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Are the media biased? The short answer is yes

By Beverly Kelley (Contact)
Wednesday, August 6, 2008

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Democrats are quick to point out that talk radio is dominated by the right-wing likes of Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage and James Dobson, that the Fox News Network is anything but fair and balanced and, according to Ben Bagdikian's "The New Media Monopoly," a mere five conservative-minded corporations (Time Warner, Disney, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., Bertelsmann of Germany and Viacom) presently control most of the American media industry.

Republicans counter with a 2006 study of bias by UCLA, Stanford and University of Chicago researchers determining that only one media outlet (Fox News) could be tagged as "right of center," an online Tyndall Report (http://tyndallreport.com/comment/20/2966/) showing Barack Obama receiving more than twice the network air time as did John McCain from June 4 to July 23, and a 2008 Harvard study — examining 1,742 presidential campaign stories by print, online, network, TV, cable and radio news outlets — concluding "not only did the Republicans receive less coverage overall, the attention they did get tended to be more negative than that of Democrats."

Just last month, when the presumptive Democratic nominee traveled to Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Germany, France and England, even major news outlet royalty showed up to document Obama's every utterance while only a modest retinue of second-class scribes accompanied McCain on his overseas excursion last March.

Perceived bias has gotten so blatant that even the liberal writers at "Saturday Night Live," "The Colbert Report" and "The Daily Show" felt compelled to skewer the mainstream media for their Obama-fawning ways.

Fairness, like beauty, seems to dwell in the eye of the beholder. However, if critics presume that being anointed a "media darling" guarantees victory on Election Night, you might want to check with McCain. The reporters who used to wax eloquent about the senator as they clambered aboard the Straight Talk Express just eight years ago seem to be suffering from a bad case of Obamamania-induced amnesia right now.

Perhaps, instead of inquiring whether or not the media are biased, we should be asking, "Does media bias actually matter?"

The short answer is no — especially to Bill Bishop, the author of "The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-minded America is Tearing Us Apart."

Bishop seems to be channeling the mid-1950s selective perception theories of Gordon W. Alport, but with one distinguishing wrinkle: Not only are we likely to seek out, pay attention to or recall opinions with which we already agree, but also, at least over the past three decades, we are opting to reside in homogenous communities, a phenomenon which Bishop labels "The Big Sort," and which, unfortunately, has led to intolerance of political differences, stymied legislative productivity at all government levels and rendered national consensus virtually impossible.

When NBC, ABC and CBS dominated the dissemination of news, Americans shared the same images (John-John's chubby-fingered salute), references (Andy Warhol's "Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes") and icons (Twiggy, Janis Joplin).

The post-cable and Internet landscape, however, has splintered the nation into thousands of inward-looking tribes. We now inhabit a cultural universe that's not only custom-tailored to our social standards, our musical tastes and our unique viewpoint on every single political issue, but we have likewise become geographically insulated against inadvertently exposing ourselves to attitudes, values or beliefs contrary to our own.

"We have built a country," Bishop writes, "where everyone can choose the neighbors (and church and news shows) most compatible with his or her lifestyle and beliefs. And we are living with the consequences of this segregation by way of life: Pockets of like-minded citizens that have become so ideologically inbred that we don't know, can't understand and can barely conceive of those people' who live just a few miles away."

In 1976, fewer than one in four Americans lived in an electoral district that delivered a lopsided presidential vote. By 2004, however, nearly half of voters had set up housekeeping in landslide counties.

What does this statistical shift really mean?

Social psychologists such as Alport predicted that if we heard our political beliefs echoed or amplified by our neighbors, we would become even more rigid and/or extreme in our ideological thinking. What occurred during the last 30 years, according to Bishop, "wasn't a simple increase in political partisanship, but a more fundamental kind of self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing social division."

"Americans," he continued, "were busy creating social resonators, and the hum that filled the air was the reverberated and amplified sound of their own voices and beliefs."

Are the media biased? Fox News would have you believe, "We report, you decide." Isn't the truth actually, "You decide what we report?" Bias, my dear readers, resides in us.

— Beverly Kelley, Ph.D., who writes every other week for The Star, is an author ("Reelpolitik" and "Reelpolitik II") and professor in the Communication Department at California Lutheran University. Visit http://beverlykelley.typepad.com/my_weblog/. Her e-mail address is Kelley@clunet.edu.

