Mark Halperin acknowledges liberal media bias

[DVaut1]

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DVaut, I agree with a lot of what you said, but the problem is that the media markets itself as unbiased. Fox claims to be "fair and balanced", not a conservative news network. I'm not going to argue for or against bias in the media, but what you said can't work unless each network markets itself accordingly.

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Why does how the media markets itself matter? Assume Fox tries to make a conscious effort to capture the market share of conservatives alienated by other outlets. These consumers like to hear how fair and balanced their media source of choice is. These consumers also feel other media sources aren't "fair and balanced". Again, I'm missing why the Fox News tagline is relevant.

And I fail to understand what "the media markets itself as unbiased" means. WTF is "the media"? Is the media some monothilic entity? Rush Limbaugh is part of the media. Does he market himself as an unbiased source of information? What about The Weekly Standard? What of Lou Dobbs on CNN? What about This Week host and former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos?

I wouldn't bother answering these questions. I think you missed the point.

My point, in sum:

News media isn't some special kind of product that magically violates logic, ignores profit motive, and spits in the face of the audience it caters to. The news media market isn't a command economy where the product supply is controlled by ideological overlords; as evidenced by the commentary of ABC News Chief Mark Halperin, when a media outlet like ABC loses market share to Fox, it doesn't blindly ignore this information and head back to the Liberal Ministry of Information for new strategies on how better propogate The Message in the face of the Fox insurrection -- no, what seems to have happened, according to Halperin, is that (oh my god whoda thunk it) ABC takes this information and attempts to better appeal to conservatives it seemingly alienated and who now consume the product of a competitor. It's a revolutionary business strategy so shrewd and diabolical that at least a few people with high school diplomas must have been in the room when it was concocted.

So, I ask: why should we care about bias? It's merely a reflection of what the market wants.

[UATrewqaz]

Anyone who thinks CNN is 100% fair and Fox News is right wing is crazy.
Anyone who thinks Fox News is 100% fair and CNN is left wing is crazy.

CNN (and most other major news media) clearly lean left and Fox News (and a handful of new organizations) clearly lean right.

The reason Fox News got so popular so fast was due to the right wing ire over the liberal media. Fox News pandered to them (the first time anyone had in a long time) and now our news media is about as polarized as politics are.

I don't think any of these biases are intentional, I don't think they meet before the news airs and say "Ok boys, how are we gonna spin it tonight?"

I think it's just natural beliefs seeping out.

The communications department at my college was the hotbed of liberal thought on campus. Do you really think that most major news organizations have a roughly 50/50 split of right winers and left wingers, particularly in positions of power?

When a news organizations employs 90% liberals it's only natural the coverage is going to lean left, even without them trying or noticing (and the converse for Fox News)

[adios]

You may be right but where is the center? We need to know this to before we can even start thinking about measuring the bias of a news organization.

[Chris Alger]

Goldberg's "evidence" of bias in media content consists of anecdotes like the time CBS correspondents snickered off-air when someone said they hailed from Salt Lake City. Matthews works for a network than runs two prime time right-wing talk shows (Carlson and Scarborough) and no liberal talk shows after cancelling its top-rated Phil Donohoue show. It cancelled Donohue for the explicit reason that it was one of the lone voices of liberalism in the media. According to an internal memo, the show threatened to create a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war" as his show could become "a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity."

Matthews himself has been a prime source of right-wing disinformation concerning public confidence in the GOP vs. the Democrats on tax and terrorism policies, as Media Matters has pointed out again and again. Mathews also has a well-documented record of gushing over GOP leaders like Bush and McCain while demonizing the Clintons, such as his attempt to tag (centrist, pro-war) Hillary as a "socialist," "Dukakis in a dress," "Madame de Farge of the left" and so on, to the evident pleasure of his pro-Republican paymasters at GE. And, of course, this is a network routinely derided by the right-wing noise machine as excessively liberal.

That cheap flacks like Mathews and Halperin could be sources for an "admitted" liberal bias shows why this myth is ridiculous beyond belief.

[Chris Alger]

x

[Chris Alger]

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"The Center for Media and Public Affairs study found that Democrats recieve 77% favorable coverage, while Republicans receive 88% negative coverage. "

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But the methodology used by the CMPA to define "favorable" is typically skewed in order to obtain a preordained conclusion. To wit:<ul type="square">Despite the . . . objective posture, the methodology used in most of their [CMPA founders Robert and Linda Lichter] research is not scientific. They have used it in the past to "prove" entirely dubious claims, such as the idea that Jesse Jackson was the candidate with the most positive news coverage in 1988, or that George Bush got as much negative coverage as Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War.

