It's The Liberal Media......
.........We have PROOF and everything!!!!!
While the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is conservative, the newspaper's news pages are liberal, even more liberal than The New York Times. The Drudge Report may have a right-wing reputation, but it leans left. Coverage by public television and radio is conservative compared to the rest of the mainstream media. Meanwhile, almost all major media outlets tilt to the left.
WOW! Who woulda ever thunk it! I guess I can't believe my own eyes and ears after all. I mean they did a study and everything.
Too bad that most news organizations that innocently pick up this story will be unaware of its author's extraordinary biases.
The methodology of the paper is bizarre to say the least. The paper tries to measure liberal or conservative leanings of a news organization by measuring how many times they quote organizations that are deemed liberal or conservative. To create that correlation, the authors count the number of times an organization is quoted approvingly by members of Congress. They then take the ADA rating ("liberalness") score of those members of Congress, assign those scores to the groups in question, and conclude that the more often a news organization quotes a group the more it must approve of that group.
So, if Ted Kennedy (the most liberal member of the Senate according to the ADA) approvingly cites the NAACP and the New York Times regularly quotes the NAACP, then the New York Times is as liberal as Ted Kennedy.
I could spend hours debunking this flawed technique. But let's not get bogged down in details. This is a classic "guilt by association" technique. ..... So let's try the same technique on Professor Groseclose. According to the professor's curriculum vita, he's received the following "honors and fellowships":
* Hoover National Fellow* Olin Faculty Fellow* Lambe Fellow, Institute for Humane Studies* Dissertation Fellow, Center for the Study of Public Choice, George Mason University
Hmmm. Olin Faculty Fellow? That's funded by the (now-defunct) John M. Olin Foundation, Inc.
The New York-based John M. Olin Foundation, which grew out of a family manufacturing business (chemical and munitions), funds right-wing think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute for Public Policy Research, and the Hoover Institute of War, Revolution and Peace. It also gives large sums of money to promote conservative programs in the country's most prestigious colleges and universities.
Professor Groseclose has been accepting grants exclusively from far-right foundations for more than a decade. His work is backed by organizations that are also backing the most extreme-right organizations on his list (the number in parens represents the paper's ADA rating of each group, on a scale of 1 to 100, where lower is more conservative: the Cato Institute (36.3), the Heritage Foundation (20.0), American Enterprise Institute (36.6), the Manhattan Institute (32.0).Using the same "guilt by association" techniques that the professor uses in his paper, I conclude that he is far from unbiased. In fact, taking the average ADA score of the four groups in the previous paragraphs, which are all supported by the same foundations that have funded the professor in his research, results in a score that ranks the professor as more conservative than any of the news outfits in his rankings. More than the Drudge Report, more than Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume, more even than the Washington Times.
Co-author Jeffrey Milyo was a Salvatori fellow for the ultra-right-wing (by their paper's own numbers!) Heritage Foundation. He and Groseclose wrote their first article together in 1996 for the far-right scandal sheet The American Spectator.
Plus often times on liberal or conservative media an attribution or reference is made just to rip it to shreds. The exact opposite of the accurate result they are attempting to obtain. Which I would guess is the reason it looks the way it does. This is certainly not the survey that will convince me.
posted by Ron at 5:16 PM
5 Comments:
There is the only thing you can say when you are proved wrong...the source is biased...sad.
Game, do you doubt that the authors just might be extremely biased? That their "conclusions" might be tainted?
Game, where is the proof that Ron is wrong? This biased report?
Game, "There is the only thing you can say" when you use a biased source...it somehow "proves" critics wrong ... hilarious.
I havent been proved wrong..even outside the biases the methodology should be enough to make any logical person cringe.
Even on C-Span it turns out that two thirds to three fourths of the guests are from CONSERVATIVE sources -- conservative think tanks, etc. WHAT PERCENTAGE of talk show hosts on FOX or MSNBC, for instance, are conservative versus liberal?? Not only that, but of the "liberal" hosts, how many are REALLY liberal?? Seems like any host who is not FAR RIGHT is called "liberal."
Even in politics, the Republican Party has gone RIGHT, and the Democratic Party has gone RIGHT. So, now there are very few people who would fit the former definition of Liberal at all. Barry Goldwater, who was once considered too far "right" to be electable as a Republican nation wide, would now be a "moderate" Republican, or even a "left-leaning" Republican. Eisenhower would be considered a Democrat. Most of Nixon's policies too, would be left-leaning.
Ye Gods!!
Lonna
The so called Liberal Media is a total myth if one is referring to the networks and most of the mainstream press. I was talking to a friend about this. He is still supporting the war and is into this whole Islamic hating thing, probably because he still believes the Iraqis are responsible for 9/11. I keep telling him to go to "Democracy Now"'s website, listen to Ron's show, etc., but apparently to no avail.
Fascist governments control the press. In this case, the corporate media is controlling most of the press, but the corporations are controlling the government now, so what's the difference?
Also, with just about everyone and his/her brother/sister and the press moving to the right, the perception of what and what isn't Liberal has changed. Not too long ago, I had a petition to get
Molly Ivins' column added to the Op/Ed page of our local paper. The editor refused to consider it stating that the editorial balance of the paper was just fine. Can not figure this one out, as the national columnists include
Wm. F. Buckley, Jr. and Cal Thomas both extremely conservative Republicans, Roger Hernandez who is a conservative Republican, Cokie and Steve Roberts who I'm not sure of, but think are moderate Republicans, and the president of The Heritage Foundation, an ultra-conservative Republican think tank, oh and Helen Thomas the lone Liberal Democrat. How is that balanced? Balanced would be having
Molly Ivins and Ann Coulter (Yuk!) featured on the same Op-Ed page like they do in "The Arizona Daily Star", the paper my mom subscribes to. We gotta start screaming about the lack of freedom of the press in this country. In the meantime, watch "Democracy Now" or go to the website (www.democracynow.org) if you want to get the REAL news and not cartoons!
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