Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] Media bias finally given a number....

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On 12/19/05, Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:

My guess is that the true center would be the Wall Street Journal news
pages, but I'll tell you why later. :-)  (Eek 9%)

In brief, here's why:  The Wall Street Journal is notoriously targeted towards investors, whose livelihoods depend on having access to reliable news, and who have no real geographical clustering.  These two forces are pretty big incentives to make the Journal's news reporting pretty strong and unbiased.  The editorial pages are written by completely different people, though; these are to entertain the wealthy, who are more conservative (esp. about economic issues) than the population at large.

Now, one basic reason why using the ADA measure as is as the one and only measure of political belief should be clear to most people, so I won't go into it.  But even if that were the one best measure to use, there's a spectacular hole in the logic of the study as I understand it.

If we assign a score of 50 to the average member of congress, we have built into our measure a bias towards the right.  Why?  Because congress is elected by people who vote, and a greater proportion of Republicans vote than the proportion of Independents or Democrats.  In that situation, the average member of congress is going to end up being more conservative than the population of the district that he or she represents.  In modern times, the drift has gone even further to the right because Republicans have done a stupendously better job of getting their candidates elected given their view.  Now, that's smart politics, but it has nothing to do with the bias of the media.  Yet this paper seems to base its center point on just this fact.  The mind boggles.  I suppose if I had time to read the paper, I bet I would find out that they tried to statistically correct for things like this, but this is not an easy thing to do.

So do I think the work is useless?  Hardly; I'm guessing that they may have done a decent job of arranging the order of the spectrum.  Do I think the major media is completely unbiased?  No, that would be really unlikely when you think about who the people involved are:  primarily, they are educated residents of major metropolitan areas.   So it would be remarkable if their attitudes and opinions weren't closer to the mean for the populations they are drawn from, and that's definitely shading towards the blue side of things.  Now, how far that shading goes is an interesting question, and how much impact it has on the news itself is another one.  I'm guessing that the answer is somewhere between the true unbiased mean of the whole US population and the specific views of the reporter/writer/whatever in question.  At least on most issues; I do suspect that issues in which there is a specific and sizable religious component that they could end up being rather less conservative than the population as a whole, but probably far less biased if you compared them to other college-educated people.

Well, gotta get back to work...

jking

 

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