Media Bias in The United States - Liberal Bias

Liberal Bias

Liberal bias in the media occurs when liberal ideas have undue influence on the coverage or selection of news stories.

Conservative critics of the media say some bias exists within a wide variety of media channels including network news shows of CBS, ABC, and NBC, cable channels CNN, MSNBC and Current TV, as well as major newspapers, news-wires, and radio outlets, especially CBS News, Newsweek, and The New York Times. These arguments intensified when it was revealed that the Democratic Party received a total donation of $1,020,816, given by 1,160 employees of the three major broadcast television networks (NBC, CBS, ABC), while the Republican Party received only $142,863 via 193 donations. Both of these figures represent donations made in 2008.

A study cited frequently by critics of a "liberal media bias" in American journalism is The Media Elite, a 1986 book co-authored by political scientists Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda Lichter. They surveyed journalists at national media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the broadcast networks. The survey found that most of these journalists were Democratic voters whose attitudes were well to the left of the general public on a variety of topics, including such hot-button social issues as abortion, affirmative action, and gay rights. Then they compared journalists' attitudes to their coverage of controversial issues such as the safety of nuclear power, school busing to promote racial integration, and the energy crisis of the 1970s. The authors concluded that journalists' coverage of controversial issues reflected their own attitudes, and the predominance of political liberals in newsrooms therefore pushed news coverage in a liberal direction. They presented this tilt as a mostly unconscious process of like-minded individuals projecting their shared assumptions onto their interpretations of reality.

In a survey conducted by the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1997, 61% of reporters stated that they were members of or shared the beliefs of the Democratic Party. Only 15% say their beliefs were best represented by the Republican Party. This leaves 24% undecided or independent.

A 2002 study by Jim A. Kuypers of Dartmouth College, Press Bias and Politics, investigated the issue of media bias. In this study of 116 mainstream US papers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle, Kuypers stated that the mainstream press in America tends to favor liberal viewpoints. They argued that reporters who they thought were expressing moderate or conservative points of view were often labeled as holding a minority point of view. Kuypers said he found liberal bias in reporting a variety of issues including race, welfare reform, environmental protection, and gun control.

A joint study by the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University and the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that viewers believe that liberal media bias can be found in television news by networks such as CNN. These findings concerning a perception of liberal bias in television news – particularly at CNN – are also reported by other sources.

A study by political scientists Tim Groseclose of UCLA and Jeff Milyo of the University of Missouri at Columbia attempted to quantify bias among news outlets using statistical models. The research highlighted surprising conclusions; the news pages of The Wall Street Journal are more liberal than The New York Times, and the news reporting of PBS is to the right of most mainstream media. The report also states that the news media show a fair degree of centrism, since all but one of the outlets studied are, from an ideological point of view, between the average Democrat and average Republican in Congress. This may be because organizations perceived to be extremist may have difficulty getting access to news material such as interviews.

The study met with criticism from media outlets and academics, including the Wall Street Journal, and Media Matters. Criticisms included:

• Different lengths of time studied per media (CBS News was studied for 12 years while the Wall Street Journal was studied for four months).
• Lack of context in quoting sources (sources quoted were automatically assumed to be supporting the article)
• Lack of balance in sources (Liberal sources such as the NAACP didn't have conservative or counter sources that could add balance)
• Flawed political positions of sources (Sources such as the NRA and RAND corporation were considered "liberal" while sources such as the American Civil Liberties Union were "conservative".)

Mark Liberman, a professor of Computer Science and the Director of Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania, critiqued the statistical model used in this study. The model used by Groseclose and Milyo assumes that conservative politicians do not care about the ideological position of think tanks they cite, while liberal ones do. Professor Liberman characterizes this unsupported assumption as preposterous, and argues that it leads to implausible conclusions.