Do newspapers use “Christian conservative” as an emblem of hatred, and avoid “atheist left” due to liberal bias? If so, we have big news to share. If Coulter’s NEXIS search has proven these things, then the once-conservative Washington Times is spilling with lib bias, too.

In the calendar year 2000, how often did the New York Times refer to “Christian conservatives” or the “religious right?” A NEXIS search of that year presents 182 references. But the Washington Times—a much slimmer paper—had 151 such cites that same year. And how about those other terms—“atheist liberals” or “the atheist left?” Incredibly, Coulter was right in one of her claims; the New York Times never used either term. But guess what? The Washington Times never used the terms, either. If Coulter has sniffed out a vast left-wing plot, Wes Pruden is in on it too.

Why do newspapers write about “Christian conservatives?” Because they exist, and because they’re important. And why don’t we read about the “atheist left?” Because the group doesn’t exist.

Let's now turn to "Type A" BS.

Here, Stanford Professor Geoffrey Nunberg's work at The American Prospect, which was done in the context of reviewing the fraudster Bernard Goldberg's book "Bias", is very useful to illustrate the point (bold text is my emphasis):

One response to the piece came from Bernard Goldberg himself, whose bestseller Bias has given wide circulation to the notion that the press define liberals as the mainstream by labeling conservatives far more than they do liberals. In an op-ed piece in the Miami Herald, Goldberg offers two numbers to prove his point about labeling. First, he says that a six-month search of The New York Times showed that the word "conservative" popped up in news stories 1,580 times; "liberal" only 802 times.

Well, but so what? Goldberg didn't bother to check how many of those instances of "conservative" and "liberal" were used as labels of American politicians or interest groups, much less to relativize those numbers to the occurrences of the names of each. For that matter, he didn't even try to screen out occurrences of "conservative" that referred to European political parties, business suits, or investment strategies, not to mention occurrences of "liberal" that referred to loan repayment terms and helpings of gravy. In short, these figures are utterly meaningless.

Goldberg's other number involves one of those specious comparisons that critics of liberal media bias are prone to. In this case, he points out that "the Los Angeles Times ran only 98 stories about the Concerned Women for America and identified the group as conservative 28 times. But The LA Times ran more than 1,000 stories on the National Organization for Women and labeled NOW liberal only seven times."

But that's meretricious, in every sense of the term. Concerned Women for America is a self-identified conservative Christian group (it opposes, among other things, abortion, homosexual adoption, hate-crime legislation, the AmeriCorps volunteer program, and the teaching of "ill-conceived Darwinian theory" in the schools). Whereas NOW makes a point of rejecting explicitly partisan labels -- the appropriate description of the group is "feminist." To insist on labeling it as "liberal" would be to assume that to be pro-choice makes you by definition a liberal, by which criterion Goldberg ought to be equally indignant that the press doesn't use the "liberal" label for Christine Todd Whitman or Tom Ridge.
...
Brent Bozell's column on my TAP article develops this strategy at length. Bozell claims that I ignored studies by the Media Research Center that show discrepancies in the labeling of what he takes to be conservative and liberal groups. For example, he says, newspaper stories on the Competitive Enterprise Institute included a conservative label 28 percent of the time, compared to less than one percent for the Sierra Club, and that Concerned Women for America is labeled far more often than Planned Parenthood.

But those comparisons are as transparently loaded as Goldberg's are. After all, the Sierra Club membership came close to adopting a resolution favoring immigration restriction a few years ago, and Planned Parenthood proudly points out that Peggy Goldwater was the founder of its Arizona chapter. To insist that the press describe these groups as liberal amounts to demanding that it adopt the lexicon of the right on a wholesale basis, like a baseball manager demanding that the team's own fans should determine the strike zone. Again, this one is for the bleachers.

It's notable that Bozell doesn't mention any figures for well-known groups like the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) or the Center for Justice, who fairly deserve to be labeled as liberal or progressive. As it happens, I did counts for a number of political organizations like these, and if I wanted to play Bozell's game I could point out that ADA and the Center for Justice are labeled far more often than conservative groups like the National Association of Scholars, the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, or the Competitive Enterprise Institute. But that would be misleading -- the fact is that there's a lot of unaccountable variation in the frequency of labeling of groups, with some groups on both sides, like the Heritage Foundation and ADA, being labeled far more than others.

Other responses to my study are worthy of more serious discussion. The blogger Edward Boyd went to the trouble of replicating a part of the study on the last six months of the Nexis "Major Papers" database (probably not the best period to pick, since the coverage of American politics has been decidedly atypical in the months following September 11). Boyd used the ten names that I used in my test set, and found that conservatives on average were labeled as "conservative" about fifteen percent more often than liberals were labeled as "liberal."

Not surprisingly, a few conservative bloggers trumpeted Boyd's results as having "refuted" my claims. But even if Boyd's results were valid, that conclusion wouldn't hold. What Goldberg argued, after all, was that there was a massive disproportion in the labeling of conservatives, which is not the same as a fifteen percent difference. Still, Boyd's result surprised me, since the American papers in the Nexis database are largely the same ones I looked at.

But there turns out to be a very big fly in Boyd's ointment. He himself points to the problem when he notes that the database he used contained some English-language foreign papers that might have skewed the results. In fact, fully 32 of the 80 papers in the database are foreign, ranging from the Sydney Telegraph to the Scotsman, the Tokyo Daily Yomuri, and The Jerusalem Post. And when I ran these searches in the Nexis "non-US news" database, which includes all of the foreign papers in the database that Boyd looked at, it turned out that foreign papers label American conservatives more than four times as often as they label liberals -- possibly because of their point of view, but more likely because "liberal" often has another meaning in foreign contexts and because American conservatives like Jesse Helms, John Ashcroft, and Trent Lott are much better known abroad than liberals like Barbara Boxer, Barney Frank, Tom Harkin, or Paul Wellstone.

That disparity introduces a strong tilt in favor of labeling conservatives into the overall data. In fact, when you correct Boyd's results for the relative disproportion of labels in the foreign papers in the database -- a matter of fairly simple math -- you find that the likely rate of labeling in the American papers in the database favors the labeling of liberals by an 18 percent margin. In short, Boyd's data confirm my own, or at least as best as one can make sense of such a small and noisy sample.

One other point worth mentioning is that Boyd did another search that included not just the labels "conservative" and "liberal," but also the labels "right wing" and "left wing," which increased the disparity in the labeling of conservatives to around 30 percent.
...

The bottomline though, as Nunberg and Somerby point out, is that these kind of word games are nonsensical and are of virtually no use in proving "bias", especially without context or controls. Moreover, as I emphasized in Part 1, any analysis that does not measure accuracy of the media coverage is really not measuring media bias at all. So, anyone who seriously purports to show "liberal bias" using such shoddy approaches (especially *only* such approaches) is a quack.

[NOTE: At Illiberal Conservative Media (ICM), I've provided a lot more detail on the fakery in Goldberg's "Bias", Coulter's "Slander" and Goldberg's "Arrogance" (puns intended)].

Part 3: Using "newspaper headlines"

[Posted originally at The Left Coaster]

How the Liberal Media Myth is Created - Part 3

In Part 1 of this series, I covered myths created about "liberal bias" using "tone" of media coverage. In Part 2, the creation of "liberal media" myths by the Right using "catch-phrases" was covered. In this part, I highlight a third approach used to create the "liberal media" myth - "newspaper headlines".

The offending pair on the Right in this case are John Lott and Kevin Hassett (of the American Enterprise Institute - AEI), in their 2004 paper "Is Newspaper Coverage of Economic Events Politically Biased?". (Yes, this John Lott). I've covered this paper more extensively at ICM - here, but I'm going to reproduce a few key portions that illustrate how myth-creation works in this case.

The abstract of this paper says the following (bold text is my emphasis):

Accusations of political bias in the media are often made by members of both political parties, yet there have been few systematic studies of such bias to date. This paper develops an econometric technique to test for political bias in news reports that controls for the underlying character of the news reported. Our results suggest that American newspapers tend to give more positive news coverage to the same economic news when Democrats are in the Presidency than for Republicans. When all types of news are pooled into a single analysis, our results are highly significant. However, the results vary greatly depending upon which economic numbers are being reported. When GDP growth is reported, Republicans received between 16 and 24 percentage point fewer positive stories for the same economic numbers than Democrats. For durable goods for all newspapers, Republicans received between 15 and 25 percentage points fewer positive news stories than Democrats. For unemployment, the difference was between zero and 21 percentage points. Retail sales showed no difference. Among the Associated Press and the top 10 papers, the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Associated Press, and New York Times tend to be the least likely to report positive news during Republican administrations, while the Houston Chronicle slightly favors Republicans. Only one newspaper treated one Republican administration significantly more positively than the Clinton administration: the Los Angeles Times’ headlines were most favorable to the Reagan administration, but it still favored Clinton over either Bush administration. We also find that the media coverage affects people’s perceptions of the economy. Contrary to the typical impression that bad news sells, we find that good economic news generates more news coverage and that it is usually covered more prominently. We also present some evidence that media treats parties differently when they control both the presidency and the congress.

Why have I highlighted specific words? Well, when you read about the methodology they use, you'll understand (bold text is my emphasis):

In this paper, we attempt to overcome these problems by objectively categorizing newspaper headlines as either positive, negative, neutral or mixed and then comparing those headlines to the actual economic numbers that generated those news articles.

They study newspaper headlines and not the actual content of the articles (wow) - and I would bet that anyone who reads the abstract of the paper could easily miss this point, namely that their "study" is based on headlines - not "news reports", "news coverage", "stories", "news stories", etc. I imagine it must be particularly busy out there at AEI. 

Now, they do acknowledge this silliness (not in so many words of course), among other things (bold text is my emphasis):

We chose headlines because they create the strongest image of the news in readers’ minds, and because headlines are easier to objectively classify, though the headlines we examine may differ systematically from the stories they are associated with. While newspapers write other news stories on the economy that do not coincide with the specific release of economic data, one benefit of limiting ourselves to these announcement dates is that we can more directly link a specific set of economic data to how the media covers that data. It is possible that these other news stories are biased in ways that are different from stories released on announcement dates, and thus announcement date coverage might not give the complete picture of any partisan biases. The values for the different economic variables were those released at the time of the news reports.

So, let's recap.

• They only look at headlines; they don't look at the actual content of articles

• They only consider headlines associated with articles that coincide with the release of the economic data and not at any other articles that may be published about the same data subsequently

• They acknowledge that "It is possible that these other news stories are biased in ways that are different from stories released on announcement dates, and thus announcement date coverage might not give the complete picture of any partisan biases"

• And predictably, they make firm conclusions from their data anyway

Let's just say I didn't have it this easy in graduate school. And they actually get paid big bucks to write this stuff up, while I have to do this on my own dime. That said, these flaws are the least of the paper's problems.

Tim Lambert of Deltoid, who has done tremendous public service by exposing Lott's repeated shoddy work and lying on the topic of guns, also covered this paper. The following extract from one of his posts shows, in a nutshell, what is wrong with this whole paper:

Now, here’s what Lott and Hassett say:

“In the case of unemployment, 44 percent of the headlines under the Clinton administration were positive while that same number was only 23 percent under Bush II. By comparison, the average unemployment rates were fairly similar, 5.2 percent under Clinton s eight years and 5.5 percent under Bush during the sample. There is also a great deal of overlap (3.9 to 7.1 percent under Clinton to 4.2 to 6.4 percent under Bush II).”

What they fail to mention and what is obvious from the graph is that under Clinton the unemployment rate decreased from 7.1% to 3.9%, while under Bush it increased from 4.2% to 6.4%. Maybe, just maybe, that’s why the headlines were more positive under Clinton. In fact, there seems to be evidence of bias against Clinton—why were only 44% of the headlines about unemployment positive when it just kept going down and down to the lowest levels in decades? Oh, and don’t expect to see a graph of the unemployment rate anywhere in their paper or presentation.

Now, they claim to have controlled for level and trends in unemployment in their analysis, but of course they have not. The only control they have for trend is the change since the previous quarter and it is obvious that changes over longer terms will affect the reporting. Do Lott and Hassett believe that no-one ever compares the unemployment rate with what it was a year or two before?

Through a Google search I came across this post at Dead Parrots Society that explored the unemployment comparison further (not specifically in the context of the Lott/Hassett paper, but in the context of a similarly nonsensical "media bias" post by another blogger, using the employment figures):

Via Glenn Reynolds, I and many others have been reading this Tim Blair post about media framing of unemployment figures. The gist is that CNN described a 5.6% unemployment rate as "low" in 1996, when Clinton was in office, but describes a similar rate as a sign of problems for Bush. Tim's post is being widely cited as yet more proof of media bias; in Glenn's link, he encourages us to "Go figure." So I did.

The graphic is courtesy of the BLS, and shows the unemployment rate charted over the past 15 years. Perhaps it offers a little insight into why 5.6% was considered "low" in early 1996, but not in 2001. Actually, the context was right there in the excerpts Blair chose from the 1996 CNN story:

Economists didn't expect June's unemployment rate to be much different from May's, which was an already-low 5.6 percent. But in fact, it did fall -- to 5.3 percent. The unemployment rate hasn't been that low since June 1990.

And from the 2001 CNN story:

The U.S. unemployment rate jumped to 5.7 percent in November - the highest in six years - as employers cut hundreds of thousands more jobs in response to the first recession in a decade in the world's largest economy.

....

Still, there is some context that might be helpful. The first place we can look is right there in Tim Blair's 1996 story, to see how the Clinton administration and economic analysts felt about the numbers:

White House: But the Clinton administration was tickled about the increase in jobs, and took credit for the upturn. The president said the figures showed "the most solid American economy in a generation."
Analysts: In January, analysts were concerned that growth was so anemic that the nation was in danger of a recession. But five straight months of strong job gains now have analysts worried more about inflation. ... The Federal Reserve is almost guaranteed to push interest rates up to stave off inflation.

The second place we can look for context is in Tim Blair's 2001 story, to see how the Bush administration and economic analysts felt about that very similar unemployment figure:

White House: President Bush and his Labor Secretary, Elaine Chao, separately expressed alarm at the data and called for Congress to approve a package of economic stimulus. "Today's numbers are not good news, and I think it's a clear reflection that the attacks of Sept. 11 are still reverberating around our economy," Chao told CNNfn's Market Call program.
Analysts: To keep consumers spending despite mounting unemployment, the Federal Reserve has cut its target for short-term interest rates 10 times this year and is expected to do so again after its policy makers meet Tuesday. "Despite some better-than-expected data over the past two weeks, this report is sufficiently gloomy to force the Fed to ease next Tuesday and retain their bias toward further economic weakness," said Steven Wood, economist with FinancialOxygen.

Really, my point here doesn't have anything to do with whether a 5.6% unemployment rate is too hot, too cold or just right. Frankly, I don't have any idea. What I do know is that journalists weren't the only ones who looked at the unemployment figures in a different light between 1996 and 2001. The reality is, the media saw the data the same way as the White House, economic analysts and the Fed.

Thus, even at a fundamental, conceptual level, the Lott/Hassett paper is a bunch of garbage and proves absolutely nothing about bias in news reporting.

This goes back to the point I have been making in each of my previous posts. Accuracy. You cannot assess bias without understanding how accurate the report is, and you certainly can't figure out the accuracy by either looking at headlines alone or headlines compared to out-of-context data points. There is also a lot more detail within those numbers which could influence the news reporting, as one of the commenters (Barry Ritholtz) to the Dead Parrots Society post noted - such as quality of jobs created v. lost, spread between wage growth and CPI, the underemployment rate, those who have dropped out of the workforce, etc.

Part 4: Using "topics" covered

[Posted originally at The Left Coaster]

How the Liberal Media Myth is Created - Part 4

UPDATE 4/16/05: It was brought to my attention that the version of the paper I had originally linked to and analyzed is not the final version of Puglisi's paper. The latest version is available for download here. I apologize for this inadvertent /unintentional error. Given this, I made appropriate (minor) modifications in my detailed analysis at ICM, and in this post, to reflect the content and pagination in the final version of the paper. Having said that, Puglisi's conclusions or my critiques of his assumptions, data or conclusions have not changed with the latest version of his paper. Thus, the substance of my critique remains unchanged. (I also made some cosmetic changes to the post). The version of the post prior to 4/16/05 is archived here.

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This is the continuation of a series on how the "liberal media" myth is created. Previous installments covered how this myth is created using "tone" of media coverage (Part 1), using "catch-phrases" like 'right-wing extremist' v. 'left-wing extremist' (Part 2), and using "newspaper headlines" (Part 3). In this part, I address a fourth (superficial) approach used for creating a myth of "liberal media" - "topics" covered.

The focus of this part is the 2004 paper, "Being the New York Times: The Political Behaviour of a Newspaper" by Riccardo Puglisi of the London School of Economics (LSE) (which I discovered via Marginal Revolution). I have provided a more systematic critique of this paper at Illiberal Conservative Media (ICM) - Sec. 2.10; here I will highlight some portions of that critique. 

