Interesting non-partisan study on the media's political bias in the US.

Objective and nonpartisan, but it sounds like a really weird metric.

The first weirdness is outside of the scope of this study, but the last sentence seems wrong:

I don't think that we can say that a Congressperson's voting record will correlate to the "average voter". But then...

That's a clever Freakonomics-style hack to create a measurable metric, but it is nowhere near as solid as the first metric.

 

I don't think that this is an outlier. The study authors should have examined this point more fully, because IMO it demonstrates that their metric does not measure what they want it to.

 

as redlemon points out, the metric is really problematic.

here's an earlier piece from the same author, published in 2005:

http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/groseclose/pdfs/MediaBias.pdf

which outlines the same methodology and shows that it's at best questionable.

researching the lead author shows that he's widely regarded as a conservative hack. look for yourself.

but giving this the benefit of the doubt.... the article itself is not available yet---i just used my magic access capabilities to check, and it isn't yet up in the Quarterly Journal of Economics' advance access area. The publication date is listed as December. Perhaps, if this discussion seems still of interest to folk, and if someone remembers, it can get bumped closer to the appearance of the article.

press releases don't mean much of anything. if you want to evaluate a bit of research, you want the thing itself. so at this point, i don't take the report as indicating much of anything worth paying attention to--and the earlier paper linked above simply provides more reason for that.

but we'll see in december.

 

I think defining where the middle is will be as big of an issue as the metric.

I'll wait and see; but I think you could make a case either way by manipulating the midpoint.

 

Meh. Why does it matter that half the student researchers supported Gore and half supported Bush? How does that safe guard against bias?

 

This is a pretty bad study, actually, and has been debunked in many following publications.

First, the whole thing is based on the assumption that a balanced view is giving certain views the same "time" as they are given in congress. That is, it assumes that congress is representative of the views of the country on all issues as a whole. It also assumes that a citation count is an accurate way of dealing with this. That is, a think tank's political tilt is determined by the number of times they are cited by democrats vs the number of times they are cited by republicans. They then compare the numbers of citations to the media as a whole. This ends up with weird results, like the ACLU being right of center. The ACLU is right of center in this because lots of republicans cited them in floor speeches (mostly in relation to McCain Feingold). Or that the NRA is a centrist organization because lots of democrats also cited them. So it would score an article that cited the NRA and the Brady campaign (coded as strongly liberal) as an article biased to the left.

Second, and this is really the kiss of death, though less sexy in terms of debate: the article has a huge problem of sample selection. I am not saying that the author set out to do it that way, but publications using his data show that his findings are highly sensitive to sample selection:
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/gasper/WorkingPapers/IdeologicalShiftv2.pdf

For example, if the national tax payer union is excluded from his sample, the "average" media score then is highly balanced. That is, his results depend entirely on the inclusion of the NTU. Now, while the inclusion is certainly justified, he doesn't include things like the US Chamber of Commerce in his results, or the American Bankers Association (but he included the geonomy society). If the exclusion or inclusion of one organization changes things so much, then the choice to leave out some pretty big organizations like the authors did is indefensible.

Finally, and most important, what I think is amazing is this wholesale transformation of the American right into postmodern relativists. If one side suddenly though that the earth was flat, and the other that the earth was round, in the view of this article the "balanced" media should give proportional time to both claims.

 

I recall when this study was released six years ago, There was a fair amount of controversy regarding the author's conservative leanings and assumptions, the sampling and questionable characterization of organizations , the reliance on citing sources like Brent Bozelle and other conservative media "experts"

Why are we discussing a six year old study again? The public's choice of media for political news has changed considerably since that time, with far less reliance on newspapers and, to a lesser degree, commercial TV, and far greater reliance on internet "news" sources that have little or no journalistic standards or integrity.

 

the press release that is the op announces another version to appear in december.

i found the earlier study with a simple search. and some traces of the controversy. i don't know from the press release what relation there'll be between the newer version and the 2005 version and what followed it. and while the quarterly journal of economics will put up advance copies of articles that are in the galley stage, there's nothing up yet. the methodologies sound very similar, though. my suspicion is that there'll be an attempt to use the second study to legitimate the first--but i've not seen it yet.

 

I didn't even look at the post date: December 14, 2005.

 

woah. shit. neither did i. obviously. so the study's linked above. there is no second one. ugh. sorry about that.

 

I hate George Bush, Dick Cheney, Heritage Foundation, Project for a New American Century, and the Brady Campaign

By their methodology, this post has a strong to moderate conservative bias.

 

Everyone knows the Huff post leans heavy to left, Fox News leans heavy to the right. President Obama makes the kool-aid and MSNBC drinks it. The Times(pick one) leans left. WSJ leans right. CNN, NBC national broadcast, and Houston Chronicle sways with popular opinion. A lot of papers in major cities would lean left, yet most AM talk radio shows lean heavy to the right.

Best way to truly get a "Fair and Balanced" story is to read 4 or 5 different places and draw your own conclusion. That true facts will line up.

 

I'm sorry... but in what way does this research really measure anything? I've dealt with the issue of quantifying social data before and it's so grey an area as to be virtually impossible to do. I've not looked at this in particular but I will note that I find left-leaning media conclusion to be beyond obvious. My other problem would be with understanding exactly what the metric is measuring. Too often the description of social metrics belies what is actually being measured (e.g. did you know that there really isn't a "poverty line"?).

And as pointed out by others, comparing this metric to the voting patterns of Congress seems to be like arguing oranges are rounder than the colour blue because oranges are fruit.