Media Bias Is Real, Finds UCLA Political Scientist


Date: December 14, 2005
Contact: Meg Sullivan ( msullivan@support.ucla.edu )
Phone: 310-825-1046



While the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is conservative, the newspaper's news pages are liberal, even more liberal than The New York Times. The Drudge Report may have a right-wing reputation, but it leans left. Coverage by public television and radio is conservative compared to the rest of the mainstream media. Meanwhile, almost all major media outlets tilt to the left.

These are just a few of the surprising findings from a UCLA-led study, which is believed to be the first successful attempt at objectively quantifying bias in a range of media outlets and ranking them accordingly.

"I suspected that many media outlets would tilt to the left because surveys have shown that reporters tend to vote more Democrat than Republican," said Tim Groseclose, a UCLA political scientist and the study's lead author. "But I was surprised at just how pronounced the distinctions are."

"Overall, the major media outlets are quite moderate compared to members of Congress, but even so, there is a quantifiable and significant bias in that nearly all of them lean to the left," said co‑author Jeffrey Milyo, University of Missouri economist and public policy scholar.

The results appear in the latest issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which will become available in mid-December.

Groseclose and Milyo based their research on a standard gauge of a lawmaker's support for liberal causes. Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) tracks the percentage of times that each lawmaker votes on the liberal side of an issue. Based on these votes, the ADA assigns a numerical score to each lawmaker, where "100" is the most liberal and "0" is the most conservative. After adjustments to compensate for disproportionate representation that the Senate gives to low‑population states and the lack of representation for the District of Columbia, the average ADA score in Congress (50.1) was assumed to represent the political position of the average U.S. voter.

Groseclose and Milyo then directed 21 research assistants — most of them college students — to scour U.S. media coverage of the past 10 years. They tallied the number of times each media outlet referred to think tanks and policy groups, such as the left-leaning NAACP or the right-leaning Heritage Foundation.

Next, they did the same exercise with speeches of U.S. lawmakers. If a media outlet displayed a citation pattern similar to that of a lawmaker, then Groseclose and Milyo's method assigned both a similar ADA score.

"A media person would have never done this study," said Groseclose, a UCLA political science professor, whose research and teaching focuses on the U.S. Congress. "It takes a Congress scholar even to think of using ADA scores as a measure. And I don't think many media scholars would have considered comparing news stories to congressional speeches."

Of the 20 major media outlets studied, 18 scored left of center, with CBS' "Evening News," The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ranking second, third and fourth most liberal behind the news pages of The Wall Street Journal.

Only Fox News' "Special Report With Brit Hume" and The Washington Times scored right of the average U.S. voter.

The most centrist outlet proved to be the "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer." CNN's "NewsNight With Aaron Brown" and ABC's "Good Morning America" were a close second and third.

"Our estimates for these outlets, we feel, give particular credibility to our efforts, as three of the four moderators for the 2004 presidential and vice-presidential debates came from these three news outlets — Jim Lehrer, Charlie Gibson and Gwen Ifill," Groseclose said. "If these newscasters weren't centrist, staffers for one of the campaign teams would have objected and insisted on other moderators."

The fourth most centrist outlet was "Special Report With Brit Hume" on Fox News, which often is cited by liberals as an egregious example of a right-wing outlet. While this news program proved to be right of center, the study found ABC's "World News Tonight" and NBC's "Nightly News" to be left of center. All three outlets were approximately equidistant from the center, the report found.

"If viewers spent an equal amount of time watching Fox's 'Special Report' as ABC's 'World News' and NBC's 'Nightly News,' then they would receive a nearly perfectly balanced version of the news," said Milyo, an associate professor of economics and public affairs at the University of Missouri at Columbia.

Five news outlets — "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer," ABC's "Good Morning America," CNN's "NewsNight With Aaron Brown," Fox News' "Special Report With Brit Hume" and the Drudge Report — were in a statistical dead heat in the race for the most centrist news outlet. Of the print media, USA Today was the most centrist.

An additional feature of the study shows how each outlet compares in political orientation with actual lawmakers. The news pages of The Wall Street Journal scored a little to the left of the average American Democrat, as determined by the average ADA score of all Democrats in Congress (85 versus 84). With scores in the mid-70s, CBS' "Evening News" and The New York Times looked similar to Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., who has an ADA score of 74.

Most of the outlets were less liberal than Lieberman but more liberal than former Sen. John Breaux, D-La. Those media outlets included the Drudge Report, ABC's "World News Tonight," NBC's "Nightly News," USA Today, NBC's "Today Show," Time magazine, U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek, NPR's "Morning Edition," CBS' "Early Show" and The Washington Post.

