From my own experience working with newspapers, I agree with your characterization of the media in the first section "complexities." I also read a summary in business week of the research you cite in the second part of post, and I was intrigued but not yet entirely persuaded.

However, I don't see a link between the two parts. Lazy journalism may lead to individual reporters, news outlets or even congolmerates becoming one-sided. But I don't see why necessarily would lead to an industry dominated by one ideology across the nation, and why that ideology would be liberal.

An ambitious attempt at a grand, unified theory of the media. Lots of interesting points, but overall, but a bit too rambling for my ADD attention span.

Perhaps I didn't explain the goal of the post well enough. I wasn't necessarily trying to give a grand unified theory of the media. I was trying to answer the question of whether the media is liberal.

You're absolutely right – the first part, Complexities, does not in anyway imply the second part. The first part was simply to show that I've thought a bit about how this all works and that I'm not using a simplified model of an evil, elite media (Slander! Treason!) as some who are quick to label it liberal are wont to. As I said, not all (or even most) bad reporting is caused by liberal bias, but liberal bias can exacerbate some of the effects of bad reporting.

The second part was supposed to stand on it's own and attempt to answer the question. Nothing in the post was an attempt to explain why the media is liberal, just that it is. And, barring refuting evidence, it does so fairly strongly in my mind. If, in the eyes of the public, in their own voting records, in their own self-reported labels, in their usage of think-tank quotes, the media are overwhelmingly more liberal than the average American, why can't we just admit they are liberal.

Or, if it makes you feel better, that the average American is more conservative than you'd like to admit.

And you didn't even mention the New York Times has had 48 front page articles on the Iraqi prison abuses and only 1 on the oil for food scandal (the missing $21 billion!)

I may reply more indepthly (not a word, but it conveys my meaning well) if I have time, because I appreciate your efforts, but a few off the cuff thoughts:

"Or, if it makes you feel better, that the average American is more conservative than you'd like to admit." This may be my fundamental problem with your logic. The average American is more conservative than I would like — but not more conserative than I think they are. Americans are twice as likely to describe themselves as conservative than as liberal (this is admittedly based on old data so if you have something more up-to-date . . .)

Also, the members of congress are not only way more conservative than I would like, but more conservative than the population as a whole (because of reversal in fortune of the parties over the past decade, recent Republican Gerrymandering, the remarkable work of the religous right to mobilize their base and fund candidates at all levels, etc.).

So, the American people as a whole are indeed conservative (especially when compared with the rest of the world) and congress even more so. You then define the media as liberal because this study found them to be to the left of the median congressperson.

The problem lies in defining moderate as the median congressman, who is more conservative than the median American, who is more conservative than the average person in the world. If Joe Lieberman and Constance Morella are way left of center (by your chart) then I'd probably say the New York Times is as well.

If you start where you started, you can only come to the conclusion you came to (if that makes sense). I think the premise is flawed . . . You address this a bit in your preamble, but then had to pick something for your analysis, and you picked a conservative callabration (in my liberal worldview). You say NYT is liberal because it is on par with Joe Bidenl I say ABC News is conservative becasue it is on par with Ernest Hollings of South Carolina . . .

And no Dick, he didn't mention the abuse to oil-for-food ratio; nor did he mention the "how cool are our weapons and soldiers" to Iraqi dead & soldiers maimed ratio — which is probably just as high.

I haven't had a heck of a lot of time to look at the follow-up links. It's interesting stuff.

But some points off the top of my head, quickly, while the post is still ripe —

There is a normative undercurrent here, not in the post per se, but in the post as set against the larger argument that goes on in this forum. The obvious take-home intended here is that it is problematic to have the center of gravity of "The Media" too far to one side of the average Congressman or American resident (yes, Mr. Ashcroft, I'm counting non-citizens, too).

But I wonder, what exactly do we want our press to be? The Framers of our Constitution envisioned not objective relayers of information, but determined gadflies of government. Not facts distilled of any conscious or unconscious slant, but pamphleteers who can and will distribute politically charged materials to whip up a democratic froth on the lips of a population that might too easily otherwise tolerate tyranny, simply because of inertia.

From a First Amendment perspective I would be supremely skeptical of a press that endeavored to align itself perfectly with the views of Congress. As a humanist I am appalled at the extent to which the media currently does try to tailor its reporting to its read of the tastes and distastes of Joe American.

You're never going to expunge the bias out of reporting. The best thing to do is cultivate a readership that questions what it sees or reads — and not because some other media entity (say, Rush Limbaugh) says it should and dictates how. All self-appointed conveyors of information ought to be reviewed for their motive and opportunity to convince or mislead. I think the will to objectivity in the news has done more damage than good, because people get lulled into thinking this ideal is achievable, that the Times has done it, that Fox has declared itself to be "fair and balanced." Then the spoon-feeding of America follows.