In analyzing media coverage, the Lichters single out what they judge to be "thematic messages"—explicit statements of opinion or evaluation. Usually the Lichters determine that such statements make up a very small proportion of the statements found in news reporting—yet proceed to generalize about coverage as a whole based on this tiny percentage.

The Lichters’ tendency to generalize from a narrow sliver of data is the main way that their studies end up supporting their preconceived conclusions of left bias. Take the Center’s report on Gulf War coverage (Media Monitor, 4/91) and its widely cited claim that "nearly three out of five sources (59 percent) criticized U.S. government policies during the [Gulf] War." This, of course, is not 59 percent of all 5,915 sources, but of those 249 sources (4.2 percent) who in the Lichters’ judgment stated an explicit position. This leaves only 148 sources, or 2.5 percent of all sources, who made explicit criticisms of U.S. policy (from the left, right or center).

On what basis can you generalize from the 4 percent of sources who supposedly expressed overt opinions to the 96 percent who didn’t? Doing so results in absurd claims, such as, "Surprisingly, the U.S. government fared little better than its Iraqi counterpart in the soundbite battle." That would be surprising, considering that 44 percent of total news sources were from the U.S. government, according to the Center’s own research.

The Lichters have also been known to stress partial data when a more comprehensive statistic would not prove the bias that they seemed to be looking for. For example, the Center’s report on abortion coverage (Media Monitor, 10/89) trumpeted this finding on the front page: "Pro-choice activist sources outnumbered their pro-life counterparts by a five to three margin." What wasn’t noted on the front page is that the anti-abortion position was often represented by government officials and other non-activist sources (who may speak with more authority than activists to the average news consumer). There is a statistic in the report that includes viewpoints from all sources: "On our summary measure of views on abortion policy, the pro-choice side had a slight edge (53 percent to 47 percent)." This is the more inclusive but less dramatic statistic—and it was buried on the last page.

Under the guise of revealing patterns of bias, what the Lichters really uncover are patterns of rhetoric. The Center’s abortion study found that 75 percent of media sources on abortion favor abolishing Roe v. Wade, yet 66 percent think abortion should be legal. Are these sources schizophrenic? No: The Lichter method simply picked up on the way activists talk. Pro-choice people favored the slogan "keep abortion legal," while anti-abortion forces rallied around "overturn Roe v. Wade."

Yet the Lichters constantly treat such semantic differences as if they indicated real biases in the media: "The pro-choice side dominated the legalization debate. But the pro-life side won out in the debates over Roe v. Wade’s status, government funding, morality and the outset of life." (For more on the Center’s abortion study, see FAIR’s research memo, "Do the Media Have a Pro-Choice Bias?")[/list]Which is exactly what one would expect from a right-wing propaganda outfit like CMPA founded by an AEI fellow and endorsed by Ronald Reagan, Ed Meese, Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson.

The Freedom House study tended to ignore explicitly right wing outlets (they received two percent of total questionaires) because its sample size tended to exclude non-profits (which conservative media organs tend to be). It sent only 20% of its questionaires to national organs while sending more than a quarter to marginal papers like "The Green Bay Press-Gazette, . . . the Sheboygan Press, . . . The Mississippi Press, Fort Collins Coloradoan, Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, Idaho Statesman, Thibodaux Daily Comet, Hemet News and many other newspapers that are not normally counted as part of the national news media. Other of the small-fry survey recipients were specialty journals or obscure publications. Intermission Magazine got a questionnaire, so too did Indian Country Today, Hill Rag, El Pregonero, Senior Advocate, Small Newspaper Group, Washington Citizen, Washington Blade and Government Standard." Robert Parry, Illiberal Conservative Media.

Yet this study was rountinely touted as proof (by Krauthammer, Will and USNWR's Michael Barrone) that 89% of "Washington Journalists" (Ben Wattenberg's phrase) are left-leaning, and that unfair content in the mainstream media can therefore be presumed.

In short, your evidence is a joke that merely reinforces my claim that "liberal media bias" is a conscious and deliberate lie promulgated by the right-wing propaganda machine to dupe its more credulous followers.

[John Feeney]

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my claim that "liberal media bias" is a conscious and deliberate lie promulgated by the right-wing propaganda machine to dupe its more credulous followers.

