ONE-PAGE MEDIA BIAS SUMMARY

Once all the sections on this website are complete, I will feature a handy, one-page summary of the contents here. In the meantime, here is a brief summary based on what has been published on this site so far.

Over the past few decades, and certainly since the Nixon era, prominent conservative spokesmen and Republican leaders (and their staunch foot-soldiers in the media) have invented the notion of a "liberal media" in the United States, as a means of deceiving the public and gaining political power. Quite a few excellent books have studied and chronicled this phenomenon, and among the most compelling are: David Brock's The Republican Noise Machine (excerpts here) and Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media. 

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. In this website, I have systematically examined the most prominent of these claims in my series titled How The Liberal Media Myth is Created and shown how these claims really do not prove that there is a "liberal media" bias (overall) in the United States. 

The main reason why most claims that the American mainstream media is biased "liberal" don't really prove their case is that such claims don't assess accuracy of the news content at all. Once accuracy of news content is assessed, the data shows that the media is biased more conservative than liberal, because of its overwhelmingly uncritical propagation of false or misleading conservative talking points.

The "liberal media" myth persists because the people who can do the most to dispel it do not do so for a variety of reasons - as I have explained in detail in my series titled Why The Liberal Media Myth Persists. In particular, even academic research on media bias often has the serious shortcoming that it hardly focuses on accuracy of news content. Some academics don't seem to have much exposure to the widespread media malpractice outside of what they hear from the media itself (e.g., CBS and Bush, Jayson Blair). This is problematic for two reasons. An independent examination of a subject should not rely overly on the subject's claims and underemphasize independent, critical analysis of the subject's claims (this is the cardinal law of any independent research). Further, considering that the media rarely, if ever, reports its own gross inaccuracies or malpractice when the targets are Democrats (see here for a small selection of evidence), this adds a clear bias to their analysis, which they don't seem to be cognizant of. All of these authors would benefit substantially by widening the scope of their research to include web sites like The Daily Howler, Media Matters, etc. Academics, who can do a lot to reverse the rampant inaccuracies, biases and routine journalistic malpractice in the media are unfortunately too hooked into the media's own discourse to realize that they are missing the main problem with the American media. It is rarely accurate on controversial topics. That's where the search for media bias should begin.

Indeed, as I have pointed out in my series titled The Media's True Colors - Part 1, when it comes to the most important measures of integrity in journalism, the mainstream media tilts far more conservative than liberal. These measures include:

• Journalistic malpractice in political coverage - which tends to be far higher against liberals/Democrats than against conservatives/Republicans
• Accountability for malpractice - which tends to be virtually absent if the target of the malpractice is on the Left
• Punishment for mistakes or transgressions (even valid opinions) - which tends to be far more severe if the target is the Right or its policies
• Censorship - which tends to be imposed far more on coverage/ads/opinions that lean leftward than on similar things that lean rightward
• Astroturf propagation - which tends to skew the media to the Right partly because of wealthy conservative groups that tend to indulge far more in this type of propaganda
• Propaganda - which again shows a clear tilt of the media to the Right

The real question to ask is not whether the media is liberal or conservative when it comes to a particular incident. The question is whether it is more liberal than conservative or more conservative than liberal on any given issue. When it comes to issues of basic journalism, mainstream media bias is like the state of Idaho - it's much more conservative than liberal. Even on political and economic coverage the evidence indicates the media is clearly more conservative than liberal. On social issues the evidence for an overall "liberal media" is likewise non-existent, and in most cases the media tilts conservative overall (unpublished work).