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What liberal media?

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JTT
 
Reply Thu 20 Jul, 2006 08:51 pm
Yet another Republican talking point that there is a liberal bias in the media, echoed long and hard here at A2K by the rightwing nuts, is shown to be a lie.


Quote:
Third time's not the charm: Sunday-morning talk shows still imbalanced

Summary: In Media Matters' third examination of guest appearances on ABC's This Week, CBS' Face the Nation, and NBC's Meet the Press, research demonstrated that Republicans and conservatives outnumbered Democrats and progressives from April to June of 2006.

On February 14, Media Matters for America released a comprehensive study analyzing the guest appearances on ABC's This Week, CBS' Face the Nation, and NBC's Meet the Press from 1997 through 2005. In April, Media Matters released an update to that study, analyzing the shows for the first quarter of 2006. In both reports, the results demonstrated that Republicans and conservatives dominated on all three Sunday shows. Media Matters has now completed an analysis of the second quarter of 2006, April through June, and the key conclusions reached in the first two studies remain unchanged.

Republicans and conservatives outnumber Democrats and progressives. More conservative journalists appear than progressive journalists. Panels are more likely to be imbalanced toward the right than toward the left. Republicans and conservatives are given more solo interviews. In short, the title we gave to our original study -- "If It's Sunday, It's Conservative" -- remains true.

http://mediamatters.org/items/200607200006

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Merry Andrew
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Jul, 2006 04:00 am
Does anyone still actually believe that ancient myth about "the liberal media"? With remarkably few exceptions, the media are in the hip pocket of the current administration and of big businesses. It's been that way for at least the past 50 years or thereabouts. PBS/NPR is a rare exception, but even they're not radical in any sense. NY Times has gotten positively right wing, with the Washington Post not far behind. I have no idea what the neocons are talking about when they label the media "liberal."
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Joe Nation
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Jul, 2006 04:16 am
The liberal media was originally an off-hand remark made by Newt Gringrich, picked up by the usual suspects on yawp-radio and re-made into a kind of mantra by the neocons who know a good lie when they repeat one.



Joe(yes. I am one of those people they hate)Nation
0 Replies
 
freedom4free
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Jul, 2006 04:45 am
The Media's Middle East Rules :

Robin C. Miller's book - The Media's Middle East Rules of Engagement - is a good primer on how this works, listing ten - rules - that are scrupulously followed and giving examples of each.

Rule 1: See the Middle East through Israeli eyes.
Rule 2: Treat American and Israeli governmental statements as hard news.
Rule 3: Ignore the historical context.
Rule 4: Avoid the fundamental legal and moral issues posed by the Israeli occupation.
Rule 5: Suppress or minimize news unfavorable to the Israelis.
Rule 6: Muddy the waters when necessary.
Rule 7: Credit all Israeli claims, even if wholly unfounded.
Rule 8: Doubt all Palestinian assertions, no matter how self-evident.
Rule 9: Condemn only Palestinian violence.
Rule 10: Disparage the international consensus supporting Palestinian rights.

There is an eleventh rule that hovers over all the other rules. Equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. This shuts everyone up. That's why it is so critically important that this Eleventh Rule be challenged loudly and clearly and frequently. Anti-Zionism is NOT anti-Semitism. Zionism is not Judaism. Not all Jews are Zionists, and not all Zionists are Jews. The point is that Zionism raises many questions about what constitutes Jewishness. Israeli Jews are largely secular, so it cannot be called a strictly religious category. Race is not even a scientifically operational term. The Jewish communities around the world are distinctly developed from one another. If Zionism is to define Jewishness for itself, it can only do so - loosely - as the Diaspora, the political utility of which, for example with the African Diaspora, is one where that - scattered - status still results in a common historically conditioned oppression. For Israeli Jews, the contrary is true. They have become not an oppressed nationality, but an oppressing European settler state.

http://stangoff.com/?p=328
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fishin
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Jul, 2006 04:52 am
Re: What liberal media?
JTT wrote:
Yet another Republican talking point that there is a liberal bias in the media, echoed long and hard here at A2K by the rightwing nuts, is shown to be a lie.



A study that looked at 3 hours of programming per week (out of a total of 504 hours between the 3 networks) somehow proves the claim is a lie??

Your claim here is just as silly as the media bias claims.
0 Replies
 
slkshock7
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Jul, 2006 05:07 am
To judge this question, I recommend you use other sources than "Media Matters", a venue with a distinctly liberal bent and an avowed agenda to dispel the "liberal media myth". This hardly represents an unbiased position.

If fact, there are countless studies which have demonstrated conclusively that the mainstream media is predominately left of center. Below is a summary from one study done by UCLA.

study wrote:
In this paper we estimate ADA (Americans for Democratic Action) scores for major media outlets such as the New York Times, USA Today, Fox News' Special Report, and all three network television news shows. Our estimates allow us to answer such questions as "Is the average article in the New York Times more liberal than the average speech by Tom Daschle?" or "Is the average story on Fox News more conservative than the average speech by Bill Frist?" To compute our measure, we count the times that a media outlet cites various think tanks and other policy groups. We compare this with the times that members of Congress cite the same think tanks in their speeches on the floor of the House and Senate. By comparing the citation patterns we construct an ADA score. As a simplified example, imagine that there were only two think tanks, one liberal and one conservative. Suppose that the New York Times cited the liberal think tank twice as often as the conservative one. Our method asks: What is the typical ADA score of members of Congress who exhibit the same frequency (2:1) in their speeches? This is the score that we would assign to the New York Times. Our results show a strong liberal bias. All of the news outlets except Fox News' Special Report and the Washington Times received a score to the left of the average member of Congress. Consistent with many conservative critics, CBS Evening News and the New York Times received a score far left of center. Outlets such as the Washington Post, USA Today, NPR's Morning Edition, NBC's Nightly News and ABC's World News Tonight were moderately left. The most centrist outlets (but still left-leaning) by our measure were the Newshour with Jim Lehrer, CNN's NewsNight with Aaron Brown, and ABC's Good Morning America. Fox News' Special Report, while right of center, was closer to the center than any of the three major networks' evening news broadcasts. All of our 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.
source
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parados
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Jul, 2006 05:38 am
Oh look,

A study that found the most liberal news outlet is the Wall Street Journal.
0 Replies
 
Lash
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Jul, 2006 06:01 am
Over 90% of them vote Democrat.