The issue of topic choice is important in media bias analysis, but like everything else it has to be treated with some sophistication to eliminate false results/conclusions. As I have indicated before at ICM:

Topic choice is certainly a function of editorial bias, but it also a function of numerous other confounding factors - source credibility, events, circumstances, issues of public interest, issues of interest to politicians or policy-makers, issues of interest to the media outlet to ensure their revenues and profits in the markets they compete in, etc. So, it would be much more difficult to credibly demonstrate editorial bias on topic choice, by itself.

With that sentiment, let's look at Puglisi's paper, starting with his abstract (bold text is my emphasis):

I analyze a dataset of news from the New York Times, from 1946 to 1994. Controlling for the incumbent President’s activity across issues, I find that during the presidential campaign the New York Times gives more emphasis to topics that are owned by the Democratic party (civil rights, health care, labour and social welfare), when the incumbent President is a Republican. This is consistent with the hypothesis that the New York Times has a Democratic partisanship, with some "watchdog" aspects, in that it gives more emphasis to issues over which the (Republican) incumbent is weak. Moreover, out of the presidential campaign, there are more stories about Democratic topics when the incumbent President is a Democrat.

In my detailed critique of this paper, I've pointed out what I believe are six major problems with this paper (I, II, III, IV, V, VI). I can't do full justice to all of those points here - so I am simply going to condense my points here and refer interested readers to the full critique for details.

First, here are some assumptions stated by Puglisi for his study:

As briefly anticipated in the introduction, the empirical analysis performed here and the interpretation of its findings are based on the following set of identifying assumptions:

(1) The issue ownership hypothesis holds.

(2) “All publicity is good publicity”.

(3) The relative share of Executive Orders about a subset of issues proxies the relative intensity of the activity of the incumbent President with respect to those issues.

The issue ownership hypothesis, which Puglisi bases on historical polling data and mentions throughout, is the following: 

Democratic topics comprise Civil Rights, Health Care, Labor & Employment and Social Welfare. Republican topics comprise Defense and Law & Crime.

Now, it may be convenient to assign such ownership because it helps make the analysis more interesting, but really, someone "owning" the issue often has little to do with whether the publicity/coverage that person gets on that issue is good or bad (even if one can be sure that the "issue ownership" actually holds). Thus, the second assumption, that "All publicity is good publicity" (referring to "owned issue" coverage for the person who owns it) simply makes no sense. For example, was "Health Care" coverage always "good publicity" for Bill Clinton (Democrat)? Was "Defense" and "Law and Crime" coverage always "good publicity" for Richard Nixon (Republican) and Ronald Reagan (Republican)? Was "Employment" and "Social Security" coverage necessarily always "bad" publicity for the Reagan administration? In other words, the assumption that if a newspaper reports on topics "owned" by a party, it automatically means that party benefits, makes no sense because such an assumption fails to account for the fact that newspapers, can and do issue reports on "owned" topics that may not be positive at all to the "owning" party.

Second, consider these "definitions" offered from Puglisi:

Definition 1 A newspaper has a Democratic (Republican) partisanship if during the presidential campaign it devotes more space to issues owned by the Democratic (Republican) party, at the expense of neutral or Republican (Democratic) issues. 
...
In fact, over and above the electoral partisanship of the newspaper, as described by definition 1, the political color of the incumbent President could be given an interpretation within a lapdog/watchdog dichotomy. The idea is the following: if it turns out that -during the presidential campaign- the New York Times gives less emphasis to Democratic topics and/or more emphasis to Republican topics when the incumbent is a Democrat, over and above his Democratic or Republican partisanship, this is consistent with the fact that the newsaper acts as an electoral watchdog with respect to the incumbent President.
...
Definition 2 A newspaper is an electoral lapdog of the incumbent President if, ceteris paribus, during the presidential campaign it devotes more space to the issues over which the incumbent is strong, and/or less to issues over which the incumbent is weak.

Definition 3 A newspaper acts as an electoral watchdog if, ceteris paribus, during the presidential campaign it dedicates more space to the issues over which the incumbent is weak, and/or less space to the issues over which the incumbent is strong.

Where do I begin?

These definitions are incorrect - not only are they inconsistent with each other, the latter definitions are incorrect in themselves. For example, I can just as well argue based on Puglisi's Definition 1 that the newspaper is no "watchdog" but just a shill for the candidate opposing the incumbent and is therefore displaying "partisanship" in favor of the challenger. In fact, let's ignore Definition 1 completely and consider Definition 3 on its own. It is Puglisi's *opinion* that the newspaper serves as a "watchdog" by focusing on the topics that supposedly favor the challenger. One can easily have a different *opinion* that a newspaper doing this is a partisan supporter of the challenger and not a "watchdog". (Thus, setting up the definitions the way Puglisi does, has the (unintentional and) unfortunate consequence of pre-ordaining the results.)

This is the natural (and fully expected) problem with studies of this nature which don't actually analyze the content of the news articles. Thus, Puglisi's assumptions and definitions are incorrect because at a very fundamental level, they neglect the actual nature of the coverage (accurate or inaccurate). So, combining Problem I and Problem II, this study and the interpretation of its results totally break down even before we get to the actual data. Needless to say, this study's findings are untenable, as a result. 

Third, by Puglisi's own admission (Tables 2 and 3), when we look at "All stories" that appeared in the New York Times in the period 1946-1994, the so-called Republican topics and so-called Democratic topics were only 21.7% (8.37% + 13.36%) of the total. Thus, this study claims to show "Democratic partisanship" (or otherwise) based on a study that essentially ignores over 78% of all stories published in the New York Times. Stunning.

For example, "Banking, Finance and Dom. Commerce" (14.66% of all stories) and "International Affairs" (13.22% of all stories) are not part of Puglisi's model because they are not "owned" by Republicans or Democrats. What category would "taxes" or "spending" or "budget deficits" fall under? This is one of the most important topics in all Presidential campaigns - which often make or break campaigns - and there's no mention of it in the analysis. Also, what category would draft-avoidance or alleged extra-marital affairs fall in? Other? Or is it "Law and Crime?" There's a whole slew of topics relating to the individuals or their policies, that fall into the supposed "non-owned" issue category, which have a habit of coming up frequently during campaigns. It may be acceptable to ignore all that for the purpose of creating certain limited hypotheses, but in the absence of any serious consideration of some of these other topics, it is not advisable to reach sweeping conclusions of the kind the author has.

Fourth, Puglisi's paper does not consider seriously the fact that major events happen which have nothing to do with the "strength" of Democrats or Republicans. For example, George Bush Sr. started significant cuts to defense spending at the end of the Cold War and Bill Clinton continued this effort. When there are no major wars and when there is no overarching concern about national defense, there is no reason for papers to simply keep writing more articles about "defense" just because a Democrat is in power. This same argument applies to every topic under the sun.

It is also obvious that many topics are raised, especially in electoral campaigns, by the politicians who are campaigning. Not to mention, one of Puglisi's "findings" is that the coverage of "Republican topics" actually goes up significantly in the campaign coverage when the challenger is a Republican. This takes us right back to Problem II. Either the NYT has "Democratic partisanship" or it doesn't. It makes no sense to claim that it has "Democratic partisanship" and simultaneously say that "...under a Democratic incumbent there are more stories about Republican topics when the presidential campaign kicks in. This effect is quite strong in magnitude...". Why is the latter considered a "watchdog" behavior rather than "Republican partisanship"? After all, if part of the "results" point one way, it is sufficient for Puglisi to label it "partisanship" of one kind; yet, when another part of the "results" points in another direction, it is not partisanship in the other direction - it is "watchdog"ism. 

Fifth, when I look at Puglisi's basic data tables 3 and 4 (in his paper - see footnote), even if one makes the assumption that Executive Orders get proportional coverage in the NY Times (as he does), the numbers I derived suggests that even when the New York Times' topics-coverage is normalized to Executive Orders, it provided more coverage overall on the "Republican" topics than on the "Democratic" topics (I invite readers who are more statistics-aware to comment on whether I made any mistakes in my assumptions/calculations because I am not a statistics expert). This seems to partly contradict his main conclusions (even if you ignore the fundamental flaws I discussed above).

Sixth, Puglisi's study lacks any *real* control for comparison. Even if we assume that the results of this study are correct (which they are not), how can someone claim that a paper is partisan without even evaluating another paper - with an ideology known to be conservative - to see whether that paper's topic coverage was similar or the opposite? We have no idea whether Puglisi's findings will be "mirrored" or "similar" in a rag like the Washington Times. But it was inappropriate to make the kind of sweeping conclusions he makes in his paper without doing such a basic comparison in the first place.

All in all, this is a deeply flawed paper that certainly does NOT prove ANY liberal bias or Democratic "partisanship" on the part of the New York Times. But it helps us learn yet another way media bias myths are propagated.

Part 5: Using "think-tank" citations

[Posted originally at The Left Coaster]

How the Liberal Media Myth is Created - Part 5

UPDATE 4/16/05: This is an updated version of my original post which is archived here. As I was doing a review of some other published literature on media bias on 4/16/05, I discovered that Groseclose-Milyo (G-M) had posted an updated version (HTML, PDF) of their original paper as of 2005-01-03. The revised version of their paper corrects some of lacunae in the original version; however, the most fundamental problems with the original paper remain in this new version. [NOTE: The fact that I missed the latest version in my original critique was purely an unintentional oversight. The updated G-M paper does not in any way invalidate my original critique (indeed, one of the fixes they made shows that one part of my critique was right on target). I have updated my critique here to refer to their revised paper.] 

---

This is a continuation of a series on how the "liberal media" myth is created. Previous installments covered myth-creation using "tone" of media coverage (Part 1), "catch-phrases" like 'right-wing extremist' v. 'left-wing extremist' (Part 2), "newspaper headlines" (Part 3) and "topics" covered (Part 4). This part highlights an unusual, indirect approach that uses "think-tank" citations. 

The focus of this post is a paper titled "A Measure of Media Bias" (HTML, PDF) by Tim Groseclose and Jeff Milyo. I found this paper via Language Log (there has been some back and forth at Language Log between critic Geoffrey Nunberg and the paper's authors), where it was also noted that:

Groseclose and Milyo's study has been approvingly cited by Bruce Bartlett in National Review, by Linda Seebach in the Rocky Mountain News, and by Harvard economist Robert J. Barro in Business Week,  not to mention conservative bloggers like Instapundit, Andrew Sullivan, and Matt Drudge, among a number of others, who trumpet its "objectivity."

A single blog post, once again, is insufficient to provide a detailed critique of the paper. So, I'll refer readers who are more curious to my detailed critique over at ICM - Sec. 2.9. Here, I'll reproduce my summary (with links to details) showing why this paper's conclusions are wrong.

The Groseclose-Milyo (G-M) paper (HTML, PDF) attempts to assess media bias using an approach wherein adjusted ADA (Americans for Democratic Action) scores (0-to-100) are used to assess legislator ideology (archconservative-to-archliberal), and separately, the think-tank citations of the legislators are compared to the think-tank citations of the media outlet to then derive the media outlet's "bias". Based on their methodology (presented and discussed in this paper), they claim that:

Our results show a strong liberal bias.

I examined the paper from three perspectives:
1. Is the methodology used for assessing the ideology of think-tanks correct and reliable?
2. Is the methodology used for assessing the ideology of the media correct and reliable?
3. Is the definition of media bias used by the authors correct and reliable?

The answers to each of those questions is NO. 

Why?

The methodology used by the authors for assessing think-tank ideology (i.e., based on the average adjusted ADA score of the legislators citing the think-tank) is deeply flawed because it omits public or private disagreements that legislators have with the same think-tank and it does not account for the fact that legislators may agree with a think-tank but not state it publicly for various reasons (e.g., they are unaware of the think-tank; they are aware of the think-tank but the latter may not be known well enough to cite, it may be a "controversial" think-tank, there may be no need to cite a think-tank, etc.). This can effectively skew their results in the wrong direction, to an unknown degree. For example, the fact that their methodology found the ACLU to be "conservative" was a result of the former flaw. To address this, they say: 

The reason the ACLU has such a low score is that it opposed the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance bill, and conservatives in Congress cited this often.  In fact, slightly more than one-eight of all ACLU citations in Congress were due to one person alone, Mitch McConnell (R.-Kt.), perhaps the chief critic of McCain-Feingold.  If we omit McConnell’s citations, the ACLU’s average score increases to 55.9.  Because of this anomaly, in the Appendix we report the results when we repeat all of our analyses but omit the ACLU data. 

Unfortunately, omitting McConnell's citations or the ACLU data point is the wrong approach to fix this problem. The way to fix this is by actually ADDING all those instances in which Republicans actually disagreed with ACLU, not incorrectly and artificially remove situations where *they agreed with ACLU* in order to get an average score that seems more in sync with a *separately established* reality. In other words, if we already knew ACLU is "liberal" and need to know that to "adjust the data", then what is the value or point of this study?

Additionally, a legislator may cite a think tank not because he or she mostly agrees with the think tank but because that think tank's view is closer to his or her view than any other think-tank the legislator is aware of or cares to cite. It is very unlikely that legislators who cite a think tank agree with everything the think tank says or stands for. For example, some legislators may cite it because their position is in agreement with, say, only one or two or three of the think tank's positions and they may cite it for that reason, repeatedly (like in the ACLU case). The bottom line is that their think-tank ideology ratings are unreliable and incorrect, as I show in detail in at ICM Sec. 2.9.

The methodology used by the authors for assessing media ideology is completely untenable. There are three principal reasons for this:

(a) The approach G-M use establishes media ideology indirectly, by using the media's think-tank citations and comparing those to think-tank citations by legislators in order to find the legislator whose citations are the closest match. Thus, if a legislator is liberal and the media's think-tank citations match that of the liberal legislator, they would declare the media to be liberal. Momentarily setting aside the fact that this definition of media bias is itself incorrect, their claim would make sense only if it can be independently proven that the think-tanks cited by the liberal legislator are actually liberal. Their study does not prove this at all, considering that their methodology to establish think-tank ideology is itself deficient. Thus, at a fundamental level, their entire conclusion on media bias breaks down. (NOTE:  It is not at all implausible that left-leaning legislators may cite more centrist think-tanks in public than progressive/liberal ones, especially considering how the liberal advocacy groups and think-tanks are tarred negatively by the GOP in the illiberal conservative media). 

(b) The use of weighted-average ADA scores (for the House and the Senate) is slightly more meaningful than the Median (which they used in the original version of their paper), but even this is completely deficient and incorrect because the ideological center is set not using an independent, objective measure of ideology but based on the (political) positions of the people in Congress at a given point in time. Thus, their model simultaneously assumes that ADA scores can provide an absolute picture of a legislator's ideology but that media and think-tank ideology should be determined not using the same absolute reference but a relative, moving reference that is highly dependent on who's the majority in Congress and how they think or vote. This is not an acceptable model, for, if the minority party becomes the majority party in the next election, the derived ideology of think-tanks or the media could change significantly even though their actual positions underwent ZERO change. 

Put another way, if the Republican majority suddenly decides to become 100% conservative, guess what happens. The weighted-mean ADA score would drop, even if the Democrats in Congress DID NOT change at all, and even if the media outlets that are considered "liberal", by the G-M definition, remain STATIC (i.e., no change in their think-tank citation ratios and that of the corresponding "liberals" in Congress). In this case, even though the media's ideology has NOT changed at all, it's adjusted ADA score(s) will artificially look more liberal compared to the lower weighted-mean ADA score. (BONUS FOR LEFTIES: This is right in line with one of the long-time Republican strategies of declaring the media (and Democrats) to be too "liberal" by moving the country to the Right). This is not a partisan issue though. The opposite could occur when we are talking about media outlets that are considered "conservative" because they match the citations of conservative Republicans and if the Democrats decide to become 100% liberal.  

(c) The final, and perhaps most serious, problem with their analysis is their attempt to derive a conclusion of media bias using this study - because their definition of media bias, is in itself, completely flawed. Their confident conclusion that they have demonstrated "liberal" media bias is wrong because the study does not examine whether the media's news reporting is accurate. Their assumption that "seldom do journalists make dishonest statements" is also fatally incorrect. The focus on think-tank citations completely ignores what the media communicates to viewers or readers when it is NOT citing think-tanks, which is a big chunk of the time. The irony of the authors' citing serial liar Brent Bozell's claim that there is "rarely a conscious attempt to distort the news" is incredibly ironic! Their claim that "the citations that they gather from experts are also very rarely dishonest or inaccurate" also suggests that they are very un-skeptical when it comes to absorbing news.

When controlled for other factors, the more fundamental determinant of bias in news reporting is accuracy -- not whom the news reports cite. To the extent that news reporting could become inaccurate by citing certain think-tanks over others, one may have a case that think-tank citations could influence the accuracy of the reports. But, G-M have fallen into the trap of assuming that the part is the whole. Think-tank citations are merely one part of the whole - which is the media's accuracy in news reporting. 

Part 6: Using journalist ideology or voting preferences

[Posted originally at The Left Coaster]

How the Liberal Media Myth is Created - Part 6

This is a continuation of a series on how the "liberal media" myth is created. Previous installments covered myth-creation using "tone" of media coverage (Part 1), "catch-phrases" like 'right-wing extremist' v. 'left-wing extremist' (Part 2), "newspaper headlines" (Part 3), "topics" covered (Part 4) and "think-tank" citations (Part 5). This part highlights attempts to create a "liberal media" myth using surveys of journalist ideology or voting preferences.