Discussions

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Comments

Posted by mikeb6804 on August 6, 2008 at 1:12 a.m. (Suggest removal)

This editorial spends a lot more effort on Fox/"fair and balanced" than it does on the ramblings of ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, NYT, and last but not least, the LAT. They ensure that news contrary to their interests/message is not highlighted and in some cases downright lie to the viewers and readers.

I'm waiting to see if any of them will take away Obama's free pass and start looking into specifics (which don't exist). Yesterday he proposed an end to the age of oil. Pure stupidity. I haven't seen anyone go outside the realm of energy when it comes to eliminating the need for oil. How about materials (paints, plastics, fabrics, etc) which are derived from oil? Are we going to replace them with wood? If we do, we will most certainly ruin the environment and leave a huge excess of tree stumps. We already have one on this blog and that is one too many.

Posted by nelsonknows on August 6, 2008 at 4:17 a.m. (Suggest removal)

Ms. Kelley failed to point out the George Mason and Quinnipiac studies that show that Fox News is the least biased and all other television news is off the charts on their bias toward the left.

Posted by nelsonknows on August 6, 2008 at 4:21 a.m. (Suggest removal)

mike, whatch the leftist goons attack this article like it's raw meat. They do so hate fact, opinion and free speech. You can almost predict what they will say before they say it, it's become such old hat. I wonder how many "faux news" comments leftists will post?

Posted by hemlock1262 on August 6, 2008 at 4:46 a.m. (Suggest removal)

Interesting that Dr. Kelley neglects to mention the most recent study on this question, by the conservative George Mason University's Center for Media and Public Affairs, which shows an anti-Obama and generally pro-conservative position bias in major media. The study is conducted to all conventional standards for content analysis and the findings are robust and statistically significant. A Tiny URL link follows:

http://tiny.cc/7kXMY

It's interesting, too, that she fails to mention the numerous methodological flaws in the Groseclose-Milyo paper (the so-called "UCLA study").

The problem with the Groseclose-Milyo paper (though this will be old news to nelsonknows, who has undoubtedly looked at all the raw data and re-run the regressions himself) is the way the authors operationalize "bias." Unlike the vast literature on content analysis and media bias generally, Groseclose-Milyo uses an idiosyncratic estimator -- the number of times a think-tank is mentioned by a media outlet.

So they have to first rank-order think-tanks along a liberal-conservative continuum, then they count the number of times the Star or the LA Times mentions them (Hoover, AEI, etc.). If one or another gets mentioned more frequently, they define this as bias.

In other words, if a reporter turns to a representative of, say, Brookings more often than Heritage, the reporter is "liberal biased."

The flaws in that estimator are too numerous to mention. Suffice it to say here that the core flaws are (a) Groseclose and Milyo are themselves affiliates of conservative think-tanks (Hoover, AEI, and Heritage) so they are hardly unbiased and (b) not every think-tank has experts on every topic.

With respect to the latter, the authors also fail to account for government officials quoted by journalists who are former think-tank affiliates. So if Bill Bennett or Richard Perle are quoted, this does not count as "bias," despite the fact that both men are long-standing associates of the American Enterprise Institute, a neocon think tank.

Dr. Kelley's basic point, though, is sound -- claims of media bias are difficult to sustain and even more difficult to prove. Among other things, it is the case that Republican candidates for president are endorsed officially by newspapers more often than Democratic candidates. So whatever the bias of individual reporters, it would appear to be offset by the bias of editorial boards.

Posted by ConcernedResident on August 6, 2008 at 7:26 a.m. (Suggest removal)

One of the points discussed by the media was how Obama got extensive coverage while he was overseas for a week. But can you really blame the media for that coverage? Obama was showing how he can be a leader overseas, extend good will toward other nations, and lay the foundation for foreign policy. One of the big issues the next president faces is healing foreign relations; in case anyone doesn't know, Americans are not looked at as favorably as we once were by other nations.

If McCain was doing something as equally notable, he most likely would have gotten the same coverage. But during that time, McCain took up the defensive position and refuted Obama's comments rather than bringing up his own.

Posted by hemlock1262 on August 6, 2008 at 7:43 a.m. (Suggest removal)

Golly-gee, 'smatter, mmshoot? Words too big for you?

