Media Bias
A recent comment here by Brian expressed amusement at a citation of CBS news. Indeed, if you talk to a lay person about bias, one of the first examples that will come up is bias in the news media. A recent Zogby poll confirms widespread belief in the existence of such bias:
The vast majority of American voters believe media bias is alive and well – 83% of likely voters said the media is biased in one direction or another, while just 11% believe the media doesn’t take political sides...
I had a preconception that most people perceive bias as a function of difference from their own beliefs. Conservatives complain about liberal bias, while liberals complain about conservative bias. However the Zogby poll revealed that things are not as symmetrical as I had assumed:
While 97% of Republicans surveyed said the media are liberal, two-thirds of political independents feel the same, but fewer than one in four independents (23%) said they saw a conservative bias. Democrats, while much more likely to perceive a conservative bias than other groups, were not nearly as sure the media was against them as were the Republicans. While Republicans were unified in their perception of a left-wing media, just two-thirds of Democrats were certain the media skewed right – and 17% said the bias favored the left.
Overall, 64% perceived a liberal bias compared to 28% who see conservative bias.
In thinking about these results, it occurs to me that when liberals complain about conservative bias, they often focus their attention on just a few media outlets. The worst offender is Fox News, a network which advertises their "Fair and Balanced" coverage but which is widely perceived among liberals as being strongly biased to the right. It appears from these poll results that liberals are not as unhappy about opposing bias among the broad range of media.
An academic analysis of media bias from UCLA a couple of years ago attempts to offer a more objective appraisal (PDF preprint available here). This is of course a highly controversial topic and at first it might seem impossible to fairly quantify media bias. The methodology they developed is to study media sources, including newspapers, TV shows and web sites, and to look at how often they cite various think tanks and other policy groups. The idea would be that if they consistently cite liberal groups they are showing a liberal bias, and similarly for conservative groups.
But how to measure the groups, objectively? Here is the real novelty. The study looks at how often members of Congress of various political views cite the same groups, and correlate those rates with the Congressperson's scores from the ADA, a liberal group. ADA like other such groups gives Senators and Representatives numerical scores showing where they are on the liberal-conservative spectrum, and I understand that these ratings are generally considered to be reasonably objective and not too controversial.
By comparing the citation rates from the media with those from members of Congress with various ADA scores, the researchers come up with an equivalent ADA score for each media source. This then measures where they are on the political spectrum, compared to the average scores for Congressional representatives (the average ADA for Congress at the time was 50.1 on a scale from 0 to 100).
Although this methodology sounds reasonable, the results were surprising to me. The bottom line is that, of the 20 media outlets studied, almost all were had ADA scores above 50, putting them on the liberal side of the spectrum. Here are the results from Table IV of the paper, ranking media outlets in order of distance from the center, i.e. from least to most biased by the methodology of the study. For reference, the average ADA score for Congressional Democrats was 84.3:
1. 55.8 Newshour with Jim Lehrer
2. 56.0 CNN NewsNight with Aaron Brown
3. 56.1 ABC Good Morning America
4. 60.4 Drudge Report
5. 39.7 Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume
6. 61.0 ABC World News Tonight
7. 61.6 NBC Nightly News
8. 63.4 USA Today
9. 64.0 NBC Today Show
10. 35.4 Washington Times
11. 65.4 Time Magazine
12. 65.8 U.S. News and World Report
13. 66.3 NPR Morning Edition
14. 66.3 Newsweek
15. 66.6 CBS Early Show
16. 66.6 Washington Post
17. 70.0 LA Times
18. 73.7 CBS Evening News
19. 73.7 New York Times
20. 85.1 Wall Street Journal
If we accept these results at face value, Brian is right to be skeptical about the use of CBS news as a factual source, especially on a matter which reflects badly on a conservative administration. CBS Evening News was tied for the 2nd most biased source in the study. We also note that the one Fox News program does perhaps surprisingly well given the criticism the network often receives, coming in as the fifth least biased.
