GameOver22 said:
I was going to leave this discussion alone, but now I have to respond.....Research on a liberal bias in the media is mixed, with more research suggesting that there is no systematic liberal bias. The claim has been around for a long time, and researchers have explored this question a lot. Things have changed a lot in the past 10-15 years though (and part of the reason for null finding could be measurment issues). If anything, studies suggests that the news media tends to respond to public opinion, meaning that the media gives more positive coverage to candidates with higher approval ratings among the public. Pew looked at this, and you can see how coverage of Obama becomes more negative after the first debate (where the public thought he had perfromed poorly).
Pew Research
Some other links if you have access:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2000.tb02866.x/abstract
A meta-analysis from 1948-1996
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-polisci-040811-115123
Review of recent literature.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2006.00336.x/full
This just gives a summary of measurment issues.
http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/content/120/4/1191.short
This is the article that your link cites. The problem with the study is that ADA scores are not a good measure of ideology because they are determined by roll-call votes, and roll-call votes are not a represntative sample of the votes taking place in Congress. These votes are more highly partisan, so the results tend to overstate the polarization in Congress, meaning it overstates the liberalism of Democrats and the conservatism of Republicans, which would result in an overstatement of media bias. Many congressional scholars are moving away from roll-call votes for this very reason.
|
