A couple of political science profs from UCLA and Stanford and the University of Chicago investigaged the claim that the news media has a liberal slant (or not).
http://mason.gmu.edu/~atabarro/MediaBias.doc
To compute our measure, we count the times that a media outlet cites various think tanks. We compare this with the times that members of Congress cite the same think tanks in their speeches on the floor of the House and Senate. By comparing the citation patterns we can construct an ADA score for each media outlet.
One of the most curious and surprising statistics in all of American politics is that an overwhelming number of journalists are liberal. For instance, Elaine Povich (1996) reports that only seven percent of all Washington correspondents voted for George Bush in 1992, compared to 37 percent of the American public. Lichter, Rothman and Lichter, (1986) and Weaver and Wilhoit (1996) report similar findings for earlier elections.
A large number of economic studies give theoretical reasons that bolster the view that the media does not have a systematic bias. (See xx, xx, xx and xx). The idea is that if there were a systematic bias, then an entrepreneur could form a new media outlet that does not have a bias. This outlet would drive the others out of business. This is a compelling argument, and even the libertarian Cato Journal has published an article agreeing with the view: In this article, the author, Daniel Sutter (2001), concludes that, although it might be possible for a systematic bias to exist in the network news (since, before cable television, there were strong barriers to entry in this industry), such a bias is impossible, or at least very unlikely, for the newspaper, radio, or magazine industry.
However, contrary to the views and evidence cited above, we find a significant liberal bias in our sample of media outlets. This presents a challenge to economic theorists. Given that there is a systematic liberal bias the news market, at least one of the assumptions in the above theoretical studies must be inaccurate.
We now compute the difference of a media outlet’s score from 39.0 to judge how centrist it is. Based on sentences as the level of observation (the results of which are listed in Table, the Drudge Report is the most centrist, Fox News’ Special Report is second, ABC World News Tonight is third, and CBS Evening is last.
Given that the conventional wisdom is that the Drudge Report and Fox News are conservative news outlets, this ordering might be surprising. Perhaps more surprising is the degree to which the “mainstream” press is liberal. The results of Table 8 show that the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, USA Today, and CBS Evening News are not only liberal, they are closer to the average Democrat in Congress (who has a score of 74.1) than they are to the median of the whole House (who has a score of 39.0).
Another interesting fact concerns the following claim: “Although the New York Times and other media are liberal, they are balanced by conservative media outlets such as Fox News. Consequently, if one spent an equal amount of time watching Fox News and reading the New York Times, he or she would receive a fairly balanced view of the news.” However, Table 8 shows that this is not quite true. Since the New York Times is twice as far from the center as Fox News’ Special Report, to gain a balanced perspective, one would need to spend twice as much time watching Special Report as he or she spends reading the New York Times. (Further as we shall see in Table 9, when one uses citations as the level of observation, one would need to spend an even greater amount of time watching Special Report to gain a balanced perspective.)
Conclusion
Although we expected to find that most media lean left, we were astounded by the degree. A norm among journalists is to present “both sides of the issue.” Consequently, while we expected members of Congress to cite primarily think tanks that are on the same side of the ideological spectrum as they are, we expected journalists to practice a much more balanced citation practice, even if the journalist’s own ideology opposed the think tanks that he or she is sometimes citing. This was not always the case. Most of the mainstream media outlets that we examined (ie all those besides Drudge Report and Fox News’ Special Report) were closer to the average Democrat in Congress than they were to the median member of the House.
Our results contrast strongly with the prior expectations of many others. It is easy to find quotes from prominent journalists and academics who claim that there is no systematic bias among media outlets in the U.S. The following are some examples:
“Our greatest accomplishment as a profession is the development since World War II of a news reporting craft that is truly non-partisan, and non-ideological, and that strives to be independent of undue commercial or governmental influence....It is that legacy we must protect with our diligent stewardship. To do so means we must be aware of the energetic effort that is now underway to convince our readers that we are ideologues. It is an exercise of, in disinformation, of alarming proportions. This attempt to convince the audience of the world’s most ideology-free newspapers that they’re being subjected to agenda-driven news reflecting a liberal bias. I don’t believe our viewers and readers will be, in the long-run, misled by those who advocate biased journalism.”
– New York Times Executive Editor Howell Raines accepting the “George Beveridge Editor of the Year Award” at a National Press Foundation dinner shown live on C-SPAN2 February 20, 2003.
“…when it comes to free publicity, some of the major broadcast media are simply biased in favor of the Republicans, while the rest tend to blur differences between the parties. But that’s the way it is. Democrats should complain as loudly about the real conservative bias of the media as the Republicans complain about its entirely mythical bias…”
--Paul Krugman, “Into the Wilderness,” New York Times, November 8, 2002.
"The mainstream media does not have a liberal bias. . . . ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, the New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and the rest -- at least try to be fair."
--Al Franken. (2003, xx) Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.
The main conclusion of our paper is that our results simply reject such claims.
MUCH more detail is found if you download the document and read it. It reads quickly and has more juicy tidbits.