Granted, the study's methodology is somewhat unorthodox and indirect. It occurs to me that the same results could occur if liberals and the media both cite mostly factual, unbiased sources (in keeping with the liberal claim to be the "reality based community") while conservatives and conservative media cite sources that have strong biases. On the other hand, the consistency between the results of this study and public polling results suggests that the reality is what we see here, a widespread if modest liberal bias in the media which is recognized accurately by the public.
overcomingbias.com
Selected comments -
Posted by: Tex | April 06, 2007 at 05:28 AM
Your estimator for bias is not an effective metric because it does not capture how the quoted sources are used. An article in one newspaper that quotes the Brady campaign may be biased in favor of gun control, while the same quote could be used in another publication to argue strongly against gun control.
More fundamentally, I believe that you are conflating two very different kinds of biases. Your site seems primarily devoted to correcting unconscious biases due to misapprehension of reality (or if your prefer Baysean probability theory). These types of biases are usually unintentional, and there's little resistance to correcting them once the error is demonstrated. Your mission seems to be to help us find and use more accurate scales.
The bias in politics, journalism, advertising and education is of a very different type. Practitioners of this these trades have a vested interest in intentionally distorting their presentation of information to achieve results which they believe are desirable. They are not mistaken, they are simply lying. These professionals are like the butcher resting his thumb on the scale. Accuracy and precision are the very last thing they want.
I think we all know that politicians and advertisers lie. But, why should journalists and educators lie? After all, aren't they devoted to the pursuit of truth? In fact, many journalists and educators enter these fields with the specific intention of attempting to achieve political or social change that they think is desirable.
In a recent speech broadcast on National Public Radio, Bill Moyer praised Antonio Gramsci and Michael Moore for showing the way for more "activitist" journalism. Michael Moore's Farenheit 911 needs no introduction for the use of misinformation and bias in the pursuit of propaganda. Gramsci was an Italian communist who developed the concept of using the intelligensia to condition the proletariat for communism through the intentional manipulation of news, media and education.
Media and academic bias are real and obvious to any observer. Fortunately, they are less effective than intended thanks to the highly attuned bullshit detectors which most people deveop. If you can not yet spot phonies, here are three simple heuristic tests that will effectively spot a large fraction of intentional lies:
1) Is the action proposed in the interest of the person or organization making the appeal? In law this is called "cui bono?" (who gains?).
2) Does the person or organization actually abide by the actions they demand of others?
3) Does the person or organization making the appeal reject solutions to the problem they present if the solutions don't agree with their overarching agenda?
Can these tests lead you astray? Of course they can, but so can the most exquisite analysis of covariance testing. As George Box noted many years ago, "All models are wrong, some models are useful."
overcomingbias.com
Posted by: Carl Shulman | April 05, 2007 at 09:16 PM
Sorry for starting this mess.
I believe media bias is separate from the cognitive biases all humans are burdened with, the kind of things you guys discuss here. My theory would be that political biases are the cumulative effect of the many cognitive biases outlined in academic literature.
In the interest of full disclosure, I'm a libertarian/conservative. I think it's pretty obvious to most that the major US media organizations are consitently biased in terms of how they characterize events, sources, and people, as well as what issues they select to report. End of disclosure.
I think it's telling how liberals scream and howl whenever this issue is raised. The discussion quickly becomes ad hominem attacks on Rupert Murdoch or Matt Drudge (or others). They don't even pretend to consider if it's true.
The libertarian side of me says that CBS News and the New York Times have every right in the world to slant the news as far left as they please. Wherever there is an open market for ideas and low barriers to entry, such as in cable, internet, or radio, the market will respond. I just wish every media outlet, right and left, would fess up to their political leanings. It seems that only relatively recently in the history of the media, post WWII perhaps, that they all pretend to be neutral. In the past, newspapers or journals were clearly pro-union or pro-prohibition, or whatever. I belive we'd be better served if outlets did what they used to, wear their political leanings on their sleeves.
But maybe the bigger problem is political bias in the academy, but that's a different can of worms!
overcomingbias.com
Posted by: Brian | April 05, 2007 at 10:35 PM
One thing that concerns me about the study methodology is that it's far from clear that the median member of the House is a good approximation of the median voter. How much of an effect is the political party that controls the House having - what happens to the results when the median member is a Democrat?
overcomingbias.com |
