Abnormal Interests

« On The Selective Use Of Linguistic Data
Main
For the Next Four Days, Please Don't Find Anything »

October 27, 2008

The Question of Media Bias

For those who may not have guessed it, let me start with my own bias. I am a liberal with a few abnormal twists and turns. While details have changed over time, my basic political commitments have been quite stable since my early twenties. To some I may have seemed to move to the left as the center moved to the right. Or at least I think the center moved to the right here in the United States. I'm actually to the left of Senator Obama on many but not all issues. By a very large margin, my basic political commitments align better with Senator Obama's than with Senator McCain's. In recent years, I've been of the very strong opinion that the mainstream media is biased against most of my positions and candidates.

Very recently, editorial endorsements have been going my way but I still feel that my candidates and my positions aren't getting a fair shake in the mainstream media. Without much reflection, I've attributed some of this to media self-interests; like most people, I'd rather not attribute it to my own bias. News outlets want to sell advertisement space and time. To do so they need to maximize readership or viewership. So, when a majority of people lean to the right, their self-interest is to lean to the right, and when a majority of people lean to the left, they lean to the left. There are a few outlets that buck this dynamic by cutting out for themselves counter trending niche markets. At least, that's my ignorant intuition, more or less. By the way, I think that most alternative media outlets, right or left, are generally little short propaganda. While many such outlets have provided a useful corrective to mainstream media bias and candidate pandering, most alternative media does little to enlighten me and often gives me a headache. Like many unschooled intuitions, some of my intuitions about media bias in the mainstream media may well be wrong. This month's Scientific American has a short piece by Vivian Martin that summarizes several studies of the issue of media bias. The article begins,

Nothing ratchets up the perennial debate over media bias like a presidential election. But as Tim Groeling, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, observes, public discussions about media bias are often just “food fights,” with pundits and partisans throwing around anecdotes.

It's not a simple issue. A host of problems of definition and metric plague all attempts to apply science to journalistic bias. Even the use of the word "bias" presents its own problems. And results vary depending on methodology, definition, and even timing. For example, in one study, S. Robert Lichter, head of the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, found "that 72 percent of the statements in TV news reports about Obama in late spring and early summer were negative, whereas 57 percent of the statements about McCain were negative." But in an earlier study, Lichter found that outlets tended to favor the more liberal candidate. I do wonder if there is a problem with the definition of "negative" but I haven't read the actual study. I also wonder if these studies properly controlled for timeframe and events on the ground.

One study even dealt with what wasn't say in the news. And it is exactly in this area that I think a significant percentage of media bias is evident.

And then, there's the Groseclose / Milyo study:

In 2005 the Quarterly Journal of Economics invigorated the debate with a provocative study by Tim Groseclose, a political scientist at U.C.L.A., and Jeffrey Milyo, an economist at the University of Missouri–Columbia. Groseclose and Milyo created a scale and assigned 20 major news outlets and legislators in Washington, D.C., positions based on their citations of think tanks and policy groups labeled liberal or conservative. They also factored in the voting records of House and Senate members. Their measure determined that most of the major media were left of center of the average legislator—even the news pages of the Wall Street Journal were slightly left of the “average Democrat.” The exceptions were the Washington Times and Fox News’s Special Report.

Since I am to the left of the "average legislator," even the "average (contemporary) Democrat," I take this, if true, to be a good thing. Others may differ. The article ends with an all too short discussion of the role of framing, journalistic norms, and completive pressures. And that brings me part way back to my own original bias.

And then there is the unaddressed question of whether a fact of the matter can be biased. Sure, selective presentation or framing of facts can be biased but what if the total, rationally weighted, set of facts simply favors one candidate over another? A few elections ago we had an incumbent candidate for the House of Representatives who ran on his exemplary record of attendance at House debates and votes. But he always forgot to mention the reason. He was under house arrest in Washington DC. One of the very few places he could go other than his Washington area home was Capital Hill. He even wore an ankle bracelet to make sure he didn't violate the conditions of his house arrest. He couldn't even go to his home district, the district in which I live, to campaign. He had pleaded guilty to ten misdemeanor counts of accepting $250,000 in illegal campaign contributions. Was reminding people of this little fact a case of media bias? He thought it was. After all, he was paying his debt to society. Would have failing to mention his house arrest not been a greater case of media bias? None of the studies summarized in the Scientific American article addressed this kind of issue.

Yes, I was motivated to write this post by Claude Mariottini. As best I can glean, Claude is not a liberal. I do agree with him on this,

In light of all the things mentioned above, what does the Old Testament have to say to us today about the selection of the next president of the United States?

The answer is: absolutely nothing!

Posted by Duane Smith at October 27, 2008 8:37 PM | Read more on Current Events |

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telecomtally.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2676

Comments

Posted by: Claude Mariottini at October 28, 2008 6:09 AM

Sorry, comments are closed for this post.
Send me an email if it is important.

Tags: