http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-onthemedia27-2008jul27,0,712999.story

Quote :

" In study, evidence of liberal-bias bias Cable talking heads accuse broadcast networks of liberal bias -- but a think tank finds that ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Barack Obama than on John McCain in recent weeks. By JAMES RAINEY, ON THE MEDIA July 27, 2008 Haters of the mainstream media reheated a bit of conventional wisdom last week. Barack Obama, they said, was getting a free ride from those insufferable liberals. Such pronouncements, sorry to say, tend to be wrong since they describe a monolithic media that no longer exists. Information today cascades from countless outlets and channels, from the Huffington Post to Politico.com to CBS News and beyond. But now there's additional evidence that casts doubt on the bias claims aimed -- with particular venom -- at three broadcast networks. The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, where researchers have tracked network news content for two decades, found that ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Obama than on Republican John McCain during the first six weeks of the general-election campaign. You read it right: tougher on the Democrat. During the evening news, the majority of statements from reporters and anchors on all three networks are neutral, the center found. And when network news people ventured opinions in recent weeks, 28% of the statements were positive for Obama and 72% negative. Network reporting also tilted against McCain, but far less dramatically, with 43% of the statements positive and 57% negative, according to the Washington-based media center. Conservatives have been snarling about the grotesque disparity revealed by another study, the online Tyndall Report, which showed Obama receiving more than twice as much network air time as McCain in the last month and a half. Obama got 166 minutes of coverage in the seven weeks after the end of the primary season, compared with 67 minutes for McCain, according to longtime network-news observer Andrew Tyndall. I wrote last week that the networks should do more to better balance the air time. But I also suggested that much of the attention to Obama was far from glowing. That earned a spasm of e-mails that described me as irrational, unpatriotic and . . . somehow . . . French. But the center's director, RobertLichter, who has won conservative hearts with several of his previous studies, told me the facts were the facts. "This information should blow away this silly assumption that more coverage is always better coverage," he said. Here's a bit more on the research, so you'll understand how the communications professor and his researchers arrived at their conclusions. The center reviews and "codes" statements on the evening news as positive or negative toward the candidates. For example, when NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell said in June that Obama "has problems" with white men and suburban women, the media center deemed that a negative. The positive and negative remarks about each candidate are then totaled to calculate the percentages that cut for and against them. Visual images and other more subjective cues are not assessed. But the tracking applies a measure of analytical rigor to a field rife with seat-of-the-pants fulminations. The media center's most recent batch of data covers nightly newscasts beginning June 8, the day after Hillary Rodham Clinton conceded the Democratic nomination, ushering in the start of the general-election campaign. The data ran through Monday, as Obama began his overseas trip. Most on-air statements during that time could not be classified as positive or negative, Lichter said. The study found, on average, less than two opinion statements per night on the candidates on all three networks combined -- not exactly embracing or pummeling Obama or McCain. But when a point of view did emerge, it tended to tilt against Obama. That was a reversal of the trend during the primaries, when the same researchers found that 64% of statements about Obama -- new to the political spotlight -- were positive, but just 43% of statements about McCain were positive."

more in link

7/27/2008 7:22:23 PM

George mason is a university. Universities have liberal bias. This study by the university has liberal bias.

QED

7/27/2008 7:39:13 PM

HOOKSAW did say he quit TA'ing for the summers.

i guess he took his experience guarding prisoners and is applying it to his new job at the pool.

7/28/2008 1:23:23 AM

^ WTF are you yammering about now?

BTW, IBTL.

7/28/2008 2:13:38 AM

why would this get locked? i think its a pretty interesting point showing that obama has not gotten a free ride in the media. it basically says that while mccain has had it bad at times in the media, obama has had it worse.

7/28/2008 6:28:17 AM

I think that Republicans prove that they will complain of media bias whatever the coverage is, so the media might as well just ignore their diversionary tactic and give their shortcomings the sunshine they deserve.

7/28/2008 6:39:04 AM

^^
http://thewolfweb.com/message_topic.aspx?topic=527139

7/28/2008 7:13:07 AM

Quote :

"The center reviews and "codes" statements on the evening news as positive or negative toward the candidates. For example, when NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell said in June that Obama "has problems" with white men and suburban women, the media center deemed that a negative."