So the ideologies of the press and the average American don't jibe. Does it necessarily follow that either needs adjusted so that we can placate the false deity of "objectivity" in reporting? And if so, which one?

I have my preference.

And I could argue, just for kicks, that there is a reason why the journalists who spend their days in the White House are "liberal." It might be that they went to awful, awful places like Harvard and Berkeley where they were brainwashed by leftists. Or maybe, just maybe, spending all their time in the White House, where they can watch this Administration at work, shapes their thinking and their reporting.

Maybe there is something to the fact that the people who are one or two removes closer to the action (oxymoron, I know) are parked to the left of the rest of America. Maybe, as Dicky V. says about the government, "they know something we don't, and we should trust them."

I don't trust the government. I don't trust the press, either. I don't think that the "facts" promulgated by either have any basis in some supreme, indisputable Truth. They're just rhetoric packaged in a graph, and somehow, over time, this sort of rhetoric became more acceptable than my kind, which is written argument.

As an English major, I'm inclined to look through the Emperor's New Clothes at "facts" of any kind, though the Power Point presentations, the graphs, the charts, the employment figures, the catalogs of dead, and conclude:

everyone's just making all this shit up. So let's call the whole thing off.

Mike F.,

I understand your point about the difference between median Congressman and median American. But I think that you're moving into territory that's hard to measure with your assertion that the median member of Congress is more conservative than the median American.

We'll all agree that partisan gerrymandering is a gross distortion of the will of the people (ignoring for a moment Arrow's Impossibility Theorem), but I'd want to see more about number of state legislatures dominated by each party during census years before I conclude that it favors Republicans, as you aver. Perhaps "recent Republican Gerrymandering" simply undid older (but equally unfair) Democratic redistricting.

Also, many would argue that the "reversal of fortunes" of the political parties had less to do with the American people changing position and more to do with the parties changing position – maybe the American people are as conservative as they ever were, they just switched parties. Conservative southern Democrats switching to the Republican party would account for this.

Anyway, I'm not trying to argue that you're wrong – just that it's not clear that you're right that "the median Congressman ... is more conservative than the median American". Just wishful thinking?

As for the rest of the world, I think they are fairly irrelevant when discussing the slant of the American media. I'm also not sure you are correct. Compared to Westerners, Americans may be conservative (and religious) – but what about the 1 billion muslims? The millions who live in tribal societies? Are you sure that Americans aren't more liberal? Again, hard to measure effectively.

In general, though, as I said in the post, relative terms like conservative and liberal are part of the problem. But I prefer a metric that is set against a defined baseline better than one that starts "You say... I say...."

Finally, your critique only focused on the final study. What about the voting patterns and the self-reported labels? Hold any water?

Brad A.,

Well, I think you're reading too much into my posts. I made this argument because I think it is quite clear that the media is biased, and it's a liberal bias. I was answering the question posed by Mike F. and others, "Do I really think the media is liberal?"

That is quite separate from a normative statement about where the media should be. And no, I completely reject the idea that the media should somehow try to find the median of the country and stick to it.

This was supposed to be the topic of another post, and maybe it will be someday, but what I'm really objecting to is the claim of objectivity combined with a subjective bias. It's the denial that bothers me.

The claim of objectivity is a relatively new invention in the news media – and it seems to me to be a pernicious one.

By way of analogy (and one in your bailiwick), I would argue vehemently against getting rid of the adversarial system of criminal justice. We would not stand for someone replacing prosecution (or plaintiff) and defense attourneys with an "objective" magistrate – partially because we don't believe one exists. We believe that through two biased and subjective agents making their best cases, we can come closer to the truth than putting our faith in one person who attempts to rise above his own human weakness.

Perhaps the media (like in countries with parliamentary systems) would be better off casting off the mantle of objectivity (only slightly less powerful than the mantle of rationality) and letting us know where they stand.

Anyway, I don't know – but just so you know I don't support a media that chases poll numbers to find the middle (any more than I do a politician who does the same).

Rich, you're right, of course. Have any recent shifts to the right made the government more conservative or just liberal? How can we ever tell? Some of the southern dems calling themselves GOP — finally — only made sense. But I do believe that the Gingrich up swell was certainly a conservative reaction to Clinton's first two years and it hasn't been undone.