Ever so often, hapless readers are treated to yet another survey or "study" showing how "most" journalists are "liberal" in their ideology or voting preferences. This is usually accompanied by the expected braying by the usual suspects on the Right about how journalists are therefore biased "liberal" in their news coverage. This is not a new phenomenon. As David Brock has pointed out in his seminal book "The Republican Noise Machine", one of the earliest such "studies" was in the book "The Media Elite: America's New Powerbrokers" by S. Robert Lichter et al. (bold text is my emphasis):

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 
...
"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."
...
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."

Since then, of course there have been many more such surveys or "studies" and I cover some of them at ICM (e.g., see, Sec. 2.2, Sec. 2.8, and Sec. 4.1). One of the general points that emerges from some of the later, somewhat more credible, surveys is that the majority of journalists claim to be centrist rather than liberal or conservative (on social and economic issues) - but, of the remainder, more tend to be liberal on social issues and conservative on economic issues, than the other way around. Now, even if we believe these surveys, do they somehow prove overall "liberal bias" in news coverage? The answer is a resounding NO (partly explained below). Why do some conservatives in the media then persist in pushing this spin point at every opportunity? Because they can. Because they could care less about facts. And....because the ICM lets them.

Let's also look at this from another perspective. The media is awash with conservative commentators, op-ed writers, columnists, talking heads and talk show hosts. Clearly many of these people are strong supporters of the Republican party and vote Republican. If those among them who peddle the above theory actually believe it, then it means they also accept that they themselves are completely biased and cannot be trusted with anything they report on or write about because it would not be "fair and balanced". Or at least one would think they accept that. But when Fox News comically keeps insisting that they are "fair and balanced", they are actually making a claim that it is possible to support a particular political party and ideology and yet be "fair and balanced." So which one is it folks? Make up your mind.

Now, since I am trying to address serious and credible media critics, let me summarize why a so-called "liberal" journalist ideology has not resulted in overall "liberal media" bias:

• Because newspaper publishers and media owners (and often even editors) historically tend to be more conservative and endorse/vote for Republicans rather than Democrats - and they usually have much more control (and censorship) over news coverage than the journalists who are farther down the chain, especially in this era of corporatist media "monopolies". (Not to mention that publisher/editor-driven newspaper endorsements have a higher probability of influencing votes than journalist preferences.)
• Because the repeated and egregious mainstream media malpractice and fraud against leading Democrats is well known, to the point that even conservatives have been forced to admit it (albeit in "softer" terms).
• Because the coverage of Bush (and the GOP) has long been fawning and/or largely uncritical (and not just on 9/11 and Iraq), such that a Democratic president would have been impeached in this country over far, far less (and don't forget this).
• Because even many of the so-called "liberals" in the media have a demonstrated record, especially in recent years, of being afraid to tell the truth, unlike their counterparts on the Right (in the media) who are never afraid to mislead or lie to their readers/viewers
• I could go on and on....but the "on and on" part is reserved for future posts about why the media is actually conservatively biased overall - so you'll have to bear with me (or you can just go browse ICM) :-)

Conservatives who keep recycling the magical "liberal bias" meme despite the (above) facts, may best be remembered as being the Bernard Goldbergs of the world. Why? I'll let the incomparable Bob Somerby explain:

GOLDBERG (page 13): “Then what about the mainstream media’s treatment of Clinton? You can’t possibly think they went easy on him, can you?” is what liberals always ask.

It’s a fair question. And the answer is, no, they didn’t go easy on Clinton. The truth is, reporters will go after any politician—liberal or conservative—if the story is big enough and the politician is powerful enough.

Strange, isn’t it? The press corps is swimming in liberal bias—but they “didn’t go easy on Clinton,” this generation’s most important liberal pol! (Bernie doesn’t mention the trashing of Gore.) But then, Bernie can talk his way out of anything. Here’s the way he gets around the media’s coverage of Bush:

GOLDBERG (pages 10-11): Perhaps the charge liberals have been making most often to back their claim of conservative bias is that the media have given George W. Bush a free ride on some very important issues involving foreign policy and national security. For a while you could hardly open up a liberal magazine or go to a liberal Web site without finding some bitter screed about how the press was sucking up to the president on everything from the war in Iraq to supposed civil liberties abuses at home. But the truth is, all the media were doing was what the media always do in times of war: They were rallying round the flag.

Can’t you see? There’s an answer for everything! In BernieVille, the media can “go after Clinton” and give Bush “a free ride,” but they’re still thick with that rank liberal bias! [eRiposte emphasis]

Part 7: Using public opinion polls on media bias

[Posted originally at The Left Coaster]

How the Liberal Media Myth is Created - Part 7

This is a continuation of a series on how the "liberal media" myth is created. Previous installments covered myth-creation using "tone" of media coverage (Part 1), "catch-phrases" like 'right-wing extremist' v. 'left-wing extremist' (Part 2), "newspaper headlines" (Part 3), "topics" covered (Part 4), "think-tank" citations (Part 5) and journalist ideology or voting preferences (Part 6). This part highlights attempts to create a "liberal media" myth using public opinion polls on media bias.

Accusations of "liberal media" are sometimes based on public opinion polls. For example see this comment by blogger Dave Huber, on the right-wing weblog That Liberal Media: 

Poll after poll demonstrate that the public believes the media tilt left, not right 

(Of course, that's not the only spin point he offers in the post. He also conveniently refers to the other hacktacular spin point about reporters' biases). But, for now, let's focus on the spin point of public opinion on liberal media bias.

The Polling Report's page is a good source for such opinion polls. Let's look at the (roughly yearly) Gallup polls from 9/01 through 9/04. If you take the Gallup poll numbers literally (ignoring MoE for the moment, considering conservatives themselves usually cite the raw numbers without MoE), on average less than 50% of the public believes the media is biased "liberal". On average, just over 50% of the public believes that the media is either conservative or "about right" in its balance. So, if you take these numbers seriously, we can conclude that:

• Usually, the majority of the public does not actually buy the argument that the media is liberal

• The claim that "the public" tends to believe that the media is "liberal" is yet another favorite, conservative spin point (which focuses usually on comparing "liberal bias" and "conservative bias", leaving out those who don't see a specific bias)

• This is the kind of insidious spin that allows the Right's meme-pushers to keep propagating misleading "liberal bias" claims into "news" and opinions, which in turn misinform the public about what the public itself believes

In fact, if you look at this 2004 "special report" by the right-wing Media Research Center (MRC) - famous for making a living by misleading or lying to the public - you see gratuitous spin and misleading statements using similar opinion poll results. I have commented in detail on the relevant portion of the MRC report at ICM Sec. 2.11A. When you read the report, you notice the section title which says "The Public Recognizes the Media’s Liberal Bias", followed by a set of opinion poll results where raw numbers on public opinions on bias are presented (without MoE) and then, statements like this:

The public is not wrong: news organizations are, in fact, disproportionately liberal, and far too many reporters approach their stories with a liberal mindset. Every study of the past 25 years has proved this point. The only question is when will the media elite recognize that a liberal bias erodes their credibility with mainstream and conservative audiences, and make ideological diversity in their newsrooms a goal?

Unless you are somewhat careful reading the report, you don't realize that (if you set aside MoE, as they have) 2 out of 3 studies they show in the same page indicate that a minority of Americans believe there is a "liberal bias" in the media. (I'm actually being generous to MRC by dropping a fourth example they have listed, that indirectly shows pro-liberal-bias support below 50%). That is then being spun to make a case for a pervasive problem of "liberal bias".

There is an important reason why groups like MRC are successful - the MSM Illiberal Conservative Media - which simply doesn't bother to call out these guys as the pathetic hacks that they are.

But that's not all. There's a more serious problem with the argument that "the media must be liberal-biased because the public thinks it is."

This claim is probably the most laughable claim of all in the media bias debate. The Right, after all, believes that the media is too liberal and therefore tends to skew their reporting and misinform the public. If they believe that the media's reporting can skew public opinion, it would be hypocritical not to consider the possibility that the public thinks the media is liberal because it is being told repeatedly that the media is liberal, even if it were not that liberal in reality. (Indeed, the MRC "special report" discussed above is a living, breathing example of this kind of garbage being fed to Americans.)  

But this is not a problem just with the MRCs of the world. Everyone knows this spoon-feeding is also facilitated by the MSM ICM. As Stanford University's Geoffrey Nunberg pointed out in the American Prospect (bold text is my emphasis):

....none of the critics took on the single most extraordinary result in the data I looked at -- this one involving, not labeling, but the way the press talks about the bias story itself. In the newspapers I looked at, the word "media" appears within seven words of "liberal bias" 469 times and within seven words of "conservative bias" just 17 times -- a twenty-seven-fold discrepancy. (As it happens, the disproportion is about the same in the database that Boyd looked at -- 72 to 3).

Now there's a difference that truly deserves to be called staggering. But how should we explain it? Certainly critics on the left haven't been silent about what they take to be conservative bias in the media, whether in the pages of political reviews or in dozens of recent books. But the press has given their charges virtually no attention, while giving huge play to complaints from the right about liberal bias. That's hardly what you'd expect from a press that really did have a decided liberal bias, and in fact the discrepancy is far greater than anything you could explain by supposing that reporters were merely bending over backwards to be fair -- in that case, after all, you'd expect them to give at least a polite nod to the other side, as well.

David Brock mentioned this very aspect in his seminal book The Republican Noise Machine:

[p 113] When challenged during his TV appearances, Goldberg invariably replied that since so many Americans believe the claim that the media is liberal, he couldn't be wrong. But as Nunberg pointed out, this logic has a circular quality to it. "In newspaper articles published since 1992, the word 'media' appears within seven words of 'liberal bias' 469 times and within seven words of 'conservative bias' just 17 times," he wrote. "If people are disposed to believe that the media have a liberal bias, it's because that's what the media have been telling them all along."

In the end, this silly argument for "liberal media" (using public opinion polls) does show one thing. People who argue "liberal bias" based on such polls (rather than the actual content/accuracy of news reports) show how deeply spin-loving, unserious and wrong they are about this issue - which is at the core of a democracy.

Having said that, there is no doubt that Progressives in the country do face a problem. A substantial percentage of the country believes that the media is biased "liberal" because of the Republican Misinformation Machine (RMM) and the ICM. If we look at the Gallup poll results, even in 2002 and early 2003, a plurality (but not a majority) felt that the media was "too liberal", despite the fact that conservatives and mainstream media outlets have themselves acknowledged what we independently know from their "news" coverage in that time period - namely, that the media went soft on George Bush after 9/11 and before the Iraq invasion, thereby acting as an uncritical carrier of misleading and false Bush administration claims prior to the Iraq war. This, in itself, tells you how the portion of the public that believes there is a "liberal media" has been misled about the media's tilt.

We need to fix that. This series and the ones that follow it, will be my attempt to suggest a path to solve this problem.

Part 8: Using obvious, unintentional errors in news reports

[Posted originally at The Left Coaster]

How the Liberal Media Myth is Created - Part 8

This is a continuation of a series on how the "liberal media" myth is created. Previous installments covered myth-creation using "tone" of media coverage (Part 1), "catch-phrases" like 'right-wing extremist' v. 'left-wing extremist' (Part 2), "newspaper headlines" (Part 3), "topics" covered (Part 4), "think-tank" citations (Part 5), journalist ideology or voting preferences (Part 6) and public opinion polls on media bias (Part 7). This part covers attempts to invent liberal media bias using obvious, unintentional errors in news reports. 

Ryan (a journalist) at Dead Parrot Society illustrates this with a good example - and I hope Ryan does not mind my reproducing his entire post here because it is an important one:

No question about it, this is an embarrassing correction to have to make:

Thursday's New York Times misidentified GOP Senate candidate Pete Coors as a Ku Klux Klan member who murdered a black sharecropper. ...

The Times story concerned a federal court decision upholding Louisiana resident Ernest Avants' 2003 conviction in the slaying.

The story indicated the accompanying photo was of Avants. But the picture actually was of Coors on the day the Golden beer baron announced he was running in Colorado's open Senate race.

The Coors campaign handled the error well; the spokeswoman even cracked a few jokes like, "It could have been worse. Pete could have been identified as John Kerry." They clearly -- and correctly -- recognized this as nothing more than a stupid mistake. But it's not enough, of course, in many corners of the blogosphere to point and laugh. It's important to assign darker motives.

Glenn Reynolds almost fought the urge, simply pronouncing it "lame." But then comes the pointer to Ryne McLaren, who muses: "Funny how the media seldom makes these sorts of mistakes with Democrats."

Two things: Unless there's something I'm not aware of, the media doesn't make this type of mistake about Republicans very often, either. As in, practically never. And anecdotally, the worst photo caption mistake I've ever seen -- wherein a typo gave a woman's name a hilariously sexual connotation -- happened to a liberal. Stupid mistakes don't care about your politics. I'll explain how goofs like this do happen in just a second.

But first we have The Corner, where the allegations of motive are more explicit: "PETE COORS IS NOT IN THE KKK, But the New York Times looks at him and thinks of one, a murderer at that..." [eRiposte: Note that this is from the unsurprisingly egregious and stunningly uninformed KJL - Kathryn Jean Lopez at NRO; but, given we're talking about NRO, that's not saying much]

Then Tim at My Stupid Dog says the error "illustrates the irrational hatred the "Gray Lady" seems to hold against the entire Republican party." [eRiposte: To his credit, Tim also stated: "That's one hell of a bad joke [by Coors' spokeswoman]. Apparently in the Colorado GOP, it's more acceptable to be a murderous, race-baiting moron than a Democrat. Here's hoping that once Wilson extracts her foot from her mouth, she'll have the decency to apologize, then resign."]

Naarski goes even further overboard: "Instead of telling the truth about racism in the Democratic party (read: former KKK member Senator Robert Byrd), the NYT runs a FALSE story about Coors, Republican candidate for the Senate being a KKK member."

No more examples necessary here, but if you're so inclined, you can check the story's Technorati cosmos. There's plenty of blame to go around. But to be sure, there's also an extremely simple explanation for the NYT's slip-up here. If it's bias, I'll pay Instapundit's hosting charges next month.

First off, here's the briefs column where the bad photo ran. This Colorado Springs Gazette item verifies that it was a mug shot. (Update: Cool, here's a scan of the NYT story in print. Notice that there's not even a name underneath the mug shot.)

Now, if you've ever used page-layout software -- something like Quark Xpress, for example -- you know that to bring a photo onto a page, you first draw a frame on the page, and then you "call in" the photo by browsing to the image wherever it lives on your server. (The New York Times uses a front-end publishing system called CCI, which my paper is installing right now. So I'm not guessing at the process here.) Photo file names aren't always as informative as you might think, and it's easy to see how an editor might click on the wrong one. (Update: Just chatted via MSN with one of our CCI experts. He tells me that photo names coming off the wire are fairly uninformative. They're usually just named something like "APX0057" -- nothing necessarily linked to the content of the photo. So unless you're vigilant, it's not that hard to snag the wrong picture.) There's a second possibility, as well -- CCI allows you to pre-assign photos to story locations, so if a Pete Coors item had orginally been slotted for that briefs column, the photo would naturally have been assigned as well. Then if the text was swapped out later, the photo might have accidentally been left behind.

Regardless, once a wrong photo is on the page, you'd never know it unless someone happens to recognize the person in the picture. In this case, there are pretty good odds that a copy editor wouldn't know what Pete Coors or Ernest Avants looks like. (For that matter, not many bloggers either.) So the mistake, embarrassing as it is, gets into print.

Calling in the wrong photo while putting together a news page is easy; I know because I've done it. Thankfully my error was just a landscape shot. But doing this is the page layout equivalent of a typo -- 99% of the time it's just an obvious WTF mistake. But once in a while the stars align and that typo bites you hard. (The caption error I mentioned above happened because a copy editor typed an 'X' instead of a 'Z'.) That there's a simple explanation for an error like this doesn't make it any less embarrassing, or less worthy of a correction, but it does point out how silly it is to always question motive for everything.

To put it in online terms, pulling in the wrong mug shot is the blogging equivalent of pasting the wrong URL in your href tag. And I hate to say it yet again, but every time bloggers pick on something like this -- a simple mistake -- as an example of bias, they devalue their criticism when they're pointing out something that's actually egregious. [eRiposte emphasis]

Ryan's post is illuminating and all media critics (Left/Right/Center) should keep this in mind. In our attempts to critique the media, we may risk stepping overboard if we insist on reading something sinister into every error made by the media. Granted, the incident above was so obviously an inadvertent error that it was extraordinarily dumb to pick on it to suggest or hint any kind of media bias. But not every inadvertent error may be as obvious. Moral of the story? Feel free to point out errors, but be more careful about assigning motives to silly errors that have an obvious, alternate explanation.

Note to readers: If you are aware of other similar examples please mention it in the comments.

P.S. Ryan has done some good work at Dead Parrot Society on the topic of the media. I expect to feature some more of his work in future posts.