Case closed.
0 Replies
 
dyslexia
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Jul, 2006 06:06 am
Lash wrote:
Over 90% of them vote Democrat.

Case closed.
So Lash, you saying democrat = liberal?
0 Replies
 
slkshock7
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Jul, 2006 06:10 am
Parados,

In any good study which purports objectivity, the ingoing assumptions, methodology and interpretation are open to criticism, but the data is just the data. This finding is, at first blush, surprising, but the study explains the apparent anomaly quite well.

study wrote:


The study also goes on to tout the centrist position of NPR, something sure to rise the ire of the conservatives....but again, they make well-reasoned conclusions to explain the finding and support their finding with external documentation.

From my perspective, anomalies (which can be logically explained) serve to elevate the reliabilty and objectivity of the study.
0 Replies
 
Merry Andrew
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Jul, 2006 04:30 pm
dyslexia wrote:
Lash wrote:
Over 90% of them vote Democrat.

Case closed.
So Lash, you saying democrat = liberal?


C'mon, Dys. Surely you know that 79 % of all statistics are made up on the spot. (As you should also know that all Democrats are tax-and-spend liberal wimps and all Republicans are God-fearing, upstanding citizens in their respective communities, with two cars in the garage and the ole Stars and Bars proudly flying over their abodes.)
0 Replies
 
Lash
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Jul, 2006 04:40 pm
dyslexia wrote:
Lash wrote:
Over 90% of them vote Democrat.

Case closed.
So Lash, you saying democrat = liberal?

Dear,
I just saw this. No. Dem Not Equal Lib, but

Dem is closer to Lib than Rep, wouldn't you say?

97.3% of tall people have said so on four occasions.

Going to get actual figures.

<Snaps long, silky cape--->takes a running leap----->soars through the air, doing breaststroke>
0 Replies
 
dyslexia
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Jul, 2006 04:45 pm
breaststroke? does that include nipples? can i help?
0 Replies
 
Lash
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Jul, 2006 04:52 pm
Keep your mits off my partyhats, Cowboy!!
0 Replies
 
Lash
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Jul, 2006 04:56 pm
I'll lose my concentration and crash into a building.
0 Replies
 
nimh
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Jul, 2006 05:31 pm
Course a good journalist would be able to vote either Feingold or Gingrich, and yet report objectively. What journalists vote does not necessarily equate with bias in their work.
0 Replies
 
Joe Nation
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Jul, 2006 06:51 pm
One thing that can be gleaned from the report on the Wall Street Journal's news pages. The reporters apparently got the stories right, they were just off the message the editorial writers would have liked. They are not necessarily liberals then, but they are journalists.


Joe(Facts are neither conservative nor liberal)Nation
0 Replies
 
parados
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Jul, 2006 08:55 pm
So, is it a liberal bias when all the news media reported on the President speaking at the NAACP yesterday? The study you presented claims it is.

Some of the "think tanks" are Cato Institue, AARP, The Heritage Institute, ACLU, NAACP, The Rand Corporation. A group that files lawsuits like the ACLU will be cited more in the newspaper because lawsuits are news. A group that only writes papers will be cited less.

I see an inherent problem right there in the data. They are using liberal action groups and comparing the times they are cited to the conservative policy groups. Go ask 30 random people on the street what each of those 6 groups do. Most will recognize the 3 "liberal" ones because of their actions outside of policy positions. You will be lucky of 10 can tell you what the 3 conservative groups are. Does it mean that most of those people you questioned are liberal since they recognize the names of liberal groups and not conservative ones? I don't think so. Do you think every congressperson would know all 6 groups? Which ones would they recognize? If you are going to cite evidence wouldn't it be from a group you think people will know?

You can find many critiques of the study you cited slshock that point out more errors in the methodology.
0 Replies
 
slkshock7
 
  1  
Reply Wed 26 Jul, 2006 02:01 pm
Parados,
The study compared congressmen (who are paid to be biased) against news media (who are paid to be unbiased). If a news media refers to liberal think tanks to the same extent that a liberal politician does, then I don't think it is outside the bounds to consider the media to have a liberal bent.

The fact that 30 people off the street can't diffentiate the political position of the NCPPR vice the NAACP says nothing about the validity of the methodology. It's Congressmen and news reporters that should be asked. I might be putting too much intelligence into the average politician's head, but he argues for a living. Furthermore, he needs to defend the positions he's taken every few years when he's up for reelection. There's little doubt that he would be pretty knowledgeable about the think tanks that support his particular political bias, whether left-wing or right-wing. Now admittedly, the reporter "off-the-street" could be more ignorant, but the fact that his editors allow him to address on air only the well-known liberal think tank position doesn't negate the findings, it reinforces them.
0 Replies
 
paull
 
  1  
Reply Wed 26 Jul, 2006 03:29 pm
One has to remember that JTT and his ilk find the MSM, which is profoundly liberal, to be to their right. It is all perspective, after all.
0 Replies
 
 

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