Since Groseclose and Milyo were more concerned with bias in news reporting than opinion pieces, which are designed to stake a political position, they omitted editorials and Op‑Eds from their tallies. This is one reason their study finds The Wall Street Journal more liberal than conventional wisdom asserts.

Another finding that contradicted conventional wisdom was that the Drudge Report was slightly left of center.

"One thing people should keep in mind is that our data for the Drudge Report was based almost entirely on the articles that the Drudge Report lists on other Web sites," said Groseclose. "Very little was based on the stories that Matt Drudge himself wrote. The fact that the Drudge Report appears left of center is merely a reflection of the overall bias of the media."

Yet another finding that contradicted conventional wisdom relates to National Public Radio, often cited by conservatives as an egregious example of a liberal news outlet. But according to the UCLA-University of Missouri study, it ranked eighth most liberal of the 20 that the study examined.

"By our estimate, NPR hardly differs from the average mainstream news outlet," Groseclose said. "Its score is approximately equal to those of Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report and its score is slightly more conservative than The Washington Post's. If anything, government‑funded outlets in our sample have a slightly lower average ADA score (61), than the private outlets in our sample (62.."

The researchers took numerous steps to safeguard against bias — or the appearance of same — in the work, which took close to three years to complete. They went to great lengths to ensure that as many research assistants supported Democratic candidate Al Gore in the 2000 election as supported President George Bush. They also sought no outside funding, a rarity in scholarly research.

"No matter the results, we feared our findings would've been suspect if we'd received support from any group that could be perceived as right- or left-leaning, so we consciously decided to fund this project only with our own salaries and research funds that our own universities provided," Groseclose said.

The results break new ground.

"Past researchers have been able to say whether an outlet is conservative or liberal, but no one has ever compared media outlets to lawmakers," Groseclose said. "Our work gives a precise characterization of the bias and relates it to known commodity — politicians."

-UCLA-

MS580

Sounds about right.

Good article LittleWing.

Since you're obviously a little right of center yourself, where do you get your news? Do you look to sources that are right of center, or to those that are more towards the middle? Personally, I try and find reporting that's fairly objective, but it's pretty difficult these days to know what's what. I'm sure I lean to the left, whether I mean to or not.

On a related note, most of the huge stories these past couple of months (secret CIA prisons, secret eavesdropping, etc) have been broken by the LA Times, NY Times, and Washington Post. Ken Mehlman is quick to blame things on the 'liberal media', but how would we know about these things if not for these papers? Do you discount the importance of these stories? Granted, the feeding frenzy that happened afterwards probably does have some liberal bias, but I think it's pretty rediculous for the head of the Republican Party to blame these papers for discovering all of the ghosts is this administration's closet.

The media is as liberal as it's conservative owners will allow it to be.

Oh, snap.

Interesting, but there is no link to that article. They also never mention in the article what the researchers basis for determining whether an oulet was left leaning or right leaning. To do a study, you must have a control group, and so what did this researcher use as his norm?

holler.

i'd like some information to back this up, tribune co. is liberal as all hell. and gannett is down the center/to the left a bit.

So the study measures liberalism/conservatism simply by what organizations the outlet mentions, and how many times it mentions them?

I've posted this before, but it adds something to this discussion, so I'm posting it again...hopefully Cal doesn't spend too much time in N and D

This was orginally published in BusinessWeek in 2004 and is a prelude to LittleWing's post. It's a little long, but worth the read.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/co ... _mz007.htm

ECONOMIC VIEWPOINT
By Robert J. Barro

The Liberal Media: It's No Myth

Many people think the mainstream media have a liberal bias. Media spokesmen, however, usually deny such claims. So who's right? Is there a left-wing bias, or has the right wing conspired not only to influence the media but also to create a false image of unfairness? Some scientific evidence is available in a continuing study, A Measure of Media Bias, by Tim Groseclose of the University of California at Los Angeles and Jeff Milyo of the University of Chicago, presented last March at Stanford University's Workshop on the Media & Economic Performance. These researchers set up an objective measure of bias in U.S. television networks, newspapers, and magazines. The main finding is that the liberal inclination is pronounced. Although Fox News emerges as conservative, it is not nearly as far to the right as many outlets are to the left.

Groseclose and Milyo began with the well-known ratings of the voting records of U.S. senators and representatives by Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a self-described liberal lobbying group. The researchers used data for the 1990s and adjusted the ADA scores to make them comparable over time and across the two chambers. On a 0-100 scale, with 100 the most liberal, the median member of the U.S. House had an ADA score of 39. Thus, 39 is a reasonable measure of a centrist position. Among well-known senators, Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) had a highly conservative score of 4, whereas Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) had a strikingly liberal score of 80.

