Yeah. That's why those Zeitgeist guys want us to be ruled by computers. Although anyone who has ever walked down a street and seen that most people are fixated on their smartphones rather than watching where the fuck they're going knows that we already are.

Any easy way to put it in perspective is that In 2004.

34% of News Reporters self identify as Liberals.  While 7% of New Reporters self identify as Conservatives.

While in 2004, the average population that identified themselvs as Liberal was 19%, and the number of people who self identified as Conservatives was 40%.  (The extreme leftwing is actually pretty fringe, democrats relying on a colation of modreate/conservative issue voters like minorities and union workers.)

That's about as clear cut as you can get.  While I don't think there is some kind of "overt liberal media conspiracy" you'd have to be insane to suggest that personal opinions don't effect the way you perceive and report on a story.

The numbers get even worse when you consider that a large number of those conservative reporters likely are all grouped at Fox News. 

What proportion of self identified conservatives are actually conservative and vice versa? People usually say one thing and mean another, and the actual meaning of the words 'conservative' and 'liberal' mean different things to different people and that meaning has changed over time. The best thing you could take from this is that binary thinking is in itself extremely stupid. By the standards of most other countries the U.S. media is actually extremely conservative if you take the OECD as a baseline.

A) Pretty much all of them.  Self identification in confidential polls is considered very accurate.  Outside which, it's kinda irrelevent since you've got the two populations going through the exact same questions.

B)  The US media is actually not extremely conservative if you take the OCED as a baseline.  People look at the lack of universal healthcare and like to say the US is more conservative then other developed nations, yet constantly ignore things like race relations, sex relations, freedom of speech, freedom of privacy for any issue you could put America on the right of, i could name another that the US puts on the left.

Furthermore, even if the US media was more conservative, that would be extremely irrelevent, since you know.... the US Mediare reports to the US population, and therefore should be compaired to the US population.

I mean hell... compare to how the US handled their problem in 2008, and continue to handle their debt problems... vs how the EU is handling it. (IE Austerity mostly... very conservative.)

Compare the US, to say Iceland... US, Bail out the banks. Iceland... let them go bankrupt. Again, pretty conservative action there.

Or heck, 90% of the muslim laws targetting stuff in europe... or that are at least seen as targeting muslims here in the US.  (Ban of religious items in public places, headscarf ban... etc)

Example about Racism, political comments that occured when Obama was elected President

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96949439

Which, unless I'm mistaken, I believe the US is the only nation to have elected a person from a racial minority as head of state.

The only other case that even comes to mind is Benjamin Disraeli.

Though if I have my UK politcs right he wasn't directly elected Prime Minister... and I can't really tell if he was racially jewish, or if he was Italian, and just that his parents were Jewish.  (He himself converting and actually in favor of a law discriminating against jews.)

A.) Self identification is accurate? The only thing accurate about polls is you get roughly the same answer whether you ask 10,000 people or 10,000,000 people. The only accurate way to poll is to first define what 'conservative' 'liberal' etc are and then ask a bunch of questions and score them. Then you'll have accuracy but only specific to the definitions and weightings used.

B.) It always depends on what you compare. In rough terms the U.S. is equivalent to the rest of the developed world in terms of race relations, sex relations, freedom of speech etc. The very idea of binary thinking such as conservative vs liberal is extremely backwards regardless of how you wish to define them because they can mean very contradictory things.

You cannot say the media is more liberal than the rest of society or vice versa because you cannot actually find an adequate catch all for what a conservative actually means without the term contradicting the reality of the people who self identify as such. How exactly do you mesh the 'conservative' who swears like a sailor, doesn't want government intervention or regulation to impinge on their rights, takes government subsidies anyway for farming and looks forward to the social security check at the end of the month with the guy whom goes to church every sunday, wants strict control over abortion and swearing on TV and wants more control over how people dress because these young people today have no decency?

A) Moderate is an option, so it's not really binary.  And again this is again, irrelevent we're comparing a subset of a population with the population as a whole.

B) You don't have to "mesh" these things.    There are moderates.  To Identify as a liberal or a conservative you cleary have to pass more then a 51% marker.  So it's really irrelevent.  Moderates are there afterall, it's pretty easy to see that on average, many more reporters, then average people have more liberal views or feel stronger about the issues they are liebral on, and hence call themselves liberals.

Almost no reporters consider themselves conservatives.  Seems pretty obvious.

Also, no the US isn't roughly equal to the rest of the developed world in terms of race relations, sex relations, freedom of speech etc.    The US is pretty far ahead in 2 out of the 3 categories, with it being about the middle sex relations wise.

Economically europe's actually been quite more conservative then the US for a while not, outside a few of the "trouble" states.

The only place Europe is really more leftwing is the social benefits component.

Heck, even overally taxation tends to be more regressive europeon wise.

So you can have two people @ 55% scores as conservatives whom only agree 10% of the time and yet both are conservative? Really? Bull...

Fact 1: Binary thinking doesn't work and never has to describe humanity.

Fact 2: Land of the free, home of the brave or propaganda doesn't relate very well to reality.

Fact 3: Labels and brands are easily contradictory. You can defend freedom by taking it away, spread democracy with guns and puppet dictators etc.

Just take in these 3 facts and you'll be a better person.

55% Conservatism in this country would no doubt land you as a "moderate".

So no...  These are going to be more people who agree 75%-85% of the time.

Conservative and Liberal are more extreme terms then Republican and Democrat and are widely seen as such in the United states.

Outside which, your 3 facts are well... completely irrelevent to the topic at hand.  It seems like your trying to shoehorn an arguement in a place where it doesn't belong.

Outside which, you are argueing that binary labels are stupid, while ALSO argueing that the US is more conservative then the rest of the OCED based on those same binary labels.

So uh... which is it?

Both and neither.