News Flash!

[alphamale]

A UCLA study says "almost all major media outlets tilt to the left."
http://www.newsroom.ucla.edu/page.asp?RelNum=6664

Garsh doggy - who'da thunk it!

This reminds me of one time when I read of a study that concluded unemployed people don't like to be unemployed, because then they have no money.

[Petra]

Well, that's debatable.

Thing is, are you prepared to debate it?

[Abdul Alhazred]

My only question is whether this "study" was funded with tax money.

[Adam]

Interesting...I'd like to see more info how they actually arived at their numbers. Just counting references seems a bit prone to static.

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.

Does any reference count? If I say 'the Cato institute is full of intellecually dishonest partisans with axes to grind' does my score move to the right simply because I referenced Cato? Also, how do they determine if a 'citation pattern' in one source is 'close' to that in another? A quick Googling indicates that I'm not going to find my answers before bed.

I'd be interested to see this broken down further, as well. I suspect we'd see the conventional wisdom that the media tilts slightly left/libertarian on social issues (minority rights, reproductive freedom, etc.) and slightly right on economic and defense issues reflected in a more detailed analysis of the results.

[alphamale]

Interesting...I'd like to see more info how they actually arived at their numbers.

I'm just surprised and happy to see nobody call UCLA a rightwing conservative mouthpiece.

[D. Scarlatti]

Because we're speechless you linked to something that wasn't.

[Adam]

Originally Posted by alphamale

I'm just surprised and happy to see nobody call UCLA a rightwing conservative mouthpiece.

See what happens when you cite sources that aren't right wing conservative mouthpieces?

[Sauron]

Originally Posted by alphamale

A UCLA study says "almost all major media outlets tilt to the left."
http://www.newsroom.ucla.edu/page.asp?RelNum=6664

Which apparently has methodological flaws since:

Another finding that contradicted conventional wisdom was that the Drudge Report was slightly left of center.

and:

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)."

And of course, no information on median, mean or standard deviations is available.

The reality is that using Congressional speeches as a basis of comparison was a flawed approach, since Congress is not a baseline for measuring the media. It's like ranking economic progress by measuring people's height: the two issues are not related.