http://www.newsroom.ucla.edu/page.asp?RelNum=6664#gobaby

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"Media Bias Is Real, Finds UCLA Political Scientist Date: December 14, 2005 Contact: Meg Sullivan ( msullivan@support.ucla.edu ) Phone: 310-825-1046 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. These are just a few of the surprising findings from a UCLA-led study, which is believed to be the first successful attempt at objectively quantifying bias in a range of media outlets and ranking them accordingly. "I suspected that many media outlets would tilt to the left because surveys have shown that reporters tend to vote more Democrat than Republican," said Tim Groseclose, a UCLA political scientist and the study's lead author. "But I was surprised at just how pronounced the distinctions are." "Overall, the major media outlets are quite moderate compared to members of Congress, but even so, there is a quantifiable and significant bias in that nearly all of them lean to the left," said co-author Jeffrey Milyo, University of Missouri economist and public policy scholar. The results appear in the latest issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which will become available in mid-December. Groseclose and Milyo based their research on a standard gauge of a lawmaker's support for liberal causes. Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) tracks the percentage of times that each lawmaker votes on the liberal side of an issue. Based on these votes, the ADA assigns a numerical score to each lawmaker, where "100" is the most liberal and "0" is the most conservative. After adjustments to compensate for disproportionate representation that the Senate gives to low-population states and the lack of representation for the District of Columbia, the average ADA score in Congress (50.1) was assumed to represent the political position of the average U.S. voter. Groseclose and Milyo then directed 21 research assistants — most of them college students — to scour U.S. media coverage of the past 10 years. They tallied the number of times each media outlet referred to think tanks and policy groups, such as the left-leaning NAACP or the right-leaning Heritage Foundation. Next, they did the same exercise with speeches of U.S. lawmakers. If a media outlet displayed a citation pattern similar to that of a lawmaker, then Groseclose and Milyo's method assigned both a similar ADA score. "A media person would have never done this study," said Groseclose, a UCLA political science professor, whose research and teaching focuses on the U.S. Congress. "It takes a Congress scholar even to think of using ADA scores as a measure. And I don't think many media scholars would have considered comparing news stories to congressional speeches." Of the 20 major media outlets studied, 18 scored left of center, with CBS' "Evening News," The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ranking second, third and fourth most liberal behind the news pages of The Wall Street Journal. Only Fox News' "Special Report With Brit Hume" and The Washington Times scored right of the average U.S. voter. The most centrist outlet proved to be the "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer." CNN's "NewsNight With Aaron Brown" and ABC's "Good Morning America" were a close second and third. "Our estimates for these outlets, we feel, give particular credibility to our efforts, as three of the four moderators for the 2004 presidential and vice-presidential debates came from these three news outlets — Jim Lehrer, Charlie Gibson and Gwen Ifill," Groseclose said. "If these newscasters weren't centrist, staffers for one of the campaign teams would have objected and insisted on other moderators." The fourth most centrist outlet was "Special Report With Brit Hume" on Fox News, which often is cited by liberals as an egregious example of a right-wing outlet. While this news program proved to be right of center, the study found ABC's "World News Tonight" and NBC's "Nightly News" to be left of center. All three outlets were approximately equidistant from the center, the report found. "If viewers spent an equal amount of time watching Fox's 'Special Report' as ABC's 'World News' and NBC's 'Nightly News,' then they would receive a nearly perfectly balanced version of the news," said Milyo, an associate professor of economics and public affairs at the University of Missouri at Columbia. Five news outlets — "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer," ABC's "Good Morning America," CNN's "NewsNight With Aaron Brown," Fox News' "Special Report With Brit Hume" and the Drudge Report — were in a statistical dead heat in the race for the most centrist news outlet. Of the print media, USA Today was the most centrist. An additional feature of the study shows how each outlet compares in political orientation with actual lawmakers. The news pages of The Wall Street Journal scored a little to the left of the average American Democrat, as determined by the average ADA score of all Democrats in Congress (85 versus 84). With scores in the mid-70s, CBS' "Evening News" and The New York Times looked similar to Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., who has an ADA score of 74. Most of the outlets were less liberal than Lieberman but more liberal than former Sen. John Breaux, D-La. Those media outlets included the Drudge Report, ABC's "World News Tonight," NBC's "Nightly News," USA Today, NBC's "Today Show," Time magazine, U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek, NPR's "Morning Edition," CBS' "Early Show" and The Washington Post. Since Groseclose and Milyo were more concerned with bias in news reporting than opinion pieces, which are designed to stake a political position, they omitted editorials and Op-Eds from their tallies. This is one reason their study finds The Wall Street Journal more liberal than conventional wisdom asserts. Another finding that contradicted conventional wisdom was that the Drudge Report was slightly left of center. "One thing people should keep in mind is that our data for the Drudge Report was based almost entirely on the articles that the Drudge Report lists on other Web sites," said Groseclose. "Very little was based on the stories that Matt Drudge himself wrote. The fact that the Drudge Report appears left of center is merely a reflection of the overall bias of the media." Yet another finding that contradicted conventional wisdom relates to National Public Radio, often cited by conservatives as an egregious example of a liberal news outlet. But according to the UCLA-University of Missouri study, it ranked eighth most liberal of the 20 that the study examined. "By our estimate, NPR hardly differs from the average mainstream news outlet," Groseclose said. "Its score is approximately equal to those of Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report and its score is slightly more conservative than The Washington Post's. If anything, government-funded outlets in our sample have a slightly lower average ADA score (61), than the private outlets in our sample (62.8)." The researchers took numerous steps to safeguard against bias — or the appearance of same — in the work, which took close to three years to complete. They went to great lengths to ensure that as many research assistants supported Democratic candidate Al Gore in the 2000 election as supported President George Bush. They also sought no outside funding, a rarity in scholarly research. "No matter the results, we feared our findings would've been suspect if we'd received support from any group that could be perceived as right- or left-leaning, so we consciously decided to fund this project only with our own salaries and research funds that our own universities provided," Groseclose said. The results break new ground. "Past researchers have been able to say whether an outlet is conservative or liberal, but no one has ever compared media outlets to lawmakers," Groseclose said. "Our work gives a precise characterization of the bias and relates it to known commodity — politicians.""

