Political scientists quantify media bias ... and it’s liberal
Thanks to Michael R for the link to this interesting survey of US media.
While the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is conservative, the newspaper’s news pages are liberal, even more liberal than The New York Times. The Drudge Report may have a right-wing reputation, but it leans left. Coverage by public television and radio is conservative compared to the rest of the mainstream media. Meanwhile, almost all major media outlets tilt to the left.
These are just a few of the surprising findings from a UCLA-led study, which is believed to be the first successful attempt at objectively quantifying bias in a range of media outlets and ranking them accordingly.
“I suspected that many media outlets would tilt to the left because surveys have shown that reporters tend to vote more Democrat than Republican,” said Tim Groseclose, a UCLA political scientist and the study’s lead author. “But I was surprised at just how pronounced the distinctions are.”
“Overall, the major media outlets are quite moderate compared to members of Congress, but even so, there is a quantifiable and significant bias in that nearly all of them lean to the left,” said co?author Jeffrey Milyo, University of Missouri economist and public policy scholar.
One can, I guess, query the utility of the left-right model. But one can’t query the utility of a formal measure of bias that pitches even supposedly right-wing media in the centre or left-of-centre. It’s what we’ve always known - liberalism is endemic and the bulk of those who consider themselves on the right aren’t.
The full report will be published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, due out any day now.
Posted by Svigor on Mon, 19 Dec 2005 23:59 | #
As far as I can tell there is no right wing, at least not here in America. I always get a kick out of people who talk about the “radical conservative” Bush administration and the like. I just laugh at them. Really, who are these “radical conservatives,” and what is conservative about them, let alone radical?