But more importantly, that study's logic predicates itself on the median representative being defined as moderate. This logic say that we can make no judgment about whether the congress is liberal or conservative, because it is — by that study's definition — exactly moderate. (I don't want to nitpick at the study, though, but could all day: Senators should be removed from the study because they overrepresent small, conservative states; the study is done with a conservative administration in power and the press is and should be critical of whoever is in power, for examples — OK, too examples .)

So I'll stick to the main point. Issues have a left and right (I'm sorry but this whole exercise only works if we stick to the annoying left/right, liberal/conservative, one-dimensional view of the world). On one end we should have the death penalty for jay-walkers, because, hey, people would stop jay-walking; on the other end no one should get jail time for murder or drug trafficking because there was probably some reason they did it. Is there some objective, rational middle to the issue? Or do we have to define moderate as what the middle American thinks?

"58% of the public holding the view that you must believe in God to be moral, while only 6% of journalists do."

You use this as evidence that journalists are therefore left of center — and it’s probably true. I look at that figure and say, wow, at least 58% of Americans are so blinded by religion that they are incapable of rational thought. 83% of Americans also believe in the virgin birth according to Gallup. For the love of God I hope that the average journalist is to the “left” of the average American.

I have never doubted for one moment that the average New York Times journalist is to the left of the average American. I’m just not sure this proves anything. I contend — as do Americans when they describe themselves — that America is conservative. Your study tells me I can’t make that judgment.

But let me address some of your other points as well. You point out the leanings of the journalists, but don’t address my point, which was the leanings of the shareholders and executive management of the corporations that run the companies for which they work. My guess is that you’d find the opposite to be true (I just don’t have the time to conduct such a telephone survey). I know you believe this doesn’t matter because the journalists will just write what they want anyway, but you know I don’t buy that.

I don’t like this approach to the discussion. I think it answers the wrong questions. The question really is this: In the reporting of news, which mainstream publications are biased in the headlines they attach to stories and the emphasis they put on the facts from both sides.

Dick’s point about oil-for-food vs. abuse is evidence of an anti-administration bias of which all of them from Fox to NYT are probably guilty — driven by ratings, no doubt. The fact that I needed to see a Michael Moore movie to even know how many American soldiers have been maimed in Iraq is evidence on the other side. Your headline anectdote about the NYT “insurgency” article is another one.

As math-o-phile, I generally prefer broad statistical analysis to argument by anectdote, but the analysis must be broad, objective, and must address the right issue to begin with.

Your last study is cleaner because it uses “objective” numerical data, but it misses the point as far as I’m concerned.

What a thread, can't keep track of everything!

Anyway, oil-for-food is a bugaboo of mine too. However, I don't necessarily fault the NYT on this one. As Richard points out, they are lazy so why would they follow just any joe-schmoe's conspiracy theory? People posted about it on etp as far back as Jan 2002 but I dismissed it as a crack pot theory given the seemingly unreliable sources that were espousing it.

No, I think it is the Bush admin's responsibility to point out this scandalous relationship that enable France and the UN to help prop up Saddam. If they had put half the effort they did in war planning on pressuring the international community truly to isolate Saddam, he may have been toppled without a single shot being fired.

That's my monday morning quarterback opinion.

- Mike

I think we agree, Richard. To claim absolute objectivity when at best you're only aspiring to it is insidious. Ideally a readership would understand that the reporting of facts necessarily conveys some of the reporter's baggage, be it psychological or ideological. The question is then what to do with the information given to us. How do we strip the accumulated taint off it and restore it to raw data to process into our own opinions? How do we accommodate the competing values of digest and context?

One way, as you suggest, is to identify the particular biases of particular news outlets so that readers can account for them. That takes the problem into Mike's world, because even if we believe in some theoretical point of pure objectivity, none of us will agree on where to locate it.

So people tend to fly by the seat of their pants, and to find some reason to allocate or detract authority from certain reported information. The rules of evidence, developed under the common law, give some insight into how to deal with the problem. Some examples: a declarant's "statement against his interest" or "excited utterance" (though criminal cases rarely turn on a witness's cry of "HOLY SHIT!") has more clout under the law. Et cetera.

Interesting that you cited the Anglo-American criminal process, which I agree is better designed than on the Continent (though possibly simply because it's what I know). In my prior post I had a long bit about jury verdicts, which I took out. But I'll present it now (cue collective groan from the audience):

The verdict, or "spoken truth," is a fiction that the law accepts. It's borne of an understanding that one cannot go back and establish what happened between O.J. and Nicole (or if O.J. were even there). And in many respects the legal question that the jury has to answer is interpretive, because it bears often on what the defendant's state of mind was — so even if twelve jurors saw Nicole get killed, there is no estimable "truth" as to whether the killer committed murder or manslaughter. Then there is the nature of the question posed, which is not "Did O.J. murder Nicole?" but "Did the prosecution prove beyond a reasonable doubt that O.J. murdered Nicole?"