IOW: The same subjective assessments people on TWW make of news reports are, in this case, made by people at a university? Interesting.

Come on guys. This is all pretty hard stuff to nail down. And the researchers apparently realize that. I mean, for one thing, they had to exclude images from their analysis--probably because it would be much more difficult to code the images into one of the three categories. That means the contrasts of McCain in a golf-cart and Obama on a hill-top are left out of this sample.

Really, I don't think this settles anything one way or the other. Whether a story is positive or negative or neutral is a personal judgment that can be open to disagreement. I've seen similar studies done with tobacco ads that left much less subjective wiggle room (trying to categorize ads as being about "prevention", "quitting", etc), and those researchers STILL had problems making coding decisions. None of this easy or rock-solid, but it's good to know they gave it a shot.

I will also say that the researchers results would have to be discounted against Rasmussen's latest poll, which found that 49% of people believed that journalists were trying to help Obama win the election. People making the same subjective assessments of news coverage that these researchers are making.

PS* IBTL!

[Edited on July 28, 2008 at 8:57 AM. Reason : ``]

7/28/2008 8:54:59 AM

Quote :

"49% of people believed that journalists were trying to help Obama win the election"

But socks, when we use the math that you applied to the Iraq war poll we find that 51% believe that they're not, and that's the clear majority so why does it matter?

[Edited on July 28, 2008 at 9:03 AM. Reason : +r]

7/28/2008 9:03:01 AM

^ Bullshit--you need to check your math. A significant subset of the sample couldn't answer because they didn't know what "bias" means.

7/28/2008 9:17:29 AM

I'm referring specifically to 'socks`` math' which states that if 49% is for something then 51% is automatically for the opposite.

7/28/2008 9:21:01 AM

American Journalism Review
In the Tank?
So let’s get this straight: “The media” are swooning over Barack, love McCain but can’t stand Hillary? Maybe it’s a little more complicated than that.

By Paul Farhi

http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4516

Quote :

"Nevertheless, cries of bias grow louder with each election cycle. Polls have shown rising public skepticism about the news media for decades. According to research cited by media scholar S. Robert Lichter, two-thirds of the public agreed that the press was "fair" in a survey in 1937. By 1984, only 38 percent said newspapers were "usually fair" and only 29 percent said this of television reporting. We're fast approaching zero credibility. In a national survey conducted by Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, in January, only 19.6 percent of respondents said they believed "all or most" reporting. An even larger portion, 23.9 percent, said they believed "little" or none of it. What's going on here? Are we really so biased, so incapable of checking our prejudices that even the most straightforward reporting deservedly engenders suspicion? Is all of the work of the news media deserving of skepticism? At the risk of sounding biased, no. Leaving aside the obvious – that reporters are flawed humans who sometimes do launder their prejudices and passions in print or on the air – there are good reasons to be skeptical. The widespread perception of media unfairness doesn't necessarily confirm the existence of it. Consider the case against claims of bias: "

Quote :

"A starting point: "I think, first of all, we need to distinguish between actual journalism [news reports in print and broadcast] and the things uttered by TV personalities," says Susan Milligan, a national political reporter for the Boston Globe. "The latter become obsessed – based on I don't know what – with provocative topics that may or may not be all that relevant to voters. The Geraldine Ferraro comments [criticizing Obama's candidacy] and the Obama pastor story come to mind. I mean, they're both legitimate stories, but it's a bit ridiculous how so many TV shows did nonstop coverage on them, like it was 9/11 or something." It's true, certainly, that journalists themselves have contributed to this confusion. In an ever more complicated and economically challenged media environment, the lines between reporter and pundit have gradually disappeared "

Quote :

". Lichter, president of George Mason University's Center for Media and Public Affairs, believes that some of the public's antipathy toward the press has been fueled over the past few decades by the rise of the "celebrity journalist," the reporter who covers the story, then gets on television to tell viewers what to think about it. "

Quote :