12/19/2005 2:32:41 PM

Jee

Glad you cleared that up.

12/19/2005 2:34:07 PM

If it found drudge was biased to the left then obviously that method for trying to quantify bias has some rather serious problems.

12/19/2005 2:38:48 PM

Quote :

"The New York Times looked similar to Sen. Joe Lieberman"

OH NOES!!1 T3h most liberal politician in the Senate!!1

[Edited on December 19, 2005 at 2:40 PM. Reason : ^ Not necessarily. He mostly links to other outlets, which the study argues are liberal.]

12/19/2005 2:39:53 PM

the methods used in this study would be interesting to read about, that's for sure. the whole reason I'm fully against labeling "the media" as "liberal" or "conservative" is because of the ridiculousness of ideas like this:

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"Groseclose and Milyo based their research on a standard gauge of a lawmaker's support for liberal causes. Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) tracks the percentage of times that each lawmaker votes on the liberal side of an issue. Based on these votes, the ADA assigns a numerical score to each lawmaker, where "100" is the most liberal and "0" is the most conservative."

who defined what is "the liberal side" of an issue?



[Edited on December 19, 2005 at 2:45 PM. Reason : .]

12/19/2005 2:42:43 PM

^^ They did say the WSJ was more liberal than the NYT

12/19/2005 2:44:35 PM

I don't see anything frightening at all about being more liberal than Joe Lieberman. That's like saying the WSJ is more liberal than Zell Miller.

12/19/2005 3:06:46 PM

Somewhere down the line people began confusing interesting statisitcal results with actual economic research.

Why is this study in the QJE? I don't understand.

12/19/2005 4:49:33 PM

i also don't understand how you can simply measure something based on the number of references to organizations without taking into account whether they were referenced in a positive or negative light.

12/19/2005 5:11:01 PM

Its funny that most Newspaper Publishers/Owners are conservative and ultimately control what is printed.

Quote :

" Groseclose and Milyo then directed 21 research assistants — most of them college students — to scour U.S. media coverage of the past 10 years. They tallied the number of times each media outlet referred to think tanks and policy groups, such as the left-leaning NAACP or the right-leaning Heritage Foundation. "

So basically, if someone used something from Brookings, it would be left leaning just because you did not have something from Heritage to balance it out? Its seems to me that you could have Karl Rove against someone from Brookings, and the piece would have been considered liberal because Rove was not from a think tank?

If the basis of their study is on where the information came from and does not consider the other potential sources of the article, there is a huge flaw.

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" Next, they did the same exercise with speeches of U.S. lawmakers. If a media outlet displayed a citation pattern similar to that of a lawmaker, then Groseclose and Milyo's method assigned both a similar ADA score"

I am sure they looked at the context of the article. A lot of times, one must cite from the opposite think tank when they use the information in a piece.

12/19/2005 6:05:55 PM

http://mason.gmu.edu/~atabarro/MediaBias.doc

That's the full report. It was actually done back in 2003.

12/19/2005 6:16:47 PM

OMF 2 YEAR OLD STUDY!!1 CLEARLY THIS IS BEING USED TO SELL A BOOK AND INDICATES BIAS ON THE PART OF UCLA!

12/19/2005 6:20:08 PM

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"If it found drudge was biased to the left then obviously that method for trying to quantify bias has some rather serious problems."

12/19/2005 6:23:50 PM

^^ yes, clearly they waited until exactly this point to release the story because it would maximize books sales.

[Edited on December 19, 2005 at 6:26 PM. Reason : .]

12/19/2005 6:26:23 PM

Seriously, after reading the actual report, this is a graduate Statistics project. Why the fuck is it worth putting in the QJE? What the FUCK does this have to do with economics?

12/19/2005 6:55:03 PM

The ACLU was found to be biased to the right, according to their method.

12/19/2005 6:56:13 PM

And another Drudge float sails off into obscurity...

12/19/2005 7:43:02 PM

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"The fourth most centrist outlet was "Special Report With Brit Hume" on Fox News"

And that's when I realized how ridiculous this study was.

Gee, I wonder why they didn't study the opinions/editorials.

12/20/2005 12:42:08 AM

^because that wouldnt get them in the quaterly journal of economics

12/20/2005 12:43:44 AM

Media is biased towards whatever makes people watch media.

12/20/2005 12:46:49 AM