Part 9: Using [the critic's] ignorance

[Posted originally at The Left Coaster]

How the Liberal Media Myth is Created - Part 9

This is a continuation of a series on how the "liberal media" myth is created. Previous installments covered myth-creation using "tone" of media coverage (Part 1), "catch-phrases" like 'right-wing extremist' v. 'left-wing extremist' (Part 2), "newspaper headlines" (Part 3), "topics" covered (Part 4), "think-tank" citations (Part 5), journalist ideology or voting preferences (Part 6), public opinion polls on media bias (Part 7), and obvious, unintentional errors in news reports (Part 8). This part covers attempts to invent or hint at liberal media bias using [the critic's] ignorance. 

Ryan (a journalist) at Dead Parrot Society has chronicled a good example of this type of myth-creation in this post. Before we look at the details, it's instructive to first read Ryan's general comment below, because it illustrates the mind-numbing stupidity (and lack of credibility) of some of the prominent "liberal media" "critics" on the Right:

For the curious, the rule is pretty simple: If we don't run graphic images, it's because we're afraid they'd show people the barbaric nature of the terrorists we face, thereby causing the public to support the war [See: beheading videos]. If we do run graphic images, it's because we want to spread the terrorists' message, and we hope they'll sicken people, thereby causing them to be against the war [See: Fallujah, Haifa Street]. Hey, nobody ever said it was hard to be a media critic.

Ryan's (polite) post on the fake outrage on the Right over the Haifa Street execution photos, also provides a window into the downright egregious behavior of some of the right-wing bloggers on this occasion:

But the accusatory nature of the Haifa Street commentary has fed on itself for a while now, to the point where we're demanding a "full explanation," [eRiposte: This is a link to Roger L. Simon] or even talking about the AP's "role in the murders." [eRiposte: This is a link to a post from the ignorance-loving, extremist, crackpot blog, Power Line] This is because a photographer:

• Was able to "stand fearlessly in the middle of the street and shoot photo after photo".
• "[D]id not take cover, even as soldiers and Marines are trained to do when shooting starts. He was made of sterner stuff and held his ground ... in the midst of '30 armed insurgents, hurling hand grenades and firing guns' ".
• "[M]anaged to stand in the middle of one of Iraq's (and probably the world's) most dangerous roads and shot a picture after another of a ruthless murder".

Another blogger ... [eRiposte: Again, Power Line, as Ryan notes in an update] -- talked of the photographer being merely "yards away" from the killings. Do these writers really believe their characterizations of how the stringer got his shots? I can't imagine they do, not in a day where a telephoto lens and a professional crop bring you right into a photo's face. Here, compare these two versions of the same picture, both carried on Yahoo's feed of news photos.

[eRiposte: Photos not shown here, please see Ryan's post]

In all likelihood, even the photo on the left was cropped in from full frame; very few news photos aren't cropped at least somewhat to tighten in on the important part of the image. But you can see how easy it is to take a photo from distance and bring the viewer right in close. So we know the Baghdad photographer wasn't standing right up on top of the insurgents, and common sense says the photographer wasn't standing fearlessly in the middle of the street, either. Even if you were one of the terrorists themselves, you wouldn't do that. Ever tried to get a sense of what's going on around you when you're looking through a camera lens? Want to do that with bullets and grenades flying around?

So where was the photographer most likely standing when he got these shots? Hey, you know that Glenn Reynolds, he's a camera buff, so why not ask him: If you were a professional photographer carrying professional equipment optimized for shooting pictures in a war zone (where you might not want to be right up close to the action), how far away could you have been and still gotten these shots? Actually, you don't have to ask Glenn, because I just spoke with a news photographer on our staff (for readers who don't know, I'm an online producer for a newspaper in Washington state). Judging by the perspective and clarity on the image above, he estimates that the photographer in Baghdad was using a 300-millimeter lens from about a block away. "From a very safe distance," he said.

Let me repeat that: From a city block away. This is part of why you think the AP might have done something wrong? (Hey, remember how awesome it was when a blogger found someone in the field to speak to the authenticity of the CBS memos? You'd think someone might have thought of this on the Haifa Street photos.)

And most certainly the photographer was not casually standing out in Haifa Street for a long period of time, as these bloggers imply. The series of three photos show the events of no more than a few moments. Maybe 10-12 seconds, if one of the terrorists tooks his time moving from the first victim to the second. More likely it was 5 or 6 seconds. And the journalist was likely a block away, allowing plenty of opportunity for cover.

Speaking of odds, plenty of bloggers also find it hard to imagine that a photographer would have just happened to be in the right place at the right time to capture the Haifa Street incident:

After all, Baghdad is a city of over five million people. The odds are, indeed, extremely long--rather like my happening on a gang killing with my camera ready in Los Angeles.
[I]t was surely the longest of odds that would have brought an Associated Press cameraman to the site of a surprise attack on two Iraqi electoral workers.

Really? The longest of odds? Let's think about this: You're a stringer for the Associated Press. You don't get a salary; you get paid per shot. Therefore, you don't wander aimlessly, or just go about your normal day-to-day business. Of course not. You go to wherever you're most likely to witness a newsworthy event. For at least some of the many photographers currently working in Baghdad, that would probably be what one of the afore-linked bloggers described as Iraq's most dangerous road: Haifa Street. Now factor in the possibility that the AP may have been told some sort of news event would occur there (despite pronouncements declaring that AP was "tipped off," at this point we don't have anything more than speculation on the part of Salon's AP source; make of it what you will). So, all in all, what do you think the odds are that some stringer might have been on Haifa Street that day? Not bad, if you ask me. I'd be surprised if there were only one photographer there, actually.

Or think about it this way: What are the odds that a photographer would have been in just the right spot to capture a shot of Dwight Clark catching Joe Montana's pass to win the 1982 NFC championship game? Pretty darn good, actually. News photographers make their living by anticipating where to be to capture the best image. Obviously the stakes are higher when you're shooting war photos instead of wide receivers, but the underlying concept is the same. Pick your spot, get there, and see what develops. Sometimes you get skunked, sometimes you get a powerful (and possibly sickening) photograph. (Not that war is anything like a sporting event. I'm only illustrating the fact that we don't always find it wildly implausible that a trained photographer finds himself in the right place to take a split-second photo.)

Or think about it in another, less cheery way: Even if it's totally random, given the number of insurgent attacks going on, what are the odds that at some point a photographer is going to happen to be there right when one occurs? On any given day, maybe not great. But over months, it's going to happen. If Roger Simon wants to make a more accurate analogy, he might wonder how likely he'd be to see a gang killing if day after day after day after day he went to the toughest part of town, during a period of intense street fighting, with a camera, looking specifically for gang violence. Hmm. I wonder if a crime novelist could imagine that possibility.

...

Update: Found the source of that "yards away" quote; it was a separate Power Line post.

The photographer was obviously within a few yards of the scene of the murder, which raises obvious questions ...

No, no, no, no. The photographer was not obviously that close. It looks like this belief -- which is almost certainly a misconception; as noted above, a professional photographer estimates the shot was taken from a block away -- is the main meat behind these allegations against AP.

Hopefully this gets cleared up, but I'm not holding my breath. The AP deserves criticism like any media agency, but it certainly doesn't deserve a demonization campaign based on suspicions supported by little more than misconception.

Ryan posted a follow-up here since some right-wing blogs were continuing to perpetuate myths on the above incident. Also see this post with additional comments (added 4/16/05).

Lawyers, Guns and Money points out another invention arising from ignorance, from the master of them all:

Prof. InstaHack thinks this point is so clever it's worth repeating twice:

"...why are they "death squads?" I thought that people who did this sort of thing were called "insurgents," in the interest of neutrality, unless one chose to compare them to the Minutemen? Or is that only when they're on the other side?"

Yes, I'm afraid a tenured law professor can't understand why terrorists working on behalf of the state wouldn't be called "insurgents." Jeebus. There's spurious claims of media bias, and then there's just not understanding what words mean.

Kevin Drum commented at Political Animal on another aspect of Instapundit's "punditry":

Instapundit, for example, has written a seemingly endless stream of contemptuous posts about the media over the past year, but when I click the links and read the stories in question, there's usually nothing there except trivia: a tendentious reading of one word in a headline, unhappiness that a favored group wasn't quoted, etc. There's just no there there.

Today he offers up an almost self-parodic example.
...
Glenn's complaint? The contras were Nicaraguan, not Salvadoran! The editors at Newsweek are idiots!

This is like something a triumphant fourth-grader would say, and it's unfortunately typical of blogosphere media criticism. In fact, the Reagan administration believed from the beginning that Nicaragua was supporting the Salvadoran rebels, and this was one of their reasons for opposing the Sandinistas in the first place. What's more, contra-resupply efforts were based at Ilopango air base in El Salvador, a fact that became public after Eugene Hasenfus' flight from Ilopango was shot down in 1986. The government denied that it was involved, of course, but Hasenfus and Ilopango — which was a center of U.S. support for both the Salvadoran government and the Nicaraguan contras — were nonetheless the early sparks that set the Iran-Contra investigation in motion in the first place.

El Salvador was a key part of Reagan's obsession with Central America and was also a key part of the Iran-Contra investigation. The editors at Newsweek, many of whom were probably covering this story when it happened, are undoubtedly well aware of this. Would-be media critics ought to be aware of it too.

The Poor Man delivered a "stronger" response to Instapundit's brilliance and I'm just reproducing the conclusion of his post [* = my edits]:

... "Buh-d'oy! El Salvador had nothing to do with US policy in Nicaragua - they're, like, different countries, you anti-American racists!" This is coming from a guy who supports fighting the "global Islamofascist movement" of al-Qaeda by invading Iraq. Pretty rich stuff. The only question now is: how f****** clueless do you have to be to take this guy seriously?

[The Poor Man also posted an update based on Instapundit's response, here.]

Another recent example relates to the Terri Schiavo case, where some right-wing bloggers revved up their infamous fake outrage in combination with ignorance (on the meanings of phrases like "push polls" and "life support"), to claim bias on the part of ABC - see Mystery Pollster for details.

Just for fun, let me conclude this installment with the most unbelievably stupid post I have come across so far (that hints at media bias), via Jesse at Pandagon, who appropriately comments on the post as follows:

Heh...heh, heh...

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Here is a part of the post in question at the blog Trying to Grok:

When my students and I study media bias, this might be a perfect article to discuss:

A majority of American registered voters now say conditions in Iraq did not merit war, but most are reluctant to abandon efforts there, according to a new Los Angeles Times poll.

[...]

...And what was the margin of error, by the way?

The poll, which was conducted from Saturday to Tuesday, surveyed 1,230 registered voters nationwide. It had a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.

The U.S. population is estimated at close to 300 million right now, and we're supposed to get worked up over what 1,230 people who are registered voters have to say? Hell, I only just registered yesterday, so I would've been ineligible. And if the margin of error is plus or minus 3%, and 53% of these 1,230 people thought war was not necessary, then perhaps only 615 people in the whole USA said this.

615 people. How on earth is this supposed to be representative of the voice of America?

Some of the (appropriate) entertaining responses in comments to the above post (and yes, I should give credit to the blogger for allowing comments):

You teach? I'm amazed. This is one of the most clueless posts I have ever read on a blog. And that is saying something.

More evidence that any idiot can set up a web log--and more than a few idiots have.
Posted by: raj at June 13, 2004 04:23 PM

...

Since people who tick you off "incite" you to do more research, perhaps you should include a semester or two of introductory statistics in your research. Because anyone who has taken stats knows full well that if the poll was done correctly, ie, consisted of a random sample, then 1230 registered voters can, in fact, represent the opinion of ALL registered voters within a stated margin of error.

(And chances are that this poll was done correctly, simply because people who, unlike you, really know what they're talking about when it comes to statistics would be all over them in a moment.)

Furthermore, you should NEVER do research to "strengthen" your opinion because that's not genuine research, merely building your self-esteem.

Research should only be done to learn the truth about an issue, which may or may not jibe with your opinion.

And when you learn that you are wrong and/or ignorant, you need to admit it clearly. Otherwise, you have no business teaching anyone anything.
Posted by: tristero at June 13, 2004 04:57 PM

...

hohoho
"we're supposed to get worked up over what 1,230 people"
Silly liberals

That high-falutin LA times didn't fool you, huh Sarah?
It's a good thing you read the fine print.

Think of how long this scam has been going on.

Look! More media bias! From Fox News even. "The sample is 900 registered voters." Is nothing sacred?
Posted by: Ned at June 13, 2004 05:03 PM.

NOTE to Readers: If you are aware of more ignorance-based "liberal media" claims, please mention them in the comments. As we all know, the supply never dwindles.

Part 10: Using opinions to distort straight news

[Posted originally at The Left Coaster]

How the Liberal Media Myth is Created - Part 10

This is a continuation of a series on how the "liberal media" myth is created. Previous installments covered myth-creation using "tone" of media coverage (Part 1), "catch-phrases" like 'right-wing extremist' v. 'left-wing extremist' (Part 2), "newspaper headlines" (Part 3), "topics" covered (Part 4), "think-tank" citations (Part 5), journalist ideology or voting preferences (Part 6), public opinion polls on media bias (Part 7), obvious, unintentional errors in news reports (Part 8), and [the critic's] ignorance (Part 9).  This part covers attempts to invent liberal media bias using opinions to distort straight news. 

Atrios recently mentioned an example of this type of myth propagation by Michelle Cottle of TNR (The New Republican - Atrios' term and an appropriate one). The sheer vacuity of her comments is self-evident:

Press Club Wankers

I was rather annoyed this weekend when Even the New Republican's Michelle Cottle let Howie Kurtz goad her into saying that the media was biased against Christian Conservatives because it was... get this... actually showing lots of images of the Schiavo protesters on TV. The exchange:

KURTZ: Well, some of them are now being resurrected by newspapers to show that this has happened before.

Michelle Cottle, has the press ridiculed, or maybe I should say marginalized, religious people who believed the Terri Schiavo must be kept alive as a matter of Christian morality?

MICHELLE COTTLE, THE NEW REPUBLIC EDITOR: Well, it's not that they get out there and make fun of them. It's just you come with a ready-made kind of visual here. You have people on the streets praying. They're (UNINTELLIGIBLE), you have very dramatic and even melodramatic protests and things like this.

These people are very easy to kind of just poke fun at without even saying anything. You just kind of show these people. And the majority of Americans who don't get out there and do this kind of, you know, really dramatic displays feel a little bit uncomfortable on that level.

So, here we have "the liberal" mocking these people while simultaneously saying the media was mocking them simply by putting them on TV. Lord knows how biased the media would have been had they not put them on TV. Heads I win tails you lose. [eRiposte emphasis]

As Bob Somerby at The Daily Howler has noted, Cottle's Millionaire Pundit Values got more absurdly moronic as she went on:

KURTZ: Let's broaden this to other religious-related issues: teaching of evolution in Kansas schools, a lot of coverage there, whether it should be required, whether creationism should be included; the Ten Commandments display in Alabama and elsewhere; even gay marriage in San Francisco. Isn't there some built-in media bias by the East Coast journalists toward those who have a different view of these matters?

COTTLE: I think there is. I mean, it's not that they—again, it's not that they say unpleasant things. But they do behave as though the people who believe these things are on the fringe, when actually the vast majority of the American public describes itself as Christian.

Cottle still hadn’t given any examples of the press corps’ troubling “behavior.” But as she continued, her commentary became even more puzzling:

COTTLE (continuing directly): You know, a huge percentage, somewhere between a third and a half, actually say that they believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible. And another huge chunk would be uncomfortable with evolution being taught in the schools. And this—this is not what you find in the New York media.

Say what? It was still unclear what Cottle was saying, but her complaint began to seem bizarre. Should members of the New York media be “uncomfortable with evolution being taught in the schools?” Should members of the New York media “believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible?” [eRiposte emphasis]

Indeed, heh, let's extend Cottle's argument for her. If, hypothetically, 33% of the country believed the earth is flat, it would be "liberal media bias" if the media portrayed them neutrally. Cottle just earned a well-deserved nomination to the Society Of Flat Earth Wankers - SOFEW (actually SOMANY these days).

Of course, the more common perpetrators of liberal media myths are conservative columnists, bloggers or "media watch" organizations. Jesse at Pandagon has two good examples from the crackpot wankers at NRO.

Let's start with this one:

Instant Response, Instant Stupidity

Tim Graham:

The Washington Post also signals its liberal bias by putting Al Franken on the front page AGAIN. Howard Kurtz reports from the battle front: “the signal was elusive in Los Angeles, its San Francisco station didn’t materialize, and its Internet feed kept breaking off.” So how on Earth is this front-page news? (Maybe it’s because this tinhorn network with next to no affiliates has “less than 100 employees.” Losing money hand over fist, eh?) Tom Brokaw did a whole story on his show last night, saying talk radio “of course, is dominated by conservatives.” Perhaps we should all this as a tribute: they really, really hate the idea that there’s conservative talk radio to act as instant rebuttal to Dan, Tom, Peter, Katie, Diane, and Harry.

Kids, this is what happens when your intellectual movement is led by dope fiends and the hopelessly nepotistic. A new network with prominent names on a mission to balance out the politcal leanings of a prominent and important medium gets front-page coverage? Really?

