Debunking the Myth of a 'Liberal Media'

One of the central problems for scholars seeking to study ideological bias in the media is the lack of agreed-upon data. Natural scientists and even most social scientists can run experiments where their variables are to a considerable extent controlled. But this is simply impossible in the coverage of politics. An impeachment scandal over a fib about extramarital sex is simply not comparable to misleading the nation into war -- no matter what one might think of either example. Ironically, right-wingers who spend so much time vilifying genuine academic knowledge are more than happy to embrace it when it serves their purpose, no matter how fundamentally flawed it might be. We've seen this tendency for more than a decade with the frequent flying of the flag of a nearly useless study, such as that of the voting habits of Washington reporters done for the 1992 election -- discussed at length in my book, "What Liberal Media?" -- and we're seeing it again today with a recently published study by two conservative media critics currently ensconced in academia.

The study, "A Measure of Media Bias" by UCLA Professor Timothy J. Groseclose and Jeffrey D. Milyo of the University of Missouri-Columbia, purports to demonstrate that the mainstream media lean leftward. It does so by allegedly estimating "scores for several major media outlets," by counting the number of times "a particular media outlet cites various think tanks and policy groups, and then compar[ing] this with the times that members of Congress cite the same groups." Rick Scarborough, a Baptist preacher in Pearland, Texas, has even called on his followers to "join Vision America in our New Year Resolution to Boycott Liberal Media" in 2006, claiming, in his regular newsletter, "a recent study by two university scholars has given a factual basis to what we have known to be true."

As a spokesman for the Dow Jones Co., publisher of the not-so-liberal-though-you'd-never-know-it-from-the-study Wall Street Journal, asks, "What are we to make of the validity of a list of important policy groups that doesn't include, say, the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the AFL-CIO or the Concord Coalition but that does include People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals?" And what of those stories that are quoting out-of-power liberal think tanks -- like, for instance, this one -- to "balance" in-power right-wing administration, congressional or state officials? Those quotes are deemed by the authors to be entirely one-sided, because they didn't bother coding for quotes by people in power.

Apart from its context-free methodology, upon which such a study necessarily depends, something clearly smells funny here. First of all, the research, which among other things studied news organizations for varying amounts of time and at different times, found that of 20 media outlets, 18 scored to the left of center. For the record, the study also found that only "Special Report with Brit Hume" and the Washington Times scored to the right of the average voter.

But as the linguist Geoffrey Nunberg notes, the study was "based on unsupported, ideology-driven premises." Moreover, its authors ignore "severe issues of data quality." For instance, the researchers looked at the news content of the Wall Street Journal's news pages -- finding it the most liberal of the bunch -- for a mere four months in 2002, while CBS News, which comes in as the second most liberal news organization, was studied for more than 12 years. One can't come to any other conclusion than that this huge discrepancy in length of study represents a major analytical flaw. Four months, in an off-election year, can't in any serious sense be compared to 12 years, a time period during which several national elections would be held. What's more, Time magazine was studied for about two years, while U.S. News and World Report was looked at over a period of about eight years. No matter, the researchers essentially say, as they assign the same weight to each individual study while refusing to make any attempt to explain why different times and amounts of time were spent on each organization.