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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: goldworldnet who wrote (691999)	7/14/2005 1:48:37 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Respond to of 769670

Thanks! (I looked for a while yesterday for combined marketshare numbers of broadcast and cable news operations and didn't find much in a first pass... although what I did find lead me to doubt that (outside the top 10 or so markets where electronic meters are used) the numbers were all that accurate.) If I see anything on bias, I'll pass it along.

To: goldworldnet who wrote (691999)	7/14/2005 2:34:41 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Those numbers are so old, and so much is drawn from 'self-reporting' that it leads me to question how useful it is overall. While I have no doubt that --- on average --- many of the 'reporters' serving up our daily news (if not their corporate bosses :) are more 'liberal' then the public is, I've seen little rationale for explaining that. Could it be that much of what is being 'measured' is the natural tendencies of reporters to be suspicious of authority, critical of authority? Is that a desirable thing in a news media, or not? Here is another complaint: some of the questions in that early 'eighties Lichter-Rothman study (such as this one: "Government should not regulate sex") are incapable of discriminating between a Libertarian viewpoint (nearly all Libertarians would answer 'no' to the question) and what is a "Liberal" viewpoint. There are many 'Liberals' today, I'm sure you will agree, who often FAVOR a big powerful government intervening in social matters to enforce their particular viewpoints. The 'Liberalism' of today is not at all like the small government libertarian viewpoint that the 'Classical Liberalism' of our founders expoused. It should be fairly easy for someone to run a much more scientific and useful survey of today's media biases, one that doesn't rely upon 'self-reporting' or other fluff, but simply asks a smallish number of questions prepared by political scientists to accurately delineate the political biases.... I would suggest the SHORT questions found at www.politicalcompass.com and the REALLY SHORT questions found in the "world's smallest political quiz" at www.lp.org as a good starting point for arriving at a more accurate, up-to-date answer.