If they covered it now, liberal bias. If they cover it when it's got a hundred affiliates and a thousand employees, liberal bias. If they cover it when it's failed, liberal bias. Anyone notice a pattern here?

(Out of curiousity - can you really judge whether or not a company is profitable or not after one day of official operation?)

But, yes. If the media covers the media, it's because they're liberal. Unless they hate the media...which is only defined as anyone who's liberal - one of the curious things about the whole allegation of liberal media bias is that the strong and growing openly conservative media just doesn't count.

Here's the other one:

...For instance, the madcap dash to root out liberal media bias.

A Madness-watching reader e-mails: "Does anyone out there besides me think that CBS, by airing the promo for the Clarke interview over and over and over again during the NCAA Tournament, is jumping on what they percieve to be a golden opportunity to plant in as many Middle American minds as possible the idea that Bush is a lying screw-up? Just a thought."

The sad part is, there probably are other people besides this nut.

If anyone can think of a reason that CBS would promote CBS shows during a heavily viewed CBS-aired event, you can e-mail K-Lo with your very interesting idea.

Since Iraq coverage has been a common complaint from the Right, let's review Kevin Drum's post at Calpundit where he dispensed with the "media bias" nonsense trotted out by the usual suspects (led by Instapundit) back in October 2003:

The most common angle is to look at the facts on the ground in Iraq, but that doesn't get you very far. The media generally reports that although some progress is being made, things are still pretty bad: people are getting killed, tensions are high, and troop morale is low.

Scoffers suggest that this is just media bias. Why, touring musicians and federal judges, having spent short times there under heavy guard, have returned to tell us that things aren't so bad! Iraqis are definitely better off than they were under Saddam.

This gets us nowhere. Media bias is generally the last refuge of a scoundrel who has no evidence of his own, but the fact is that I've never been to Iraq, the critics have never been to Iraq, and none of us would be qualified to assess the situation even if we did go there. So it's impossible to judge if the press is doing a good job.

Instead let's look at it from a different angle. Presumably the Bush administration does have some idea of how things are going in Iraq, so how have they reacted to events?

• Before the war they expected to draw down troop levels to around 30,000 by now. This hasn't happened, so obviously events on the ground have turned out to be a lot worse than they originally expected.

• In fact, as I mentioned last month, we've seen the following actions recently: (a) keeping the 3rd ID in country after scheduling them to return, (b) rotating officers and senior NCOs out of their units, (c) extending the tours of regular troops, and (d) extending the tours of reservists. Now apparently leaves are being shortened. These are risky moves, and the Army wouldn't be making them unless the reality on the ground continued to be grim.
• The White House has shuffled responsibility for Iraqi reconstruction three times, first to Jay Garner, then to Jerry Bremer, and finally giving Condoleezza Rice a bigger role, the last move provoking a furious response from Donald Rumsfeld, who apparently learned about it via memo and media reports.
• Last month Bush shocked everyone by requesting an additional $87 billion for Iraqi reconstruction. He wouldn't have requested a sum this large if he could have gotten by with less.
• Finally, there's the UN. Regardless of what his apologists say now, it's pretty obvious that Bush didn't want to fight for another UN resolution. He wouldn't have done this unless he'd been convinced that he had no other choice.

...

But the Sunni triangle still seems to be a war zone, ambushes are taking place at an alarming rate, oil production is not ramping up very quickly, NGOs (and the UN) have pulled out because conditions are so unsafe, unemployment is over 50%, and Saddam is still loose. Compared to this, it's hard to take seriously the evidence of a few miscellaneous visitors who proclaim that everything looks safe to them while refusing to go anywhere without a heavy armed guard.

When you combine these facts on the ground with the fact that the administration isn't acting like things are going well, it's hard to be very optimistic...

Ryan at Dead Parrot Society highlights another aspect of news reports in this post - the fact that reports from war zones may evolve as more data comes in and may have nothing to do with bias:

The last time I brought this up, nothing much happened. But if the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results, call me crazy. Because the blogosphere is a critical part of making journalism get better, and I hate to see it chip away at its own credibility.

So let's take a look at this email printed at Instapundit today:

Two thoughts: One of the great things about blogs is bloggers work through the holidays, as opposed to newspapers and magazines, which recycle the year's news during the last week of the year to put together the inevitably boring "Year in Review" issue.

Second, a big media observation. Have you ever noticed that no matter how small the scale of the attack in Baghdad,the headline from the big media outlets will read something like "Huge Explosions Rock Baghdad" or "Baghdad Reels From Attacks"? I noticed an absurd example of this on the radio on Christmas Eve. My local ABC-radio affiliate interrupted regular programing to report that "huge explosions" had rocked the area near the Sheraton Hotel in Baghdad.

40 minutes later the end of the hour news update reported that an RPG had been fired at and missed the Sheraton, landing in the backyard. Big difference, huh?

If you don't mind, I'll start with the second observation, because the first one's just so silly. [eRiposte: Ryan is being overly generous and polite, as always. But, the contemptuous, ignorant, unmitigated horse*** about when journalists don't work, both from Instapundit's reader and from Instapundit - in his lame defense of the point in an "Update", after Virginia Postrel called the first observation "crock" - is a small but important reflection of their utter lack of credibility as media critics, which manifests itself time and again.]

It is entirely true that media reports sometimes use hyperbolic terms to describe attacks in Baghdad. If you are stridently anti-media, you probably assume this is because journalists hype everything, or because journalists will lie to make these attacks sound as bad as possible. Actually, you might assume both of these things.

If you are somewhat reasonable, you might consider that initial reports run the risk of being conflated because there's not much perspective available. Ideally these stories are clarified as soon as possible. In the example cited, this is precisely what happened. If you were on the scene of an RPG attack, you might well describe it to a reporter as a "huge explosion," too. And I wouldn't hold it against you if 40 minutes later your description was clarified to provide some perspective. This process of reporting, then revising upon further detail, is fairly common [eRiposte: This is a link to an Instapundit post where he links to (Dem) message board postings that are ridiculous and later "updates" that at least one of the posts is from a troll. This is not the first time Instapundit made accusatory posts based on something posted by a sock puppet or troll. Here's another example.] It's unfortunate, but not particularly unexpected or malicious.

Also, if you are somewhat reasonable, you might go to Google News and search on "baghdad explosion" before you accuse the media of always writing sensational headlines. Different story, yes, but you might find that even though bad headlines are great to poke fun at, straight headlines are the norm.

In doing these things, you wouldn't have to back away from your role as media critic. In fact, please don't, because journalism has plenty of real problems for you to help fix. But keeping your criticisms reasonable helps you hold onto your credibility.

OK, now back to that first observation by Glenn's reader: "One of the great things about blogs is bloggers work through the holidays, as opposed to newspapers and magazines, which recycle the year's news during the last week of the year to put together the inevitably boring 'Year in Review' issue."

I will avoid mentioning, at this point, how many Thanksgivings and Christmases and New Year's Days I've worked on the news desk, while a great majority of the public (including my own family) spent time at home. I will also avoid mentioning how many days of my vacation time I haven't been able to use because of short staff and a busy schedule during the past couple months. Because that's just me, and that's just anecdotal. Instead I will point back to Google News, where you can see exactly how little fresh work is being done this season by the news industry at large.

As for those bloggers who keep on updating through the holidays, I'm enjoying the fruits of their labor too. But I'm curious, with the media taking so much time off during the holidays, what exactly are they linking to? Since we're finding this criticism on Instapundit's site, we can take a quick peek at his last couple days of posting, as of mid-afternoon Pacific time Wednesday:

Total posts: 42. (wow!)
Posts that have no relation to recent media reports: 15. (Disagree with my methodology here if you like. I was looking for anything that didn't have a direct media link and didn't link to another blogger commenting on a media report. Among these 15 are links to techcentralstation columns, some interesting blogger reports direct from Iraq, and miscellaneous observations on food, books and other topics.)

... and just for fun ...

• Posts linking to a blogger's "Year in Review"-style compilation: 1

One could go on and on....but I have to move on. So let me stop here, with links to a few more examples from among the reams of "media bias" garbage that gets accumulated daily in many right-wing blogs and websites:

• The dependably egregious, crackpot pair - Power Line and Michelle Malkin - invent liberal bias on the NYT's coverage of the Pope's death, using "evidence" that, if anything, shows the opposite: see Michael at Ezra Klein's blog
• Right-wing blogs expressing their trademark fake outrage over the memo from ABC's Mark Halperin that the media should report Bush and Kerry's claims objectively without resorting to a subjective, false "balance": see Mark Kleiman
• Tim Graham at NRO attemps to paint a picture of bias over news coverage that is biased because.....it is not fawning over or neutral to Bush: see CJR Daily
• The Media Research Center invents liberal bias on a Peter Jennings story: see Roger Ailes

Part 11: Using superficial fact checking

[Posted originally at The Left Coaster]

How the Liberal Media Myth is Created - Part 11

This is a continuation of a series on how the "liberal media" myth is created. Previous installments covered myth-creation using "tone" of media coverage (Part 1), "catch-phrases" like 'right-wing extremist' v. 'left-wing extremist' (Part 2), "newspaper headlines" (Part 3), "topics" covered (Part 4), "think-tank" citations (Part 5), journalist ideology or voting preferences (Part 6), public opinion polls on media bias (Part 7), obvious, unintentional errors in news reports (Part 8), [the critic's] ignorance (Part 9), and opinions to distort straight news (Part 10).  This part covers attempts to claim liberal media bias using superficial fact checking.

One of the things I have pointed out in previous posts is that it is almost impossible to assess media bias without looking at the actual content of articles. Sometimes, conservatives review the content and claim media bias based on the contention that the article failed to mention something relevant and important. Let's look at a couple of such examples here.

Ryan at Dead Parrot Society catalogued a case which falls into this category. Blogger John Cole claimed (in a post titled "Halliburton- Not Guilty") that CNN Money, AP, Reuters and BBC failed to mention Dick Cheney's name when Halliburton was "exonerated" on a charge of overbilling for fuel costs, even though these same outlets mentioned Cheney's name in their news reports that originally alleged that Halliburton was overbilling the U.S. government. Ryan looked at the specific news reports cited by Cole and discovered that Cole's claims were incorrect in the case of all but one of the media outlets - because the rest had actually mentioned Dick Cheney's name in their reports. [A minor point. The only media outlet that Ryan had found, which did not cite Cheney in the "exoneration" piece is CNN Money. If you look at Cole's post, you see that he compares CNN Money (after the "exoneration") to a CNN piece (before the "exoneration"). So, the comparison is not quite one-to-one. But, this is trivial.]

Although Ryan showed that Cole's claim was largely without substance, there are additional aspects to the news reports that Ryan didn't look at, which make Cole's claims not just untenable, but possibly even opening up arguments for a reverse claim.

Firstly, Cole chose not to emphasize another important portion of the same news reports, where the real reason for the so-called "exoneration" was noted. For example, he cites this section of a Reuters report (bold text is my emphasis):

The U.S. Army said on Tuesday it had granted Halliburton (HAL.N: Quote, Profile, Research) a special waiver to bring fuel into Iraq under a no-bid deal with a Kuwaiti supplier despite a draft Pentagon audit that found evidence of overcharging for fuel.

as support for his starting claim that "...these latest stories that clear them of any wrongdoing..."

Now, if you read the WSJ article that formed the basis of the first news report that Cole cited (from CNN Money), you would have learnt something more about the meaning of this odd "waiver" (bold text is my emphasis):

In a previously undisclosed Dec. 19 ruling, the commander of the Corps, Lt. Gen. Robert Flowers, cleared Halliburton's Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary of the need to provide "any cost and pricing data" pertaining to a no-bid contract to deliver millions of gallons of gasoline from Kuwait to Iraq.

He acted after lower-level Army Corps officials concluded in a memo to him that Kellogg Brown & Root had provided enough data to show it had purchased the fuel and its delivery to Iraq at a "fair and reasonable price."
...
The timing of the Flowers ruling -- technically known as a "waiver" because it waives a requirement that the Halliburton unit provide data justifying its pricing -- is sure to draw scrutiny on Capitol Hill. The waiver came just a week after Pentagon officials confirmed that a draft audit found that KBR fuel overcharges ran to $61 million through the end of September. Under a running Army Corps contract, that sum increased by around $20 million a month through the end of last year, officials said.

The new statement from the Corps, the Army's civil-engineering arm that oversees and builds major construction projects here and abroad, exposes increasing friction between it and Pentagon auditors in charge of keeping tabs on Halliburton and other big Defense Department contractors.
...
Gen. Flowers signed the waiver nine days after officials at the Defense Contract Audit Agency, which keeps tabs on defense contractors, accused KBR of refusing to turn over internal documents that show the company was aware of accounting problems related to the alleged overcharging.

Halliburton officials said they requested the Army Corps grant them the waiver so they could continue to purchase gasoline without interruption. Spokeswoman Wendy Hall said in a written statement that "we needed the approval of the client to proceed in a streamlined procurement fashion."
...
Army Corps officials said Monday that the Flowers ruling was necessary to allow KBR to continue to deal with Altanmia at a time when the need for gasoline and kerosene in Iraq remains high. The process that led to the waiver, they said, began in early December when the Army Corps needed to increase the amount of gasoline coming in from Kuwait and KBR had to justify sticking with Altanmia instead of seeking a new supplier through a competitive bid.

Thus, Cole's claim was not only incorrect in the case of most media outlets, he did not address the fact that the "exoneration" was no real exoneration, but a waiver exempting Halliburton from actually justifying its pricing - which was what prompted the Pentagon audit to claim overbilling in the first place! It can therefore be argued that many of the media outlets were in fact kind to Halliburton (and by extension Cheney) by underplaying the fact that this was a "waiver" and by touting the "exoneration" instead. For example, the BBC "exoneration" article cited by Cole is highly biased in favor of Halliburton, by completely omitting ANY mention of the waiver. That is a gross distortion of the facts. [NOTE: The AP article, which was updated since Cole linked to it has a brief and confusing blurb: "A spokesman said Tuesday, however, that the corps had not completely exonerated Vice President Dick Cheney's former company of overcharging allegations." Again, this contradicts the entire premise of Cole's post about Halliburton being "Not Guilty".]

That's not all. Cole's post starts with a criticism of lefty bloggers:

I wonder if Oliver and Kevin will take the time to issue an apology to Halliburton, KB&R, Dick Cheney, and all of the good people who work for those vital corporations...

The fact that the "exoneration" was not a real exoneration indicates that Cole's requests for apologies were premature. Having said that, it's a pity Cole did not ask George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld to issue an apology too. Why?

Here is what Bush had claimed, originally (bold text is my emphasis):

A Pentagon audit confirmed that a Halliburton subsidiary - Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) - overcharged the department for some of its deliveries.
...
"If there is an overcharge, like we think there is, we expect that money to be repaid," President Bush said.

And here is what Rumsfeld had claimed, originally, clearly agreeing that there had been an overcharge (bold text is my emphasis):

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Friday he believed the Pentagon caught the overcharge in time to avoid paying the Halliburton subsidiary. There has not, "to my knowledge, been any overpayment," Rumsfeld said. "We've got auditors that crawl all over these things, and what you're reading about in the paper is not an overpayment at all," Rumsfeld said, responding to a question from the audience at a conference of state legislators. The discrepancies were uncovered in what was described as a routine audit.

What's more, the WSJ article that formed the basis of the first news report that Cole cited (from CNN Money), had a blatantly misleading statement favoring Halliburton (and by extension Dick Cheney):

...when news of the audit broke, President Bush said that if Halliburton had overcharged for the fuel, he expected the company to repay the money. [Emphasis mine. Thus, the news report did not not acknowledge the fact that Bush also stated, initially, that "we think there is" an overcharge.]

Bottom line? Cole missed the forest for the trees. He even got the trees mostly wrong. Rather than prove liberal bias, the articles were quite generous to Halliburton and could just as easily have been attributed to "conservative bias" because of their downplaying the "waiver".

Another example comes from Tim Lambert, who responded to a John Lott claim:

Counting stories about the Appalachian Law School shootings

After Lott claimed that biased news coverage of the shootings at the Appalachian School of Law deliberately omitted a defensive gun use, I did my own analysis of the news stories and found that the alleged bias was the product of Lott’s flawed counting methodology. Lott has posted a spreadsheet listing 295 articles he found on Nexis, and a file containing 249 of those articles. Some of those articles he does not count because they are duplicates. He asserts that the coverage was biased because only 3 out 218 stories mentioned that the attack was stopped by armed students. Some of the differences in our counts are because we used different sources for the articles (Factiva vs Nexis), so I’ll redo my analysis using the articles Lott posted. I’ll count things in the same way if possible to see why we get different results.

I indexed and categorized the articles and placed them here. Lott has not counted stories that are exact duplicates from his count, but if two versions of a story are slightly different he counts both of them. For example, he counts this and this as different stories, even though they are almost the same. In order to be as consistent as possible with Lott’s counts, I will count duplicates the same way as him in the analysis below.

After removing the stories Lott marks as duplicates, I am left with 198 articles. Of these, nine mention a defender’s gun. (Lott counted seven—he seems to have missed two of them.)

