GameOver22 said:
Kasz216 said:
GameOver22 said:
Kasz216 said:
What the Gloscuse study more or less does... is find out how most media outlets stand on the most extreme polarizing and divided issues.
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If I'm reading it correctly, that is not what they are doing. ADA scores are used to exclusively calculate the ideology of members of Congress.....not the media outlets. They then look at which think tanks politicians and media outlets cite. The media outlets that cite the same think tanks as politicians are then ascribed the ADA score of those politicians. There is no connection between the issues voted on in Congress and the issues discussed by the media outlets in the analysis. It all depends on the cited think tanks.......which is my problem with the methodology.....they are ascribing an ideologically extreme score to media outlets based on an unconnected analysis of cited think tanks. Their arument is essentially, "politicians who cite ________ think tank share the same ideology score as media outlets who cite the same think tank." I find that logic less than convincing because of the polarizing manner in which ideology scores are calculated.
Basically, the paper has nothing to do with where the media outlets stand on the issues used in the ADA scores. It has everything to do with whether they cite a think tank.
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From what i can tell, they do so in very specific cases though... and it does make a decent amount of sense.
For example. If democrats are citing a think tank study as to why we need the stimulus... and republicans cite a different study as to why it's a bad idea.
If a media network is refrencing only one of those studies... that's certaintly an issue. It's highly unlikely the opposite would ever be true. (Fox News only refrencing a Democratic Think tank study) etc.
Again, i'd argue that it's not the polarizing ends where the problem lies, but in the middle. Since it's not measuring how they treat it when they measure both think tanks.
So Rachael Maddow and O'Reily get caught up... while Chris Matthews and... I can't really think of a biased but reasonably so republican (Joe Scarbourgh kinda sorta?)... don't get caught up.
At worst, the best critcism i'd say the study had is that it mostly just focused on the worst offenders.
Either way, I'd say it's far superior to the Gentzkow and Shapiro study, which is the only like study I can think of.
Where there they didn't really focus on anything other then specifically what the topic was. So "Tons of people are dieing because of Bush's dumbass refusal to use stem cells" would count as a republican story.
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They aggregated all mentions of think tanks....not just specific issues. There were some exceptions. For instance, if a member of Congress cited the think tank to criticize it, they excluded it from the analysis. For the most part, they included all mentions though. ADA scores are on specific issues though. I think they are generally based on around 20 issues per Congress. Even with the small sample, they are highly correlated with overall roll-call ideology scores.
If I'm reading it correctly though, the Gentzkow and Shapiro (there are a couple of them though) studies seems to be asking completely different research questions....probably not fair to compare them.
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Think tanks generally only focus on a couple issues however...
and regardless... I don't really see a better study out there.
The Gentzkow and Shapiro study does have it's issuse. For example it's local newspaper only... but it's still pretty interesting.
They find technically find a slight leftword leaning slant compaired to max profitability, but can give no actual explination for this slant.
Either way... I see little reason to cite worse studies to try and discredit an imperfect study. I'd argue that all things considered... the Gloscue study is still the best currently available on that level.
Again though, i'd hold the self identification studies, along with what reporters see as the "middle" vs American public opinions view as the middle as the best studies still.