"As the Sacred Heart survey makes clear, people implicitly overstate how much news they really consume. The poll found, for example, that Americans described the New York Times and National Public Radio as "mostly or somewhat liberal" roughly four times more often than they described those two outlets as "mostly or somewhat conservative." Leave aside the blunt generality inherent in this. (Is all of NPR – from "Morning Edition" to "Car Talk" – "mostly or somewhat liberal?") The more important (and unasked) question about this finding is its shaky foundation. Given that only small fractions of the populace read the Times or listen to NPR on a regular basis, how is it that so many Americans seem to know so much about the political leanings of the Times and NPR? Similarly, people ranked "PBS News" among the lowest national TV news organizations, with just 3 percent citing it as "most trusted." This might reflect the notion that trust is a function of ratings, rather than actual reporting expertise, since all of the networks that ranked above PBS in the survey had bigger audiences. But it may also say something about the sophistication of the survey's respondents. There is, after all, no such thing as "PBS News." "

7/28/2008 9:34:01 AM

^ LOL, you dumbass. You mean this American Journalism Review?

Quote :

"The American Journalism Review is a U.S. magazine covering topics in journalism. It is published six times a year by the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park. The AJR has been owned since the late 1980s by a foundation of the university. It was begun in 1977 as the Washington Journalism Review. In August 2007, the Washington Post reported that the AJR could shut down by the end of 2007 if it could not reduce its operating deficit, then running at about $200,000 per year (with a total budget of about $800,000). Donors provide at least a third of the budget; the remainder is from advertising. Donations to the AJR in the past three years have included about $1.25 million from a group of news veterans headed by former Philadelphia Inquirer executive editor Eugene Roberts. As of mid-2007, the AJR had only one full-time editorial employee, editor Rem Rieder, with the design and artwork of the magazine contracted out. Most of the content of the AJR is from outside contributors (freelancers). In January 1999, the Gannett Company pulled all its advertising, a few weeks after AJR published an article that contained negative comments about several Gannett leaders. In its December 2006 issue, the AJR printed an article about the Santa Barbara News-Press and its owner, Wendy P. McCaw. Later that month, McCaw sued Susan Paterno, the writer of the article, accusing her of libel and product disparagement. The AJR was not named as a defendant, but agreed to pay Paterno's legal bills and indemnify her against any judgment. Paterno, as a freelancer, had written for the AJR for about ten years."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Journalism_Review

7/28/2008 9:46:38 AM

so are you claiming that their points are wrong? because the ajr is apparently still around and publishing despite any financial problems. this is an article that makes statement that directly contradict your claims of strong media bias, are you not going to even try to make a response?

i see why everyone dismisses you, its clear you have already decided that you are right about everything

7/28/2008 10:48:06 AM

SkankinMonky,

Incorrect use of the BBC poll, this poll, and my posts on both subjects.

7/28/2008 10:51:18 AM

How is my use of YOUR math incorrect in this instance?

7/28/2008 10:54:14 AM

I love the rationale for disproving this study, by people who have been following media races for over 20 years, is "ah well shucks TWW people do this subjective analysis all the time, so it can't be really true."

Quality rationale. Quality.

Every credible textbook that has studied the media, politics, and public opinion has shown that there is little or no liberal media bias. Take a Public Opinion and Media class and maybe you can begin to see the purely political nature of this argument.

If the media was so biased, why did Swift Boating take off? Why is Obama presumptuous and not Presidential? Why is Gore labeled a hypocrite hippie? Why is Clinton whiny?

People need to stop, excuse me Republicans, need to stop confusing "coverage" with "positive bias".

You would think after 8 years of Bush muck-ups and the coverage he gets, they would get that.

7/28/2008 10:54:47 AM

^^^^ LOL! If you'll bother checking the pages of TSB, you'll quickly see that though some here claim to "dismiss" me, none actually do--nor can they.

7/28/2008 11:00:13 AM

hooksaw why dont u run for president

7/28/2008 11:01:52 AM

so are you still not going to offer any kind of counter argument? shall i assume that you concede that there is no horrible media bias?

7/28/2008 11:03:18 AM

hes just bitter because someone posted a "liberal bias in the media" thread.

hence his campaign to have it locked

7/28/2008 3:01:57 PM