Next, I leave out stories about the funerals and students being released from hospital, leaving 124 stories stories that mention how Odighizuwa was apprehended,

Rex Bowman of the Richmond Times Dispatch wrote a story on January 17 that stated “fellow students tackled and subdued him”, and then on January 18 wrote another story that stated “Odighizuwa … was wrestled to the ground by fellow students, one of whom aimed his own revolver at Odighizuwa”. Obviously the reason why Bowman didn’t mention the gun on the 17th wasn’t because he was biased against guns, but because he hadn’t learned about it. The only stories that could potentially exhibit bias against guns are those that appeared on the 18th or later. There are 25 such stories. Some of these stories don’t have any bylines and appear to have just been rewritten from wire service accounts. If reporter’s biases are removing references to defender’s guns, then we need to look at the original stories and not the ones without bylines. That brings us down to 14 stories by eight different sets of authors. I’ll look at each of these authors to see if any show signs of bias.

...

My basic result does not change. There was only reporter whose account could possibly be construed as biased against guns. Lott makes it appear that there is bias by counting all the reports from the 17th and 16th when the reporters did not know about the defender’s gun, and also counting all the stories that were about completely different aspects of the shootings. [eRiposte emphasis]

The story doesn't end there, though. There was an important detail that Lott did not address (and sharp readers will probably know what that detail is, especially if you read the previous example :-)).

As Lambert pointed out (bold text is my emphasis):

Lott has a posting responding to my comments on his claims that the news coverage of the shootings at the Appalachian School of Law was biased. I wrote:

Unfortunately, Lott’s counting methodology is flawed, his count missed half of the stories that mentioned the armed students, his version of what happened deliberately omits important facts and omits contradictory accounts from other eye witnesses and his version contains details that appear to have been invented by Lott.

Lott has no answer at all to almost all of this, so he just responds to part of the criticism about his counting methodology. He once again deliberately omits mentioning Ted Besen’s contradictory account that strongly suggests that the guns were not used to stop the attack. He also carefully avoids mentioning or linking to my posting so that his readers won’t find out what Besen said. And remember that Lott is well aware that Besen and other witnesses say that Odighizuwa had dropped his gun before the armed off-duty policre officers arrived on the scene—he selectively quoted from Mathews’ article, he talked to Markus Funk who told him the same thing and now he is responding to my posting where I stressed the same fact.

It is hypocritical for Lott to accuse reporters of deliberately concealing facts while deliberately concealing facts himself. In a separate posting I redo my analysis using his set of articles and get the same results as before, but the most important thing to notice is the way Lott keeps avoiding mentioning that the “fact” of defensive gun use that he accuses the media of deliberately suppressing, actually isn’t a fact.

These are just two examples. The basic point is clear. Even when some critics allege "liberal media" bias by focusing on specific content in articles, their fact-checking is often weak, superficial and incorrect.

There is an important reason why I posted this particular installment of this series. It is very easy for journalists, media watchers and third party observers (including those in academia) to be taken in by seemingly meaningful criticisms like the ones shown above. It gives the appearance that the critic actually took the time to read the articles or search the articles for relevant content (rather than blindly use a "catch-phrase" search) and may lead the casual reader or observer to believe there is merit to the criticism, even though there isn't.

The lesson is simple, as I've stated a few times already. Is the article or report accurate? If you're not looking at that aspect and are still claiming bias, the chances that your claim is credible are very low.

P.S. Readers, if you are familiar with other such cases, feel free to leave a note in the comments.

[Also review the Comments section to the above post at The Left Coaster to see John Cole's response and my response to him.]

Part 12: Using no fact checking

[Posted originally at The Left Coaster]

How the Liberal Media Myth is Created - Part 12

This is a continuation of a series on how the "liberal media" myth is created. Previous installments covered myth-creation using "tone" of media coverage (Part 1), "catch-phrases" like 'right-wing extremist' v. 'left-wing extremist' (Part 2), "newspaper headlines" (Part 3), "topics" covered (Part 4), "think-tank" citations (Part 5), journalist ideology or voting preferences (Part 6), public opinion polls on media bias (Part 7), obvious, unintentional errors in news reports (Part 8), [the critic's] ignorance (Part 9), opinions to distort straight news (Part 10), and superficial fact checking (Part 11).  This part covers attempts to hint at or invent liberal media bias using no fact checking.

How can I start this section with a mention of anyone other than the master of the No Facts Coalition (NFC) Bernard Goldberg? Here's Bob Somerby at The Daily Howler:

Afternoon delight: We don’t doubt for a minute that "liberal bias" may infect the areas which Goldberg discusses. But the talk-show right is deeply lazy; it really likes to cry and play victim. In Chapter 11, Goldberg claims that the TV networks only give you good news about day care. Is that true? We don’t have the slightest idea. After all, we just read Bias:

GOLDBERG (page 170): Over the years, I have seen many stories about day care, and I have come away with the impression that most mothers who work pretty much have to in order to make ends meet. But it turns out that isn’t so. Many, in fact, work outside the house because "they prefer to arrange their lives that way," as [social scientist Mary] Eberstadt put it.

Note that Goldberg’s two propositions are not inconsistent. That is, it may be true that 1) "most mothers who work pretty much have to" and also that 2) "many work outside the home because they prefer to." But how do you like the research Goldberg has done about the reporting on day care? After watching many stories "over the years," he had "come away with the impression" that most mothers have to work. But forget about the impression he got—did the stories actually say that? No reports are actually cited. After quoting Eberstadt’s views on why women work, Goldberg goes back to his slumbers:

GOLDBERG (page 171): Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation found that "nearly 80 percent of preschool children using any form of day care come from married-couple families with two income earners." I don’t remember ever hearing that on the network news.

Yeah, and we don’t remember the Bolshoi Ballet, but that doesn’t mean it ain’t out there. Forget about what Goldberg remembers; what reports have actually appeared on the nets? You won’t find out in this book.

The clowns at NRO have time and again demonstrated their willingness to be part of the NFC, so here's an example from Michael Graham [*edited to correct error in name]:

Today's Washington Post has a 1-A story on former Oregon governor--and confessed child molester--Neil Goldschmidt's sexual assault on a 14-year-old girl while he was mayor of Portland. When I read to the jump and still didn't know Goldschmidt's party affiliation, I immediately deduced he was a Democrat. I was right.

But it's even better. Here's the only ID the Post gives of Goldschmidt's party: "Republicans in the state legislature are demanding that photographs of the former Democratic governor be removed from the capitol."

That's right: The word Democrat doesn't appear until AFTER the word Republican.

Can we all agree that, if Goldschmidt had been a GOP governor, the FIRST three words of the front page article would be "Former Republican governor..."

Jesse at Pandagon responded to Graham's fact-free insinuation here [*=my edit]:

Oh, God, Michael Graham, just shut the f*** up.

The GOP ran a pedophile for a Senate seat in 2000. (And if Gore and Lieberman had prevailed, he would have been a sitting Senator when the allegations broke.) Another Republican committed manslaughter. In many cases, reports on these two rarely mentioned their partisan affiliations, or if they did, buried them at the bottom of their reports.

Is a conservative media bias at work? This transcript never mentions Giordano's political affiliation. This story mentions Giordano without his political affiliation. This story takes 18 paragraphs to mention Giordano's political affiliation. The New York Communista Times doesn't even mention his affiliation.

Why must the media hide the pedophilic tendencies of Republicans???

The worst part about this is that political affiliation really shouldn't be mentioned unless it's necessary. It would be just as pointless to write "Republican Is A Pedophile" as it would be to write "Democrat Is A Pedophile", because political affiliation has nothing to do with it.

A more serious issue is the elaborate and ugly ("treason" etc.) BS perpetrated by Instapundit and his cohorts, on the Rumsfeld "War on Terror" memo. Let's start with Eric Muller's summary at Is That Legal:

I'm confused. Everybody seems to be screaming [eRiposte: This is an Instapundit link, where, among other gratuitous spin and crap is this sentence: "...while Rumsfeld is trying to learn how to better fight this war, the press is still fighting Vietnam."] about how this Rumsfeld memo was "leaked." But was it leaked? Or was it simply released?

UPDATE: I'm scanning everything that's being written about this "leak," and I'm still not seeing evidence that it was "leaked." (That evidence may be out there and I'm just missing it.) But what I see in the USA Today story is this: "Three members of Congress who met with Rumsfeld Wednesday morning said the defense secretary gave them copies of the memo and discussed it with them." This is not how you handle a confidential internal memorandum, is it, if you don't want it to see the light of day.

And when the Pentagon spokesman's reaction isn't outrage, but praise for his boss, you have to wonder. (I'm referring to this from USA Today: "Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita declined to comment specifically on the memo, but he said Rumsfeld's style is to "ask penetrating questions" to provoke candid discussion. 'He's trying to keep a sense of urgency alive.'")

I could certainly be wrong, but isn't it possible that we're all falling for a "leak" story here, when actually this dissemination was something that Rumsfeld may have desired?
...
AND ANOTHER: anonymousblogger [eRiposte: Actually this is his post], in the comments to this post, notes that the secret, confidential, leaked Rumsfeld memo is now available on the Pentagon's website. Do we get a retraction yet from the bloggers who were shouting "treason!" earlier today?

AND ANOTHER: Fox is reporting that Rumsfeld was "livid" that his memo made it onto the front pages. Meanwhile the Defense department has a press release out on its website. Nowhere does the word "leak" appear. Nowhere there (or anywhere else) do we see anyone--from Rumsfeld on down using the word "leak" (or any word like it) or asking for an investigation of how the memo got out. The most we see, in the midst of the DoD's defense of Rumsfeld's comments, is the Pentagon spokesman's assertion that he was "surprised" by the USA Today story.

Hmmm. Nobody's saying the document was leaked. Nobody at the Pentagon's wondering who let it go and why, or asking for an investigation.

But apparently I'm the one who is doing the spinning. 

As Muller pointed out in an update:

So today, according to FOX News, Rumsfeld drops in unannounced at a Pentagon press briefing to praise himself for the "leaked" memo. When he saw it in the newspapers, he says, he thought to himself, "Not bad." He himself says he was "not upset" to see the memo in the paper--and this after a "senior Pentagon official" said Rumsfeld had been "livid."

Here's Rumsfeld's account, from the FOX story:

"On Thursday, Rumsfeld said the memo was not supposed to be made public, but a staff member for one of the officials to whom the memo was addressed copied and distributed it for discussion, and one of those copies ended up in the hands of the reporter.

"'I sent it to four people,' Rumsfeld recounted. 'One of the people was out of town and his office received it, thought, "Gee, those are interesting questions; I'll staff it out," circulated it to a number of people, so that by the time the boss got back, he'd have their thoughts. And one of the people that it was circulated to, obviously, thought I'd issued it as a press release, which, I might add, was not the case.'"

Yesterday, Glenn approvingly quoted a blogger who called this episode "treason." (That charge seems to be much in fashion these days.) He also called for the canning and jailing of the "leaker." I know Glenn is busy the next couple of days, but I hope he'll come back to this story and bring it up to date. Maybe even admit to jumping the gun.

(Also see this note from Muller.)

Let's move on to another example from Ryan at Dead Parrot Society:

Let me start by saying this post isn't meant as a defense of the media's coverage -- especially its initial coverage -- of the Jessica Lynch story. But the blogosphere is persistent about pointing out media bias where it sees it, so this recent Instapundit post sort of jumped out at me ...

CORI DAUBER NOTES that folks in the media are again repeating long-discredited canards about Jessica Lynch -- even the bogus report of the BBC's John Kampfner that U.S. forces were firing blanks.

Pathetic.

UPDATE: Patrick Belton points out how The Guardian got it wrong back in May. No doubt an apology from The Guardian will be forthcoming. . . .

...

Cori Dauber doesn't do much in the way of citing examples where these myths have been repeated. She offers one anecdote about a CNN anchor incorrectly citing the source of early information, but nothing else. She certainly offers no examples of anyone repeating the most damnable myth, the one about the rescuers "firing blanks." (Update: See below; Cori Dauber explains.)

If this was being mentioned to any extent, it would indeed be pathetic, and presumably also would be cataloged at Google News. The only source talking about firing blanks there, though, is the Arab News. But here's the thing: You don't even need to trust that Google News would have caught it. If any media outlet was actually repeating the myth of the blanks, you can darn well bet the blogosphere would be piling all over it. That's what bloggers do.
...
Next, Glenn links to an OxBlog criticism of a Guardian report, in which Patrick Belton contrasts a May 15 story that claimed Jessica Lynch was treated well in prison with the recent report that she was raped after being captured.

The May 15 Guardian story had plenty of problems, to be sure. (It does quote someone who implies that the rescuers were using blanks.) And the revelation that Jessica Lynch was raped is truly horrific. Let's make those things perfectly clear. The problem is, the excerpt that Belton is picking apart is largely concerned with her treatment while in the hospital. On on that count, the Guardian's story is pretty much corroborated by Jessica Lynch herself, who says the staff never mistreated her, never abused her, and in fact tried to reassure her (she was understandably skeptical of this, though). One of her quotes -- "I mean, I actually had one nurse, that she would sing to me" -- even suggests that the Guardian was onto something in this characterization:

She was assigned the only specialist bed in the hospital, and one of only two nurses on the floor. "I was like a mother to her and she was like a daughter," says Khalida Shinah.

Beyond discussing treatment by the hospital staff, the Guardian piece is largely intent on questioning the news management of the rescue story. That, too, is something that Jessica Lynch appears to be backing up. And neither of these points is repudiated by the Nov. 6 reports that she was raped. In actuality, the most recent news and interviews with Jessica Lynch do far more to corroborate that particular Guardian story than they do to show how "the Guardian got it wrong."

...
Update: I just received a reply to an email I sent to Cori Dauber. My interpretation of her post was correct. She said she's watched bits of misinformation tag along with "story about the story," re-emerging with each cycle of Jessica Lynch news. And after seeing CNN repeat the misunderstanding over early sourcing on the story, she wanted to warn people to keep their eyes out for a new wave of myths. She did not mean that news reports were once again claiming that the rescuers fired blanks. Nor did she mean that she'd seen other misinformation repeated; the sourcing problem was the only explicit example she intended to make.

Fair enough. Unfortunately, some read the post (or read links to the post) and gathered that the media was currently spreading the more egregious Lynch myths.

In fact, if you read the opening sentence in Dauber's post, it is quite obvious that she phrased it in a way that it is impossible to conclude from it what she claimed later to Ryan (bold text is my emphasis) :

Several myths are just in the air about who said what when about the rescue of Jessica Lynch, and they are being repeated now that her book is out and with the Diane Sawyer interview.

So Dauber makes an allegation without fact-checking and then claims she did not mean what her post clearly meant. How convenient.

Jesse at Pandagon mentioned another egregious, fact-challenged post of Dauber's (I've truncated some details [...] at the end of the post):

Cori Dauber asks why the media is showing the Paul Johnson video and not the Nick Berg video. Ignoring that they all did show the Nick Berg video, just not on the 24-hour repeat loop that many conservatives would have preferred, she goes on to declare that it's because they don't want to make us angry, they want to make us sympathetic.

Apparently a professor in the UNC system, this line of logic feels a little bit too close to Mike Adams' for it to be a coincidence. Besides whitewashing recent history, I don't see why terrorists holding a hostage isn't a story that should be covered actively. When the Berg video was released, there wasn't a whole lot more to the story - Johnson's captors are making active demands with his life in the balance. It's simply a different story.

...Of course, what would commentary about hostages, hoods, and prisoners be without the Morally Bankrupt Abu Ghraib Reference of the day?

And one other thing: yesterday, before the footage and the threat that Mr. Johnson would be killed, the media were hyperventilating over the terrorists threat that they would do to him as was done to the prisoners at abu Ghraib.

Do you really think that's why the family was so frightened? If they really believed that this man was going to have some ladies panties put on his head, have his picture taken, and then be released, I don't think they would have been all that frightened -- do you?

 

It's funny, because like the Nick Berg thing, it's a complete misrepresentation of history! They could sexually abuse and rape him, beat him - oh, yeah, and murder him.

What, you might ask, is her area of academic specialty?

Cori Dauber...is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies...her focus since September 11th has been on the performance of the media in its coverage of the war on terrorism.

The only explanation I can give is that she's been on sabbatical since Bush got elected. Otherwise, she's just very, very godawful at her job...

Let's wrap up this post, with a final example (which could have also been in Part 9), also from Jesse at Pandagon:

Mitch Berg, playing perfectly to type, declares that the flood of endorsements for Kerry "plays to type" - it shows how liberal the media is.

Or - I suggest this is more likely - it says that the liberal-slanted mainstream media had their endorsements written long before the campaign began; had the Democrat convention endorsed a set of wind-up chattering teeth for President, the New York Times would be saying "We believe that with Mr. Windup Chatteringteeth as president, the nation will do better."

Mitch, unfortunately, has done zero research. I've been pointing out for weeks that in 2000, Bush stomped Gore in newspaper endorsements. It was a nearly 3:1 ratio in Bush's favor, and whenever I've brought this up with conservatives, they say that editorial endorsements don't reflect any systemic bias...when they benefit a conservative candidate.