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I agree with that claim, btw. Though a quote from one of the studies I linked to emphasized the subjectivity of perceived media bias, and might be interpreted as suggesting the assertion of "liberal bias" is just a misperception, it's worth noting these accusations have come largely from the conservative side. Complaints of "liberal media" have been so much louder and more pervasive in recent years than any similar complaints of a conservative bias, that it's hard not to conclude it is indeed a deliberate lie.

[kickabuck]

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Goldberg's "evidence" of bias in media content consists of anecdotes like the time CBS correspondents snickered off-air when someone said they hailed from Salt Lake City. Matthews works for a network than runs two prime time right-wing talk shows (Carlson and Scarborough) and no liberal talk shows after cancelling its top-rated Phil Donohoue show. It cancelled Donohue for the explicit reason that it was one of the lone voices of liberalism in the media. According to an internal memo, the show threatened to create a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war" as his show could become "a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity."

Matthews himself has been a prime source of right-wing disinformation concerning public confidence in the GOP vs. the Democrats on tax and terrorism policies, as Media Matters has pointed out again and again. Mathews also has a well-documented record of gushing over GOP leaders like Bush and McCain while demonizing the Clintons, such as his attempt to tag (centrist, pro-war) Hillary as a "socialist," "Dukakis in a dress," "Madame de Farge of the left" and so on, to the evident pleasure of his pro-Republican paymasters at GE. And, of course, this is a network routinely derided by the right-wing noise machine as excessively liberal.

That cheap flacks like Mathews and Halperin could be sources for an "admitted" liberal bias shows why this myth is ridiculous beyond belief.

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This is an incredibly weak and frankly disappointng attempt at showing Matthews to somehow be a Republican hack out to mischaracterize Dems at every opportunity. Matthews has been in the political arena for many years, in your links he is just giving his learned opinion on issues that are in fact traditional Republican strengths over Dems. For you and Media Matters to believe it is significant based on a poll in a moment in time and feel compelled to use this statement as evidence of Matthews unadulterated conservative bias and misrepresention of the facts is nothing less than bizarre. Basically, big sh**. You lefties are strange man, Matthew's is a guy who worked for Tip O'Neill for years and a couple other Democrats. Obviously he's been undercover for all those years, probably trying to sabotage all those Dems he worked for.

[kickabuck]

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my claim that "liberal media bias" is a conscious and deliberate lie promulgated by the right-wing propaganda machine to dupe its more credulous followers.

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I agree with that claim, btw. Though a quote from one of the studies I linked to emphasized the subjectivity of perceived media bias, and might be interpreted as suggesting the assertion of "liberal bias" is just a misperception, it's worth noting these accusations have come largely from the conservative side. Complaints of "liberal media" have been so much louder and more pervasive in recent years than any similar complaints of a conservative bias, that it's hard not to conclude it is indeed a deliberate lie.

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So studies that support the contention that there is conservative bias are flawed, whereas I'm sure the studies you cite for your position are beyond reproach. The overwhelming percentage of complaints of a liberal bias as compared to conservative bias in the mainstream press is to be ignored of course, just the result of a deliberate attempt of the right wing conspiracy to dupe their followers(they have been quite successful apparently). Since you believe all this, would you mind explaining to me the reason for the need to dupe conservatives into believing the mainstream press is composed of liberals, and therefore more inclined to have a liberal slant in both choice of stories and how those stories are reported?

[John Feeney]

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So studies that support the contention that there is conservative bias are flawed, whereas I'm sure the studies you cite for your position are beyond reproach.

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Oh, come on now. The only reference of the first type I've seen in this thread was hardly a "study." It was not a university study, but a propaganda piece from a right-wing organization whose funding comes from conservative foundations.

I linked to a major study, a meta-analysis of 59 other academic studies in a respected, peer reviewed journal, the Journal of Communication.

You'll agree, my references are better. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

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Since you believe all this, would you mind explaining to me the reason for the need to dupe conservatives into believing the mainstream press is composed of liberals, and therefore more inclined to have a liberal slant in both choice of stories and how those stories are reported?

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A lot of it has to do with influencing the media.

There, you're convinced now, right? It's a first for this forum -- someone's mind being changed! Now that I've convinced you, join us and take the other side in this thread. (and others in the future!) There's power in numbers! [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img] [1]

[1] (Sorry, just kidding around. Sometimes I'm just struck by the absurdity and futility of these debates.)