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The full study is available as Word .doc here - http://mason.gmu.edu/~atabarro/MediaBias.doc
And this should come as a surprise to anyone???
Atleast now we can assign some hard numbers to the bias...
Since the New York Times is twice as far from the center as Fox News Special Report, to gain a balanced perspective, one would need to spend twice as much time watching Special Report as he or she spends reading the New York Times.
What is interesting is that most media is so far to the left that the center looks right wing!
"Few studies provide an objective measure of the slant of news, and none has provided a way to link such a measure to ideological measures of other political actors. That is, none of the existing measures can say, for example, whether the New York Times is more liberal than Tom Daschle or whether Fox News is more conservative than Bill Frist. We provide such a measure. Namely, we compute an ADA score for various news outlets, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the Drudge Report, Fox News Special Report, and all three networks nightly news shows."
Our results show a very significant liberal bias. All of the news outlets except Fox News Special Report received a score to the left of the average member of Congress. Moreover, by one of our measures all but three of these media outlets (Special Report, the Drudge Report, and ABCs World News Tonight) were closer to the average Democrat in Congress than to the median member of the House of Representatives. One of our measures found that the Drudge Report is the most centrist of all media outlets in our sample. Our other measure found that Fox News Special Report is the most centrist. These findings refer strictly to the news stories of the outlets. That is, we omitted editorials, book reviews, and letters to the editor from our sample."
Data impossible to dispute. An excellent study to read and keep handy...
MSNBC.COM is the most biased, liberal POS on the web masquerading as a mainstream news site. They are currently in orgasmic throes over the Toon's book. Other breathless headlines. "UN says US Stealing Iraq money" "Bush losing support, now even with Kerry on the war issue" Blah blah blah blah. Straight from Seattle ultra ultra liberal land to you. What a crock.
And, here I'd been thinking that both FOX and Drudge were going to the Dark Side! LOL
That's a great study. Wonder if Drudge knows about it?
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Excellent work. Drudge can really crow now.
Easy enough to tell if a liberal network is balanced.
The conservative positions are well known and well published.
Measure how often those are mentioned, how completely they are explained, and whether the substance/tone was prejudiced.
It is interesting to note with regard to the argument that a free market would produce a relatively unbiased media that this point might still be right. As noted, the broadcast media was far from a free market. However, what could have also been noted is that for the past 50 or so years the newspaper business has also not really been free market as with circulation falling and papers going out of business, the barrier to new entry was very high. In those outlets where there is a free market (cable news, radio, internet, book publishing) the conservatives are holding their own or more. The reason the 'or more' is that the conservative fraction of the market was so badly served by the mainstream media.
The New York Times is for liberal "intellectuals" who were educated beyond their intelligence.
Thanks for posting, Tamsey. Great news!
I hope Brit is back today. It'll be a hoot to see the expression on his face if he reports this from the "Political Grapevine."
Yeah, I just can't wait to throw "exp(aj + bj cm ) / ¡Æk=1J exp(ak + bk cm )" at them. Take that, Liberal scum!
Obviously that last untested theory "If the news industry is a competitive market" is wrong.The news industry is competitive only in ways which do not cut the revenue of journalism as a whole. It's perfectly fair, in that world, to try to deliver the news faster than anyone else - what is considered unethical is to select the news on the basis of what is important and true rather than on the basis of what will sell the most papers.
Ironically, what sells the most papers is reports which call the safety of the reader into question. Which, IOW, implicitly make the case that the reader would be a helpless babe in the woods if not for the fearless reporter protecting him from otherwise unsuspected dangers. Such stories are inherently anti conservative, but the conservative public as well as the liberal public can't pass by the newsstand without reading that kind of story, even as he dissects it and ultimately dismisses it.
Bump