THE NEXT STEP MEASURED the tendency of Senate and House members in their speeches to cite 200 prominent think tanks. The citations considered were those that referred favorably to a view or fact presented by a think tank. Not counted were negative citations or those purely descriptive of a think tank's actions. As an example, the Heritage Foundation was cited by legislators whose average ADA ratings were 6 -- that is, very conservative. Also highly conservative were the Family Research Council (rating of 6) and the National Right to Life Committee (7). Left-wing think tanks included the Center on Budget & Policy Priorities (80), the Children's Defense Fund (77), and the Economic Policy Institute (72). Surprisingly, the American Civil Liberties Union was centrist (35), an outcome driven by the ACLU's opposition to campaign-finance reform.

The last step measured the tendency of various media outlets to cite the same 200 think tanks. The researchers considered only "news stories" -- not editorials, letters to the editor, and so on. The periods covered ranged from 1990 to 2003. Again, the citations were those that referred favorably to a view or fact provided by a think tank. The researchers used this information to calculate a right- vs. left-wing indicator for each media outlet -- effectively, an ADA rating. The assumption is that media outlets that refer favorably to conservative think tanks are reasonably characterized as conservative, whereas those that refer positively to liberal think tanks are plausibly labeled as liberal. The final product (in a preliminary table provided by the authors) was a list of computed ADA ratings for the media outlets.

On the conservative end, Fox News Special Report came out with a rating of 27; that is, 12 points more conservative than the 39 of the median member of the House. The only other right-of-center outlet was The Washington Times, at 34.

On the liberal end, Newsweek had an astonishing rating of 72 -- that's 33 points more liberal than the House median. Other highly liberal outlets included The New York Times, Time magazine, the CBS Evening News, USA Today, and NBC Nightly News. These scores ranged from 62 to 64, about 25 points above the House median. For viewers seeking truly "fair and balanced" reporting, the best outlets were ABC Good Morning America and NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. The ADA scores for these programs were 39 and 41, respectively. Places moderately left of center were CNN's NewsNight with Aaron Brown (49), The Washington Post (53), NPR's Morning Edition (55) and ABC WorldNews Tonight (55).

Because of problems in data collection, the list excluded The Wall Street Journal, but it will be added soon. Also excluded is talk radio, which seems to have a conservative bent. Bottom line: The Groseclose-Milyo study shows the media are skewed substantially to the left of the typical member of Congress. Thus, if the opinions of viewers and readers are similar to those of their representatives, the media slant is far to the left of that of most of their customers.

Robert J. Barro is a professor of economics at Harvard University and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution ( rjbweek@harvard.edu)

Damnit

There was another thread not too long ago about this same topic, and I stil believe what I said in that thread...

I firmly believe that there is no conservative or liberal media bias. What it comes down to is self-interest. If it makes a better story or pays better to have a conservative slant, then it will be so. Likewise if you get better ratings and more attention with a liberal slant, then they will do it. It's about what the motivation is. It's not to be conservative or liberal, it's to sell more news than the other guy, or get more exposure than your competitor.
So I think the reality is that the media seems to be more liberal in some cases and more conservative in others, depending on how it plays or spins better at any given moment.

Interesting to note that both Tim Groseclose (author of the study) and Robert Barro (author of Business Week story) have been fellows at the conservative Hoover Foundation.

Maybe this thread should be renamed "Bias in Reporting on Media Bias".

Perhaps we ask for more 'liberal' think tanks for interviews because they more often provide newer ideas? I mean, its not like there's much exciting and cutting edge coming from the conservative side of these things. Not to say that the 'liberal' ideas are better, but hey, we haven't heard them all as many times before.

I disagree. Look at the rise of right wing radio. Look at the rise of Fox News, and the decline of other forms of news. Look at the decline in many major news papers. If this was the case, then why was there such a disproportionate number of negative articles about Bush during the election cycle, and a disproportionately higher number of positive articles pertaining to Kerry? It would seem that so far as mass media goes, popularity has lied on the conservative side of things, yet the mass media has not adjusted to that, and coincidentally, their businesses are suffering from it.

And I never understood why people who own media corporations are inherently conservative. Never got that one at all.

I get my news from all over. Mainstream, left field, right field.

And if a story was truly conservative based on party lines that headlines would read, "We need more prayer in school!" or something like that. I could see there being slant depending on the writer, the editor, the producer and the owner. That is an uphill battle for any storyand its going to slant a millions different ways once it gets through all those filters.

Besides the obvious?