[extropy-chat] UCLA study on media bias

[Hal Finney]

I ran into an interesting study from UCLA which attempted to measure
media bias using an objective methodology.  The news release is
here, <http://www.newsroom.ucla.edu/page.asp?RelNum=6664>,
and the preprint of the article is here,
<http://www.polisci.ucla.edu/faculty/groseclose/Media.Bias.pdf>.

This is of course a highly controversial topic and at first it might seem
impossible to quantify media bias.  The methodology they came up with
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 the same for conservative groups.

But how to measure the groups, objectively?  Here is the real novelty.
They look at how often members of Congress of various political views
cite the same groups, and correlate those rates with the Congressfolks
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 think these 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 is 50.1 on
a scale from 0 to 100).

Although this methodology sounds reasonable, the results are quite
surprising to me.  The bottom line is of the 20 media outlets studied,
almost all were had ADA scores above 50, putting them on the liberal side
of the spectrum.  For reference, the average ADA score for Congressional
Democrats is 84.3.

Here are the results from Table IV of the paper:

Rankings Based on Distance from Center 
Rank    Media outlet                    Estimated ADA score 
1       Newshour with Jim Lehrer                55.8 
2       CNN NewsNight with Aaron Brown          56.0 
3       ABC Good Morning America                56.1 
4       Drudge Report                           60.4 
5       Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume 39.7 
6       ABC World News Tonight                  61.0 
7       NBC Nightly News                        61.6 
8       USA Today                               63.4 
9       NBC Today Show                          64.0 
10      Washington Times                        35.4 
11      Time Magazine                           65.4 
12      U.S. News and World Report              65.8 
13      NPR Morning Edition                     66.3 
14      Newsweek                                66.3 
15      CBS Early Show                          66.6 
16      Washington Post                         66.6 
17      LA Times                                70.0 
18      CBS Evening News                        73.7 
19      New York Times                          73.7 
20      Wall Street Journal                     85.1 

Only two of them are conservative, Fox News and the Washington Times.
Both of these do have reputations for conservatism; in fact, Fox is often
cited as an egregious case of conservative bias.  But Fox is actually
the fifth least biased (closest to 50) of the 20.  Of the evening news
programs, PBS's Jim Lehrer is the least biased, with CNN's Aaron Brown
close behind.  Then Fox's Brit Hume, ABC's Peter Jennings, NBC'S Tom
Brokaw are all very close, and finally CBS's Dan Rather is way out there,
one of the most liberal sources of news studied.

Other anomalies are explained in the press release I linked to above.
For example the WSJ is known as conservative, but that is restricted
to the opinion pages.  The news pages rank it as the most liberal in
the group.  Must be a lively place to work!

Overall I think it is a great step forward to try to come up with
quantitative measures in this way.  I do think it is somewhat questionable
to say that the "50" score is unbiased just because it is the average
for Congress and perhaps arguably the average for the U.S. population as
a whole.  Compared to much of the world, the U.S. is quite conservative
right now, so perhaps we could argue that a higher score should represent
the "unbiased" position.

I personally think that Jim Lehrer's show does a remarkably good job of
balancing its coverage, and Lehrer is somewhat famous for refusing to
discuss his political views or even make them guessable.  His score of
55.8 is probably not far from where the "unbiased" position should be.
If we used that as the central point then Fox would be the 5th most
biased instead of the 5th least biased, which might make more sense
(although I haven't watched Brit Hume specifically).

But leaving aside the proper balancing point, just being able to rank
them objectively on the left to right spectrum is an important step
forward and a useful contribution from this study.

Hal Finney