Mitch's smirking satisfaction that the endorsements are more anti-Bush than pro-Kerry also makes one wonder if he started paying attention to politics in the last month or so. Elections like this are referendums on the incumbent. People tend to make their decision based on whether they think the person in power has done a good job, and if they're dissatisfied enough with him, they change course. Contrary to Bush's campaign's assertion, this election is about what Bush has done the past four years. I can't understand why conservatives think we're running an election where Bush's term is off the table, but they also think the media's biased towards liberals.

Glenn Reynolds also goes delusional, declaring that the Chicago Tribune's endorsement of Bush is "surprising". The Tribune has endorsed one Democrat in the entire century and a half it's been operating, according to a reporter from the newspaper on CNN.

It shows something about the "liberal media bias" meme that it requires one to be so totally ignorant of what the media's actually done in order to continue believing in it.

The moral of this post is simple. Media critics on the Right, more often than not, seem to have an aversion and contempt for real fact-checking. Bernard Goldberg epitomized this perfectly, as Somerby noted:

Here is the question put to him by that nattering professor:

PROFESSOR: When you were thinking about writing this book, did you consider not using anecdotes, but rather having a research assistant to do a systematic analysis of the number of times Rather, Jenning, Brokaw said "conservative" and not "liberal," because I think that one of the criticisms one can lodge at you is that, "Hey, you heard Jennings say it once. How many times has he said it over the course of a year?"…As a social scientist, I think you could have and should have.

We chuckled at the perfesser’s assumption—his assumption that a CBS newsman would have to hire an assistant to gather some actual facts. But Goldberg’s reply simply says it all about Bernie and others just like him:

GOLDBERG: I did think about it. And I didn’t want this book written from a social scientist point of view. I understand the question and it’s a perfectly legitimate question. But I am sure enough, based on things that I’ve seen that social scientists did do—people in this town have done studies that they named conservatives like ten times more than liberals. And I also knew—and please understand how I mean this; this is not some smart-ass thing I’m about to say—I also knew that this would be important to social scientists, but not to regular folks who just want to read about what somebody experienced at CBS News.

Incredible, isn’t it? "Social scientists" might care if Goldberg is right, but "normal people" just want a good story. That is a process we’ve often described. We’ve called it "throwing feed to the cattle."

Part 13: Using rank hypocrisy

[Posted originally at The Left Coaster]

How the Liberal Media Myth is Created - Part 13

This is a continuation of a series on how the "liberal media" myth is created. Previous installments covered myth-creation using "tone" of media coverage (Part 1), "catch-phrases" like 'right-wing extremist' v. 'left-wing extremist' (Part 2), "newspaper headlines" (Part 3), "topics" covered (Part 4), "think-tank" citations (Part 5), journalist ideology or voting preferences (Part 6), public opinion polls on media bias (Part 7), obvious, unintentional errors in news reports (Part 8), [the critic's] ignorance (Part 9), opinions to distort straight news (Part 10), superficial fact checking (Part 11) and no fact checking (Part 12). This part covers attempts to hint at or invent liberal media bias using rank hypocrisy. More than anything else, this is a key characteristic of many media critics on the Right.

Let's start with Bill Hobbs' ode to hypocrisy, chronicled by Jesse at Pandagon:

But I stopped by Bill Hobbs' site today, and found him extolling the virtues of Sinclair's unprecedented campaigning.

Meanwhile, the Kerry campaign calls for protests to against Sinclair stations and Kerry allies Sen. Kennedy and Sen. Feinstein try to get a government probe going of Sinclair. The goal: intimidate Sinclair for telling the truth about the negative impact Kerry's anti-war activities had on POWs. So much for believing in freedom of speech.
[eRiposte note: Telling the "truth"? Some "truth" that. Freedom of "speech"? Unbalanced, partisan, one-sided, fraud on (free) public airwaves is freedom of speech? Right.]

Yep. Same sort of shit the right does every day if they call George W. Bush "conservative" instead of "heroic", and it's a stifling of free speech...if they do it to his side. I asked Hobbs how he viewed the Sinclair stifling of Nightline's Iraq casualty show, telling him that "it's a private company" isn't a good enough answer. His response?

Yes it does "cut it." Fact is, Sinclair has the right to decide what to broadcast and what not to broadcast. The public has a right to watch or not watch, impacting Sinclair's ratings and ad revenue. ABC has a right to affiliate or not affiliate with Sinclair stations. Nobody censored ABC.

Now, what amazes me the most about this response is that it works the exact same way with liberal media bias [eRiposte emphasis]. Conservatives complain incessantly that the media is biased, that they're owed more and more coverage, that the media exists for them more than anyone else. And they also lie about the media a whole lot, too, which doesn't hurt.

Another example, from Bob Somerby, relates to Andrew Sullivan's brilliant display of hypocrisy:

This just in from the flight of birds: Truly, the guy gets stupider every day. Today, Andrew Sullivan spots the "liberal bias" in a movie which hasn’t been made:

ANDREWSULLIVAN.COM: A NEW LOW IN MEDIA BIAS: A new documentary on the Clinton scandals—brought to you by Joe Conason, and funded by Harry Thomason. All that’s needed is for CBS to broadcast it.

Sullivan is upset about the documentary film version of The Hunting of the President, by Conason and Gene Lyons. The movie hasn’t even been shot—but Sullivan has espied its "liberal bias."

Incidentally, this is the same Andrew Sullivan who would later write, in his review of Sidney Blumenthal's "The Clinton Wars":

It's brutally revealing about the stupidity, bigotry, malevolence and extremism of the right-wing forces that became obsessed with president Clinton. I'm glad they ultimately lost.

Of course, Sullivan then predictably goes on to attack the Clintons, but the point of my extract is that "The Hunting of the President" is also a book about the "stupidity, bigotry, malevolence and extremism of the right-wing forces that became obsessed with president Clinton", as it is about their lies and unprecedented fraud (and that of the "mainstream media") against a sitting President, passed on by the same media. Silly me, I actually thought Sullivan may have been in favor of holding the "mainstream media" accountable. "The Hunting of the President" also mentioned Bill Clinton's "reckless and foolhardy behavior" and his "falsehoods and evasions" (quotes from the book). Funny how an airing of all this, to Sullivan, would be a "new low in media bias". Not to mention, he considered the mere plan to make a factual documentary for the theatres to be media bias. Such clownistry probably deserves an award of its own, but Sullivan has certainly earned his membership in the Society Of Flat Earth Wankers (SOFEW).

I guess this is a good time to also mention the views of the unabashed, serial plagiarizer, serial liar and fake-reporter Jeff Gannon aka James Guckert, since he seems to have made himself popular in some conservative circles and with the management of the National Press Club with his "journalism". As Americablog noted (also see Daily Kos):

GG [Gannon/Guckert] just said on the National Press Club that the administration HAD to pay Armstrong Williams to report about No Child Left Behind because they HAD to, the mainstream media wouldn't report fairly about the legislation so Bush had no choice! It was the only way he could get a fair hearing!

Isn't that just fun? It did make me wonder why Gannon has been so obsessed with the mythical "liberal media", for such a media, if it actually existed, would be perfectly acceptable according to his logic. After all, mythical "liberal media" outlets that propagandize (even without pay) in favor of "liberal" politicians or administrations would be doing so simply because they were trying to ensure that they got a fair hearing, right?

Sadly, Gannon decided to rein in his latest brilliant-thought-of-the-day. He probably realized that in his attempt to tell the world what he actually believes to be true, he may have risked looking like a bigger dunce than Power Line and risked destroying the fake war against the "liberal media". So he posted an update on his very own website (aka self-parody) on 4/8/05:

Upon reflection of the discussion, I wanted to provide context for some of my answers that may have been unclear:

Armstrong Williams - I was in no way defending this practice, since I believe it is wrong to pay journalists to write favorable articles. It is PR, plain and simple and journalists have no business being involved in such activities.

Um...Gannon was absolutely defending this practice as this video showed (and yes, I understand that he can't stop lying), but really, there was no need for him to be afraid that he'd become the laughingstock of the world for justifying why journalists should be allowed to be (paid or unpaid) propagandists of the government. After all, his genius clearly appealed to the Bush administration and its (and Gannon's) unflinching supporters.

Let's move on to another faker - L. Brent Bozell III and his Media Research Center. Terry Krepel has been doing a great job at ConWebWatch, reporting on the rank hypocrisy of right-wing media and "media watch" organizations for quite some time now, and this is just one example of how these charlatans keep themselves busy:

And in his July 23 column, he [Bozell] demonstrates the traits that keep him at the top of the hypocrisy charts with bullet.

Titled "Larry Klayman, Bias Exhibit A," Bozell rails against the "media elite" for the recent heavy play given Klayman and his Clinton-harassing Judicial Watch now that it has decided to sue Republicans.
...
Over at CNSNews.com, the news-service subsidiary of MRC, no coverage at all was given to Judicial Watch's announcement of the Cheney lawsuit. The first mention of it on CNS occurred July 26 -- more than two weeks after the lawsuit was announced -- in a story about Judicial Watch's difficulty in serving the papers on Cheney.

That story is only of only four at CNS on Judicial Watch actions against Republicans. In contrast, prior to November 2000 -- the prime Clinton-suing years during which Bozell alleges Judicial Watch "was to be ignored" by the "media elite" -- CNS ran 41 stories that mentioned, if not featured, Judicial Watch and its actions.

And of those 41 stories (as noted previously on ConWebWatch), only 13 described the group as "conservative." The other 28 use terms like "legal watchdog group" or no description at all -- the same "non-ideological" terms Bozell complains the networks are using now. "[eRiposte emphasis] (N)ow that (Klayman's) suing Cheney, there’s no need for the warning label, and almost every newscast totally dropped the ideological tag," Bozell states.

But Bozell also says "there was nothing inaccurate" about the "conservative" tag: "Klayman actively solicited conservative movement support and served conservative goals." If the "conservative" tag is accurate, why criticize anyone for using it? And why is his CNS so afraid of it?

(That July 26 CNS story, by the way, doesn't call Judicial Watch "conservative" either; it gets tagged as "the legal group that's made a name for itself by filing numerous lawsuits against the nation's leaders.")

Let's conclude this section, with a final example - also from Krepel - about WorldNutDaily:

A big book in the conservative world last year was "Mobocracy" by Matthew Robinson. According to the promotional copy, Robinson's book "reveals how our country's democratic process has been corrupted by the mob rule of an ill-informed electorate whose opinions are trumpeted at the expense of thoughtful reporting" and "coverage of many of the most divisive issues ... is manipulated by polling that too often seeks to further an agenda, not measure opinion."

WorldNetDaily, in particular, liked this book. Not only is "Mobocracy" available in its online store, WND leader Joseph Farah contributed a quote for the book's cover -- "Finally, someone has said what needed to be said—persuasively and passionately—about our cultural obsession with polls. Matt Robinson's insight and observations are worthy of debate and reflection." And Robinson penned a commentary piece for WND shortly after the book's release filled with conservative buzzwords like "liberal media" and "self-important Metroliner elite" and lamenting that "it's no coincidence that cynicism has grown in direct proportion to the growth of government and crusading left-wing journalists and their self-ratifying polls."

As you may have figured out by now, "Mobocracy" is not exactly an objective look at the issue. The only "agenda" allegedly furthered by manipulative polling Robinson cares about is the "liberal" one, though the promotional copy is careful not to stipulate that. Robinson is, after all, an adjunct scholar at the conservative Claremont Institute (one recent article there is appalled that anyone could possibly like the Eminem movie "8 Mile") as well as a former editor at the conservative journal Human Events. And Robinson's bio proudly notes that "his stories have been featured on Fox News, The Rush Limbaugh Show and CBN."

So, with such corporate support of this book and Farah's own words of praise for the ideas it contains, it would be logical to presume that WorldNetDaily would never stoop to use such despicable tactics on its own, right?

Wrong.

WND found a pollster who puts out the kind of polls it likes. Scott Rasmussen is a co-founder of the cable sports network ESPN turned pollster who (probably more important to folks like WND) is also author of a book called "The GOP Generation," which "explains underlying issues, trends, and other factors moving the nation to a lasting Republican majority." He has a deal with WND to promote his poll results there.

In addition to plugging his TV appearances, WND has written regularly about Rasmussen's surveys. Some recent findings:

• "With under two years to go before the next major election," President Bush holds "double-digit leads over five Democratic contenders for his job." Even Rasmussen himself ought to admit the practical value of this poll is basically nil.
• "72 percent of Americans plan to pray to ring in 2003, while just 45 percent expect to drink an alcoholic beverage."
• "(F)ully 47 percent of those surveyed believe liberals are treated more fairly in the press" compared to "only 25 percent" who think there is a conservative media bias.

And then there's the obligatory fawning Jon Dougherty story on Rasmussen, noting that an "independent" review called Rasmussen's polling the most accurate.

Rasmussen also wrote columns for WND during and after the 2000 election -- and he said what WND readers wanted to hear. In an Nov. 1., 2000, piece he pondered why reporters called the 2000 presidential election too close to call when "all tracking polls show George Bush ahead by at least one point." One answer he came up with: "Many in the media seem to be in a state of denial. It could be that they expected Gore to win and just can't quite come to grips with data challenging their basic assessment." He also predicted that "The geography of this year's race is such that polls will close in most major "toss up" states by 8 p.m. (Eastern). ... By that point in time, it is likely that George W. Bush will have picked up the 39 electoral votes from toss-up states that he needs to win the presidency." (A poll Rasmussen took in the middle of the post-election turmoil claimed that "nearly half of Americans believe the Democratic Party is most responsible for voter fraud.")

In another article, though, he does correctly point out that "the biggest problem with Internet polls is the fact that participants are self-selected," but that hasn't kept WND from reporting on them, as it did most recently during its mostly self-generated Patty Murray controversy.

WorldNetDaily also cherry-picks polls from other sources whose results cater to its audience, as ConWebWatch has previously noted. One recent red-meat poll: "A new study finds Democrats are more anti-Semitic than Republicans."

WND's intellectual dishonesty and hypocrisy never ceases to amaze. Skewed reporting of polls that favor its own biases runs rampant even as it frowns on allegedly skewed reporting of polls by others whose results disagree with its biases.

Either Farah didn't bother reading the book he contributed a blurb to -- or he read it all too well, using it as a roadmap to create his own little "mobocracy."

One could fill pages documenting the trademark hypocrisy of the Right, but one does have other things to do, unfortunately.

Bottom line? With most right-wing media critics, the oozing hypocrisy can fill a bottomless pit (so to speak), showing again and again why their charges of "liberal media" bias lack any credibility whatsoever.

A piece of advice to the "mainstream media". Before you "swallow" the claims of these critics, beware of clowns bearing enormous amounts of garbage.

Part 14: Using outright fabrications, lies or misleading statements

[Posted originally at The Left Coaster]

How the Liberal Media Myth is Created - Part 14

This is a continuation of a series on how the "liberal media" myth is created. Previous installments covered myth-creation using "tone" of media coverage (Part 1), "catch-phrases" like 'right-wing extremist' v. 'left-wing extremist' (Part 2), "newspaper headlines" (Part 3), "topics" covered (Part 4), "think-tank" citations (Part 5), journalist ideology or voting preferences (Part 6), public opinion polls on media bias (Part 7), obvious, unintentional errors in news reports (Part 8), [the critic's] ignorance (Part 9), opinions to distort straight news (Part 10), superficial fact checking (Part 11), no fact checking (Part 12), and rank hypocrisy (Part 13). This part covers attempts to hint at or invent liberal media bias using outright fabrications, lies or misleading statements.

Considering that numerous conservative media icons have had their wealthy, mainstream-media(MSM)-enabled careers made for them despite (or is it "because of") their pathological lying or fraud (not just about the "liberal media"), the very fact that the most prominent of them continue(d) to get positive coverage from the MSM is indicative not of a "liberal media" environment but the opposite.

Let's start with Bernard Goldberg once again, thanks to Mr. Somerby:

Who is the corps’ biggest Hillary suck-up? In Arrogance, Goldberg devotes a chapter to the topic, and he makes an odd choice: Margaret Carlson. Here is the passage where he makes his award. By the way, note the rancid tone Goldberg brings to his book—a book in which he weeps and moans about the lack of polite discourse by liberals:

 

GOLDBERG (page 148): Still, Nina Burleigh, Carole Simpson and even my ex-colleague Leslie Stahl all take a backseat when it comes to painting Hillary’s toenails. They are all runners-up in the “How May I Serve You, My Queen?” Sweepstakes. Because none of them—not even Newsweek contributing editor Eleanor “Rodham” Clift—can rival Margaret Carlson, who does commentary for TIME magazine (and is a regular on CNN’s Capital Gang) for sheer devotion to Ms. Hillary. If they gave out Nobel Prizes for Hillary-gushing, Margaret Carlson would be on her way to Stockholm.

