Long ago, a few watchdog groups, such as the conservative AIM (Accuracy in Media) and its more liberal counterpart FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), kept an eye on reporters’ work.
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L There are more watchdog groups focused on rooting out media bias. “Once people see something they don’t like, they notice things that reinforce the belief that there’s bias” in the media as a whole. “There’s a kind of self-fulfilling perception to it,” said Robert Lichter, a pioneering media-bias researcher who heads the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University. This means your chance of running into “news” that seems biased has increased exponentially, elevating the impression that “bias” is pervasive throughout all parts of the media.
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as well as more conservative organizations such as Drudge and Free Republic. The Internet has given rise to champions of the left - Huffington Post, Daily Kos, etc. There’s more media and more overtly partisan media outlets, too. So why the rise in the public’s perception of media bias? A few possibilities: There’s nuance there, but when you add it all and subtract it down, you end up with nothing.” “The net effect is zero,” said David D’Alessio, a communications sciences professor at the University of Connecticut at Stamford.ĭ’Alessio drew his conclusion from reviewing 99 studies of campaign news coverage undertaken over six decades for his newly published work, “ Media Bias in Presidential Election Coverage 1948-2008: Evaluation via Formal Measurement.” The research, he says, shows that news reporting tends to point toward the middle, “because that’s where the people are, and that’s where the money is. . . A “meta-analysis” of bias studies - that is, a study of studies - shows something different: When all is said and done, left-leaning reporting is balanced by reporting more favorable to conservatives. (Groseclose determined that The Washington Post’s “slant quotient” was less liberal than news coverage in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.)Įven with conservative-leaning sources such as the Drudge Report and the Washington Times factored in, “the aggregate slant is leftward,” said Groseclose, who describes himself as a conservative.īut that’s not the end of the story. In his 2011 book, “ Left Turn: How Liberal Bias Distorts the American Mind,” Groseclose concluded that most media organizations aligned with the views of liberal politicians. He compared these ratings with a statistical analysis of the voting records of various national politicians. Groseclose used a three-pronged test to quantify the “slant quotient” of news stories reported by dozens of media sources. On the conservative side, the strongest case might have been made by Tim Groseclose, a political science and economics professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. They have, but they don’t agree that one side is consistently favored or that this favoritism has been growing like a pernicious weed. That’s not to say researchers haven’t found bias in reporting. In fact, there’s little to suggest that over the past few decades news reporting has become more favorable to one party.
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Seventy-seven percent of those surveyed by the Pew Research Center in the fall said the media “tend to favor one side” compared with 53 percent who said so in 1985.īut have the media really become more biased? Or is this a case of perception trumping reality? Meanwhile, just about every new poll of public sentiment shows that confidence in the news media has hit a new low.
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Mitt Romney said this month that he faces “an uphill battle” against the press in the general election. Rick Santorum chewed out a New York Times reporter. Newt Gingrich excoriated the “elite media” in a richly applauded moment during one of the Republican debates. Charges of media bias have been flying like a bloody banner on the campaign trail.