At any rate, the law long ago recognized the practical problems in establishing "the Truth." So it set up a process for constructing truth. Twelve people listen to presentations, come to a unanimous conclusion (ideally), and the word that falls from their lips, "Guilty" or "Not Guilty" become the "truth," at least for the purposes of the law.

You really have to give props to law, which long ago considered and worked through a lot of the issues that philosophers and literary theorists have just now come round to raising in their coffee houses. But the law did it with lives and fortunes in the balance.

Brad A. – I thought we might.... is that a first?

I want to say one more thing about the question – "what to do with the information given to us." The answer, it seems to me, is critique it. To call it out. To agree or disagree. To condone or condemn it. Unlike the stylized formalization of the court room, with two sides and 12 jurors, in the distribution of information there are infinite sides and each one of us has to be our own jury.

So we develop a complicated web of trust, of judgments as to which direction (and there are more dimensions than liberal/conservative) each agent is biased.

We build and use reputations, not in isolation, but in the crucible of criticism.

If my reputation ends up "thoughtful, honest, willing to consider both sides.... but biased, opinionated, and stubborn" – I will be extremely happy. In fact, that's what I'm shooting for (although "persuasive" would be a nice-to-have).

Ultimately, my success is for you (all) to judge.

I see what you two are getting at. Everyone's biased to some degree and we should all be critical of everything we take in (or should that be in which we take? I just don't know anymore). And most of us (us defined very narrowly here) do. I tend to be less critical of publications I have come to respect (e.g., the Economist), but still take pride and joy at calling out its bullshit when I think it's appropriate. I love reading the NY Times and being critical of it's leftish nonsense. I also enjoy — as you can no doubt tell — crtiquing the raging rightness (thought you might like that characterization) of Just-in-Casioanlly.

The problem — and here's where we get really eltisit — lies with the "outer party members" and "proles" (sorry, 1984 was on last night and our AG is a fascist so I thought the Orwellian terms might be appropriate).

When we see "Woman linked to Bush administration caught spying" or "Former Democratic staffer caught spying" we know it's a crock. It's healthy to keep bringing up NYT headlines that we think are inappropriate or global media ommisions (Sudan, oil-for-food, injured soldiers) that we find particulary glaring. It helps us level the evidencial playing field if we qrite about what we've read and open it up to discussion.

However, media bias is only a problem when it helps shape the thinking of a lazy populace (you say the lazy media deoasn't want to investigate; I say the lazy populace doesn't want to investigate). So just saying no one is objective and we should question everything doesn't solve the problem.

People buy papers that have headlines about crime, therefore the media puts out stories about crime, therefore people become worried about crime, therefore people vote republican and allow for Patriot Acts and harsh sentencing guidelines.

Sex sells so the media puts out story after story of the President getting a blowjob so people read about it everyday and after seeing presidential scandal in the news every day they say, wow, this is the most scandalous president ever. I'm obviously sticking to examples that suit my ideology because you do a good enough job of presenting the other side.

Fine, no one is objective, but how do we ascertain the direction the country is being led by this bias? That's the question as I see it. There is media bias (of all kinds). Where is the real truth and in what direction away from it is the media taking us?

We may have to analyze this compelling anectdote by compelling anectdote — simply becasue I don't buy/like the global study that's out there. It is possible to do this. Michael Moore leads us to believe that we are far more violent than our neighbor's to the north. We can then look at the statistics he used and see that he picked the most glaring one and ommitted the fact that, for example, overall violent crime is higher in Canada (see how balanced I am). It is possible to prove bias even if we are biased ourselves.

Final thought: If the media pushes everyone to the right until the median person is now right of where they were, the media is no longer right of center . . .

I have to say that this whole thread gives me renewed confidence in the possibility of reasoned discourse. It was a lot of work, from me and the commenters, but moving from snarky anecdotes to thoughtful analysis actually "worked". We ended up closer together in the end (at least I think we did) and we actually said something worth saying. While we may not have persuaded each other as much as we would have liked, certainly our understandin, of each other and the issue, is greater.

That it can be done, even in these polarized times with such a tendentious topic, gives me hope.

Ok, enough self-reflection.

But has anyone else seen the Bunnies?!?!

Lucky Star . . .

Yes, I saw it. If I tell you it was awesome, will you stop spamming my comments section?

Yes.

Lucky star . . .