Posted by ConTemplate on August 6, 2008 at 8:28 a.m. (Suggest removal)

My "takeaway" from this piece is the conclusion that it is becoming more and more difficult for voters who want to be well-informed to get the info we need. Whether you call it mis-information, dis-information, spin, lies, or just good ol' b.s., its hard to sort the truth from fiction. George Orwell, your vision of 1984 is now well-entrenched in our society.

Posted by mikeb6804 on August 6, 2008 at 9:11 a.m. (Suggest removal)

Concerned -- Obama showing "how he can be a leader"; you're joking, right? The guy is not even qualified to be a senator, let alone POTUS. He can't make a correct decision and then he continually waffles to get out of the trouble he got himself in.

I'm not thrilled with McCain either. But foisting this LONG election season on the American public has been a tremendous waste of time and money. the media has hidden a lot of worthwhile news which didn't fall in line with their way of thinking. Too bad they couldn't hide this whole useless campaign.

Posted by mikeb6804 on August 6, 2008 at 10:21 a.m. (Suggest removal)

jw--maybe you should try Fox News. You obviously need all the help you can get.

Posted by del on August 6, 2008 at 11:45 a.m. (Suggest removal)

Ms. Kelly just touches on the subject of an interesting book, "The Big Sort" by Bill Bishop. It is about..."Going far beyond the simplistic red state/blue state divide, journalist Bill Bishop (in collaboration with sociologist and statistician Robert Cushing) marshals original data and incisive reporting to show how Americans have sorted themselves geographically, economically, and politically into like-minded communities over the last three decades."

I view it the downfall of what made this nation great...talking and dealing with each other and the differences between us. The constant name-calling and derision shows a complete lack of intelligent thought process.

Posted by sslocal on August 6, 2008 at 2:02 p.m. (Suggest removal)

del wrote: 'I view it the downfall of what made this nation great...talking and dealing with each other and the differences between us. The constant name-calling and derision shows a complete lack of intelligent thought process.'

People that live in glass houses shouldn't throw rocks.<insert wagging index finger here>

Posted by nelsonknows on August 6, 2008 at 2:16 p.m. (Suggest removal)

mike, I predicted the attack by stumps like jw and exactly what they would say.
jw, again lied in his post about the George Mason Study but what's new?
Leftists have proven time and again that nothing can be far enough to the left for them. I'[m just waiting for the jackboots and brown shirts to start showing up.

Posted by cassandra2 on August 6, 2008 at 2:44 p.m. (Suggest removal)

The issue of course is who owns the media and what are their interests. This is the bottom line sort.

As one wise wag put it, "Freedom of the press only applies if you own one."

What comes out of Murdoch's Fox is usually skewed far to the right but only partially more egregious than the other corporate outlets. I love the candor of the head of Viacom, parent company to the much abused CBS. He said that Viacom was his life and that while he liked Kerry, Bush was going to be better for his business and that's who he'd support.

Reporters, editors, the work horses of the business might prefer it otherwise, might even be registered in opposition parties, but the head honchos must pass muster with the owners in the long run or it's axe time. And of late the kind of shoot-from-the -hip shallowness of Fox et al. has become cost effective while deeper, factually based info has not. It's expensive to have investigative journalists who don't just quote "official" sources.

What I have noticed and paid a lot of attention to are the kinds of information the public needs to have a long way off but hasn't obtained in the so called mainstream media --fraud in elections, fraud in the rationale for war, corruption and cronyism in government funding, the subprime meltdown, the end of cheap oil, the consequences of global warming. (until recently when it's safe, thanks to Mr. Gore's film.) The alternative media have been on these things from the git go.

With no corporate sponsors or owners and no advertisers, Truthout or Democracy Now! or James Kuntsler"s prescient rants can tell it like it is without worrying about balance, any more than Galleleo worried about balancing his findings with the church's superstitions.

Posted by cassandra2 on August 6, 2008 at 2:57 p.m. (Suggest removal)

p.s. Thanks, Hemlock, for your insertion of relevant correction into this hornet's buzz of blather (including the columnist). You do that a lot.

Right, like it's even-handed, balancing media oligopoly against flawed research. Sure.

Posted by mikeb6804 on August 6, 2008 at 3:55 p.m. (Suggest removal)

Cassie--I'm still waiting for something positive from you. Is it possible or are you just a far left America hater as I've suspected? What are you doing here (besides carrying on your shrink business -- joke)?

Posted by cassandra2 on August 6, 2008 at 5:31 p.m.