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.