Like many other Angry Male Pundits, Bernie Goldberg has a hard time being polite to liberal or mainstream female journalists. The name-calling is quite frequent, as are the lightly sexist remarks. But then, feminists are truly the source of all evil. “It is no coincidence that the beginning of the collapse of the old [New York] Times standards coincided almost exactly with the rise of the liberation movements of the last sixties and early seventies, particularly feminism,” Goldberg writes. So don’t be surprised when he invents mocking names for Clift—and when he invents silly tales about Carlson. At any rate, Goldberg says that Margaret Carlson is the Mother of All Hillary-Gushers. Here at THE HOWLER, we found this odd, because we had recently noted Carlson’s exuberant bashing of Clinton. Carlson’s autobiography, Anyone Can Grow Up, appeared in your bookstores just last spring. In it, Carlson trashes the Clintons up and down, and yes, that includes her Queen Hillary. In her book, Carlson makes it sound as if Hillary’s friend, Vincent Foster, blamed the Clintons in his suicide note. And she offers mocking, foolish accounts of Hillary Clinton’s conduct and character (links below). Soon after we reviewed Carlson’s book, we also noted the mocking comments aimed at the Clintons when Carlson appeared on Charlie Rose (link below). If you want to retain an ounce of respect for Rose, we suggest you avoid our report.

 

We certainly can't hurt the feelings of anti-American, fraudster Ann Coulter by leaving her out in this post - so I'll defer to Mr. Somerby again for an example:

CAR WRECK: Some of you think we’re carefully picking our topics when we write about Slander. Sorry. We fact-checked pages one and two because that’s where a book begins (TDH, 7/11). We checked the Katie Couric flap because it became a big flap. We fact-checked Coulter’s section on Schlafly due to Maslin’s review in the Times. But frankly, we haven’t checked any part of this book without encountering instant problems. We’d be surprised if there’s any part of this book where basic “facts” haven’t just been made up.

So yesterday, we got a grand idea. We fact-checked Coulter’s final page—and you can, of course, guess what happened.

Coulter closes with a screed against the New York Times. “[L]iberals have absolutely no contact with the society they decry from their Park Avenue redoubts,” she stupidly fumes. Then, her penultimate paragraph:

COULTER (page 205): The day after seven-time NASCAR Winston Cup champion Dale Earnhardt died in a race at the Daytona 500, almost every newspaper in America carried the story on the front page. Stock-car racing had been the nation’s fastest-growing sport for a decade, and NASCAR the second-most-watched sport behind the NFL. More Americans recognize the name Dale Earnhardt than, say, Maureen Dowd. (Manhattan liberals are dumbly blinking at that last sentence.) It took the New York Times two days to deem Earnhardt’s name sufficiently important to mention it on the first page. Demonstrating the left’s renowned populist touch, the article began, “His death brought a silence to the Wal-Mart.” The Times went on to report that in vast swaths of the country people watch stock-car racing. Tacky people were mourning Dale Earnhardt all over the South!

Typical, nasty, ugly, mean stuff. For the record, Earnhardt died on Sunday, February 18, 2001. And Coulter is right about one thing. The next day, February 19, “almost every newspaper in America carried the story on the front page.”

...Everyone else treated Earnhardt’s death as a page one story the day it occurred. Coulter’s question: Why, oh why, did the great New York Times wait two more days to put Dale on its cover?

We suspect you know the answer to that; Coulter was inventing. (Again!) In fact, the Times did run the story of Earnhardt’s death on its front page on Monday, February 19. (NEXIS makes this perfectly clear. Which part of “Page 1” doesn’t Coulter understand?) The headline might have provided a clue: “Stock Car Star Killed on Last Lap of Daytona 500.” The piece was written by Robert Lipsyte. Here’s how the Timesman began:

LIPSYTE (page one, 2/19/01): Stock car racing’s greatest current star and one of its most popular and celebrated figures, Dale Earnhardt, crashed and was killed today after he made a characteristically bold lunge for better position on the last turn of the last lap of the sport’s premier event, the Daytona 500.

Lipsyte discussed the crash itself; recent deaths to other drivers; safety devices that had been proposed; and Earnhardt’s role as king of the track. Like Bragg, the Timesman captured the awe in which Earnhardt was held:
...
Of course, Coulter didn’t demean the tone of Lipsyte’s work. Instead, she simply lied about it, saying it didn’t exist. Coulter wanted to close with a bang. She wished Lipsyte out of existence.

What, oh what, are we to do with someone who dissembles like Coulter? Again, we’re quoting the next-to-last paragraph in her whole book. As usual, she builds a screed around an invented fact—one designed to demean those she hates. And just how nasty is Coulter’s conclusion? She draws an ugly conclusion indeed. “Except for occasional forays to the Wal-Mart,” she says, “liberals do not know any conservatives.” But conservatives “already know” liberals, she says. Conservatives know liberals as “savagely cruel bigots who hate America and lie for sport.”

Incredibly, that is Coulter’s final phrase. It closes her strange, disturbed book.

Next, let's move on to the egregious and mendacious Ann Coulter wannabe - Michelle Malkin. Sadly No! has an example:

According to Michelle Malkin:

Skutnik jumped out of his car near the Fourteenth Street Bridge, where a crowd watched helplessly as a female passenger screamed for help in the icy waters. A helicopter rescue team had tossed her a line, but she was unable to hold on. Skutnik instinctively ripped off his overcoat, kicked off his shoes, dove into the river, and pulled 22-year-old flight attendant Priscilla Tirado to safety.

After Reagan's speech, a cynical press referred sneeringly to the "Lenny Skutnik moment." This elitist disdain for recognizing everyday heroes persists. [Emphasis added]

To the LexisNexis, hurry!

The entire audience joined in a standing ovation for Lenny Skutnik, who dived into the frigid Potomac River to rescue a victim of the Jan. 13 airplane crash here. Mr. Skutnik sat with Mrs. Reagan during the address and was hailed by the President as epitomizing the heroic spirit in the United States. --Howell Raines [!] in the New York Times, 01/27/1982.Reagan ended his address by praising America's heroes. He singled out two men listening to him in the House chamber--Sen. Jeremiah Denton (R-Ala.), a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, and Lenny Skutnik, the young federal worker who dove into the Potomac to rescue a woman after the Air Florida crash two weeks ago.

Skutnik and his wife were guests of the Reagans, seated next to Nancy Reagan, during the speech. When the president mentioned his name, the audience rose for a standing ovation and Reagan waved up to him in the gallery. --The Washington Post, 01/27/1982.

Two weeks before the State of the Union, the Washington Post published a front page story on Mr. Skutnik:

Lenny Skutnik, who dove into the ice-choked Potomac River Wednesday to save the life of a drowning woman following the jetliner crash in the Potomac, has had little experience in the hero business. 01/15/1982

We could find no newspaper article with coverage of the SOTU that included the expression "Lenny Skutnik moment." Google produces 6 hits, including this Slate piece:

Ronald Reagan is credited with creating what is now known as the "Lenny Skutnik moment" in State of the Union addresses. In his 1982 address, Reagan pointed to Skutnik, a government worker who leapt into the icy Potomac to rescue a woman after a plane crash, and extolled his heroism. Since then, pointing to heroes in the gallery has become an obligatory SOTU flourish. And what in 1982 was a stirring moment has become a tedious gimmick. [Emphasis added]

Maybe Michelle doesn't remember her bedtime stories extremely well.

Media Matters covered fabrications by numerous conservatives on the Al Qaqaa explosives issue:

Conservatives derided reports of "so-called" missing explosives as "false"

Leading up to the presidential election, conservatives in the media attempted to downplay and undermine an October 25 New York Times report that hundreds of tons of high-powered explosives went missing from the Al Qaqaa military installation in Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003. But following President George W. Bush's November 2 reelection, right-wing pundit Ann Coulter, Wall Street Journal contributing editor Peggy Noonan, and author and FOX News Channel political analyst Dick Morris went even further, denying the truth of the Al Qaqaa news reports altogether.

Media Matters for America has previously documented numerous reports setting out clear evidence that large quantities of the high-grade explosives HMX and RDX were present at Al Qaqaa when American forces arrived at the site in early April 2003 and were looted by Iraqis soon after. And a November 4 Los Angeles Times article, titled "Soldiers Describe Looting of Explosives," provides further evidence that Al Qaqaa was looted after American forces arrived at the site. Four soldiers from the 317th Support Center and the 258th Rear Area Operations Center told the Times that they witnessed the looting of explosives from Al Qaqaa by Iraqis over a period of several weeks from late April and early May and said that they were unable to prevent much of the looting because the Iraqis outnumbered the American forces at the site.

From Coulter's November 3 nationally syndicated column:

The media campaigned heavily for Kerry with endless Abu Ghraib coverage, phony National Guard documents and, days before the election, false news reports that hundreds of tons of munitions had been looted in Iraq.

From Noonan's November 4 Wall Street Journal op-ed column:

But I do think the biggest loser [in the November 2 election] was the mainstream media, the famous MSM, the initials that became popular in this election cycle. Every time the big networks and big broadsheet national newspapers tried to pull off a bit of pro-liberal mischief -- CBS and the fabricated Bush National Guard documents, the New York Times and bombgate, CBS's "60 Minutes" attempting to coordinate the breaking of bombgate on the Sunday before the election -- the yeomen of the blogosphere and AM radio and the Internet took them down.

From the November 4 edition of Morris's weekly "The Political Life" column for The Hill:

Next to the forged documents that sent CBS on a jihad against Bush's National Guard service and the planned "60 Minutes" ambush over the so-called missing explosives two days before the polls opened, the possibility of biased exit polling, deliberately manipulated to try to chill the Bush turnout, must be seriously considered.

Another example - about Fox News' John Gibson, from Media Matters:

In his "My Word" segment on the July 12 edition of FOX News Channel's The Big Story with John Gibson, host John Gibson responded to charges of conservative bias at FOX -- showcased in the new documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism -- by falsely claiming, "You have America's major media dominated by the left; 80-some percent of reporters are self-described liberals." He repeated this falsehood in his July 13 "My Word" column, "Liberals Bashing FOX News ... Again," published on the FOX News Channel's website.

Gibson was off by about 46 percent. A report released on May 23 by The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 34 percent of national journalists identified themselves as liberal; 54 percent identified themselves as moderate; and 7 percent identified themselves as conservative. Twenty-three percent of local journalists identified themselves as liberal; 61 percent identified themselves as moderate; and 12 percent identified themselves as conservative.

Even if Gibson had correctly stated the Pew report's numbers and said that 34 -- not "80-some" -- percent of national reporters are "self-described liberals," he would still have been disregarding commentary by Bill Kovach, Tom Rosenstiel and Amy Mitchell (Kovach is chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists; Tom Rosenstiel and Amy Mitchell are director and associate director, respectively, of the Project for Excellence in Journalism), which was included in the Pew report and specifically warned against drawing such conclusions:

Journalists' own politics are also harder to analyze than people might think. The fact that journalists -- especially national journalists -- are more likely than in the past to describe themselves as liberal reinforces the findings of the major academic study on this question... But what does liberal mean to journalists? We would be reluctant to infer too much here. The survey includes just four questions probing journalists' political attitudes, yet the answers to these questions suggest journalists have in mind something other than a classic big government liberalism and something more along the lines of libertarianism. More journalists said they think it is more important for people to be free to pursue their goals without government interference than it is for government to ensure that no one is in need.

This post would be incomplete if there is no mention of at least one of the reliable fakers at the Wall Street Journal's editorial/op-ed page. So, here's Media Matters on James Taranto:

WSJ's Taranto's "hilariously strained effort" to expose liberal bias at Time falls flat

Wall Street Journal OpinionJournal.com editor James Taranto claimed that Time magazine omitted the January 30 Iraqi elections from a "list of possible turning points" in recent Middle East politics as part of the magazine's "hilariously strained effort to deny credit to President Bush" for positive trends in the region. In fact, the article Taranto quoted, from the March 14 issue of Time, explicitly addressed political events in the region from the prior week alone. The article introduced its "list of turning possible points" as follows: "Across the Middle East last week, a tide of good news suggested that another corner might be near" [emphasis added].

Considering that entire books have been written about the constant fabrications and fraud from the Right's spokespersons and media personalities, you may consider this post the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg.

P.S. This is the last-but-one part of this series.

Part 15: Using miscellaneous spin

[Posted originally at The Left Coaster]

How the Liberal Media Myth is Created - Part 15

This is the concluding part of my series on how the "liberal media" myth is created.

Previous installments covered myth-creation using "tone" of media coverage (Part 1), "catch-phrases" like 'right-wing extremist' v. 'left-wing extremist' (Part 2), "newspaper headlines" (Part 3), "topics" covered (Part 4), "think-tank" citations (Part 5), journalist ideology or voting preferences (Part 6), public opinion polls on media bias (Part 7), obvious, unintentional errors in news reports (Part 8), [the critic's] ignorance (Part 9), opinions to distort straight news (Part 10), superficial fact checking (Part 11), no fact checking (Part 12), rank hypocrisy (Part 13), and outright fabrications, lies or misleading statements (Part 14). This part covers attempts to invent media bias using miscellaneous spin.

Let's start with Stanley Kurtz at NRO (via CJR Daily):

With the election this close, if the president loses, media bias will surely have been a key factor. The problem isn’t just bias on the election coverage, but on anything that can influence the election–downplaying Howard’s win in Australia, for example. [my emphasis]

Um. How about the media's downplaying of massive anti-war protests, the fact that majorities of the people in the world were opposed to an Iraq invasion not supported by the U.N. (including Australians), and that Howard has been quite the flip-flopper with his fellow Australians, who weren't particularly approving of his support for Bush even as recently as February 2005:

Howard, who announced on Tuesday 450 more soldiers would go to Iraq to guard Japanese engineers and train the Iraqi army, said he could not rule out further deployments.

"I am not running away from the fact that I had previously said I did not contemplate a major (troop) increase. I admit quite openly that we have changed our position," Howard told Australian Broadcasting Corp radio.

...Opinion polls showed Australians opposed sending the extra troops to Iraq.

A telephone survey of 17,000 people by Channel Ten television found 71 percent opposed the deployment compared with 29 percent in favor.

For sheer entertainment, though, one can always rely on Brent Bozell's Media Research Center. So, the rest of this post takes a look at a handful of their recent "Cyber Alerts" (which according to MRC has been "Tracking Liberal Media Bias Since 1996").

Here's one :

NBC's The West Wing isn't the only 9pm EDT/PDT Wednesday night drama, tied to the U.S. presidency, which delivers a liberal skew. After six weeks of repeats, and with The West Wing on hiatus, The WB network's Jack and Bobby will return with a "fresh" episode on Wednesday night, April 13.
...
Some samples of the liberal politics in the program from the episodes which ran in February:

I see, a fictional TV series that shows "liberal bias"! Uh-huh.

Another one:

Left of the Dial, which looks to be a 90-minute documentary that will deliver a glowing tribute to the left wing Air America radio talk show service, will debut Thursday night on HBO. The HBO Web site touted how "a group of investors set out to launch a liberal radio network that would challenge the dominance of America's airwaves by conservative talk radio." A synopsis of the documentary recounted how "in the days before launch, the energy picks up amidst a whirlwind of photo shoots, CNN sound bites, the creation of marketing/PR materials, and delivery of the hot-off-the-presses New York Times Magazine featuring Al Franken on the cover -- a publicity coup and implicit endorsement." In a highly questionable claim, HBO trumpeted how after just a few months, "the New York ratings are unexpectedly high -- Franken beats Rush Limbaugh, and [Randy] Rhodes outpaces right-wing rival Sean Hannity." And HBO celebrated how "with 40 affiliates and counting, the voices of the left are now being heard, loud and clear, from coast to coast."

I see, a documentary on a paid cable channel demonstrates "liberal bias". Uh-huh.

And another:

Members of the Washington press corps are intensely opposed to the decision by Congress to intervene in the Schiavo case, Robert Novak chronicled in his latest column. Novak recounted how he "was engaged during a Saturday night dinner party in debate at a level of intensity I had not seen since the bitter '60s and '70s. My dining companions, mostly mainstream Washington journalists a generation younger than I, were passionately opposed to the congressional intervention." When Novak expressed support for the action by the Congress, "they responded that Republicans in Congress were only interested in politics. I had not engaged in such a heated debate with colleagues since the Vietnam War."

Well, according to this Time poll, 75% of Americans felt Congressional intervention in the Schiavo case was wrong. So, would 75% of America be considered "liberal"? Somehow, I think not.

Yet another one :

ABC's Charles Gibson admitted, during ABC's live coverage Monday of the moving of the late Pope's body to St. Peter's Basilica, that "I know of a woman who bitterly disagrees with him on so many issues, an American woman," but "when she saw him in St. Peter's Square burst into tears because she was so moved." Reflecting an emerging media theme that Catholics personally liked the Late John Paul II despite his positions, Gibson asserted that "even for so many American Catholics who disagree with his positions on so many issues," the Pope had "a magnetism and a charisma that has transcended, really, positions that he has taken on issues."

Um. This one is the most interesting one because - I couldn't figure out why Gibson's statement reflected "liberal bias". You know, if Gibson had introduced the "woman" in question to Brent Bozell, Brent would also "know of a woman who bitterly disagrees with [the Pope] on so many issues". As for the so-called "emerging media theme" that "Catholics personally liked the Late John Paul II despite his positions", um, that is what normal people refer to as *fact*. Conservatives certainly didn't embrace the pope's positions on the death penalty or the Iraq war - so would that make conservatives liberal? My head hurts.

Well, I guess I better give it a rest now since we can fill books with the MRC's garbage.