What Liberal Media?

You hear it all the time, especially during election season. "The media is biased" -- a criticism leveled from both the Right and Left.

In fact, there's a cottage industry devoted to "exposing media bias," most of which has people in the news biz rolling their eyes. And for good reason: not that media criticism is unwarranted, it's just that most of it, to put it bluntly, is oversimplified nonsense that generates more heat than light.

Perhaps the weakest aspect of pop media criticism is its lack of clarity. People talk about the media as if it were a single entity.

"The media"? Are we talking about the broadcast or print media? Are we talking about the Colbert Report, PBS, NPR, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal or the Cape Cod Times? Are we talking about reporters, editors, publishers, radio talk-show hosts, columnists, bloggers or TV pundits?

As Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi wrote in a recent issue of American Journalism Review, "critics often blame 'the media,' as if the sins of some are the sins of all. It's not just a bland, inexact generalization; it's a slur. The media are, of course, made up of numerous parts, many of which bear little relation to each other. Critics need to define their terms. Holding 'the media' responsible for some perceived slight is like blaming an entire ethnic or racial group for the actions of a few of its members."

Still, surveys show ever-increasing public skepticism about the traditional news media. According to survey data cited by media scholar S. Robert Lichter, two-thirds of the public thought the press was "fair" in a 1937 survey but by 1984 rolls it dropped to 38 percent, while only 29 percent said the same about TV news.

Adding insult to injury, a national survey conducted by Sacred Heart University in January found that only 19.6 percent of respondents said they believed "all or most" reporting, while an a larger percentage (23.9 percent) said they believed "little" or none of it. Next stop: zero credibility.

These survey results should be taken with a grain of salt, in part because, news consumers tend to overstate how closely they pay attention to news, as the Sacred Heart study indicates.

For example, the survey found that Americans described the New York Times and NPR as "mostly or somewhat liberal" -- about four times more often than they described those two outlets as "mostly or somewhat conservative."

"Leave aside the blunt generality inherent in this. (Is all of NPR -- from "Morning Edition" to "Car Talk" -- "mostly or somewhat liberal?") The more important (and unasked) question about this finding is its shaky foundation. Given that only small fractions of the populace read the Times or listen to NPR on a regular basis, how is it that so many Americans seem to know so much about the political leanings of the Times and NPR?" Farhi asks.

Part of this disconnect stems from the lack of actual content analysis among the general public and an over-reliance on anecdotal examples.

Take this year's primary campaign season, for example. Depending on which candidate you supported in the primaries, the universal claim is that the media was biased for/against Clinton or Obama. Yet, a study of the A sections of three agenda-setting newspapers (the Washington Post, NY Times and L.A. Times) done by researchers at Bowling Green State University paints a more nuanced portrait.

The study found Clinton and Obama received about the same number of "positive" and "negative" headlines from those papers (from Labor Day through the Super Tuesday primaries in early February). About 35 percent of the headlines for Obama were positive and 27 percent were negative. Clinton received 31 percent positive and 31 percent negative. The rest of stories were considered to be either mixed (with positive and negative elements) or neutral.