| dsgrue3 said: Sure seems to confirm it...in studies that actually attempt to identify it. The Pew source you posted explicitly states the following: "The study of the tone in news coverage is not an examination of media bias. Rather, it measures the overall impression the public is receiving in media about each candidate, whether the assertion is a quote from a source, a fact presented in the narrative that is determined to be favorable or unfavorable, including poll results, or is part of a journalistic analysis." From my understanding a roll call vote is just a blank slate yes or no vote, so I'm struggling to understand why you think this is problematic. If you can summarize what the journals say, I will read it. I didn't notice any liberal media bias until the (first) Obama election, which is why I refuse to entertain the meta study from well before that time, although that isn't to say it didn't exist. It may have, it just seems to have shifted in recent times. |
Yet that is very similar to the definition that your article uses as a definition of bias....the number of times a newspaper cites a think tank's argument. It's just measuring the likelihood of a news source communicating a specified message, which is exactly what the Pew study is doing. The study isn't actually measuring whether each individual citation of a think tank is biased.....they just use ADA score to rank the news sources based on whether liberal or conservatives members of Congress cite the think tanks.
Here's a section of the abstract from the 2013 piece, "Although there are abundant opinions about the magnitude, direction, and even existence of media bias, producing a scholarly consensus on the issue has proven difficult for several reasons." (emphasis on no scholarly consensus). The article also provides three pages of tables breaking down recent research on bias. Long story short, some find a liberal bias, some find a conservative bias, others find no bias......mixed results.
I don't know when liberal bias became a common claim, but I know it was around during the Bush vs. Clinton election in 1992, where the analyses I've seen show the same finding as the Pew stuff. Clinton received more positive coverage, but it was because the public approved of Clinton more than Bush.
Roll-call votes are complicated. The problem is, roll-call votes are unrepresentative of the bills that are discussed in Congress. Many bills just get a voice vote and go unrecorded, so unanimous votes and near unanimous votes often do not get picked up by these votes. This results in an overestimation of polarization within Congress because only highly contentious, paty-line votes get roll calls. Roll-call votes are also often times on incredibly marginal issues, so there might be a vote for passing a bill, but there are also 10 more votes on amendments to that bill. The overall conclusion is that roll-call are probably not the best measure of ideology.
Frances Lee has a good book called "Beyond Ideology" on the subject, where she breaks down the types of issues that receive roll-call votes. Dan Lapinski and Joshua Clinton also have an article titled "Laws and Roll Calls in the U.S. Congress, 1891–1994", which also breaks down roll-call votes into their component categories and looks at which bills actually receive roll-call votes.
