Collection of empirical studies on media bias concludes the obvious…
Posted by iusbvision on August 2, 2011
This professor used liberal sources and people to decide what the liberal bias was. So this was not conservatives deciding what was liberal bias and what was not. Several studies were used and put together such as what facts were omitted, what euphemisms were used and what side did they favor, polls of the journalists themselves, prominence of ideologically charged stories etc.
One method used was to give half of a sample a free subscription to the Washington Post and the other half a subscription to the Washington Times determined by a coin flip. They went back to the families some months later and polled them on their political views to see how much they had shifted.
Dr. Tim Groseclose, a professor of political science and economics at UCLA, has spent years constructing precise, quantitative measures of the slant of media outlets. He does this by measuring the political content of news, as a way to measure the PQ, or “political quotient” of voters and politicians.
Among his conclusions are: all mainstream media outlets have a liberal bias; and while some supposedly conservative outlets—such the Washington Times or Fox News’ Special Report—do lean right, their conservative bias is less than the liberal bias of most mainstream outlets.
Groseclose contends that the general leftward bias of the media has shifted the PQ of the average American by about 20 points, on a scale of 100, the difference between the current political views of the average American, and the political views of the average resident of Orange County, California or Salt Lake County, Utah. With Left Turn readers can easily calculate their own PQ—to decide for themselves if the bias exists. This timely, much-needed study brings fact to this often overheated debate.
“I’m no conservative, but I loved Left Turn. Tim Groseclose has written the best kind of book: one that is firmly anchored in rigorous academic research, but is still so much fun to read that it is hard to put down. Liberals will not like the conclusions of this book, which in my opinion, is all the more reason why they should want to read it.”–Steven Levitt, Professor of Economics, University of Chicago, and co-author of Freakonomics.
“This book—an evolution from the pioneering article in the 2005 Quarterly Journal of Economics by Groseclose and Jeffrey Milyo—uses a clever statistical technique to construct an objective measure of conservative or liberal bias in news coverage. This method and those now adopted by other serious researchers show clearly that most U.S. news outlets lean left. Most frighteningly, we learn that the media bias actually affects the ways that people think and vote.”–Robert Barro, Professor of Economics, Harvard University, and Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution.
Video of Dr. Groseclose on Lou Dobbs: http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/1083158772001/do-all-mainstream-media-outlets-have-a-liberal-bias/
The conclusions draw upon recent studies by some highly respected economists and political scientists. For instance, one study, conducted by Yale researchers Alan Gerber, Dean Karlan and Daniel Bergan, is akin to a biology experiment. To one set of randomly selected voters in Northern Virginia, the researchers gave trial subscriptions to The Washington Post. To another set, they gave trial subscriptions to The Washington Times. After the subsequent election, the researchers polled their subjects and found that their Post-subscribing subjects voted for the Democrat at a 3.8 percentage higher rate than did the Times-subscribing subjects. That is, the more liberal newspaper truly seemed to cause people to vote more liberally.
After aggregating the results of this and similar studies, one finds an inescapable conclusion: Newspapers, television, radio and online media are extremely influential, especially over consumers’ political views.
For example, the results imply that if the “slant quotient” of the entire media moved 34 points leftward – approximately the difference between Fox News’ Special Report and The New York Times – then the “political quotient” of the average voter would move about 24 points leftward. The latter shift is approximately the difference between the average voter in Colorado or Iowa and the average voter in Rhode Island or Massachusetts.
If the analysis is right – that media bias really does change political views so significantly – then this no doubt has some important – and largely unrecognized – consequences.