60% of Americans Think News Organizations Are Biased in Their Coverage
Posted by Rick Moore
NewsBusters - Exposing Liberal Media Bias
August 18, 2005
The New York Times is reporting on a series of Pew Research Studies that indicate that a majority of Americans think that news organizations are biased in their reporting:
The share of Americans who believe that news
organizations are "politically biased in their reporting"
increased to 60 percent in 2005, up from 45 percent in
1985, according to polls by the Pew Research Center.
Many people also believe that biased reporting influences
who wins or loses elections. A new study by Stefano
DellaVigna of the University of California, Berkeley, and
Ethan Kaplan of the Institute for International Economic
Studies at Stockholm University, however, casts doubt on
this view. Specifically, the economists ask whether the
advent of the Fox News Channel, Rupert Murdoch's cable
television network, affected voter behavior. They found
that Fox had no detectable effect on which party people
voted for, or whether they voted at all.
An appealing feature of their study is that it does not
matter if Fox News represents the political center and
the rest of the media the liberal wing, or Fox represents
the extreme right and the rest of the media the middle.
Fox's political orientation is clearly to the right of
the rest of the media. Research has found, for example,
that Fox News is much more likely than other news shows
to cite conservative think tanks and less likely to cite
liberal ones.
Fox surely injected a new partisan perspective into
political coverage on television.
Isn't it interesting that the studies singled out Fox News for special attention, as opposed to CNN, MSNBC or any of the big three networks. If you read the whole article, you almost get a sense of disappointment from the writer that the studies didn't find some sort of subversive result from the presence of Fox News.
newsbusters.org
nytimes.com
