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I had extensively quoted the UCLA News article on December 14th which announced the upcoming piece and my technically-challenged inability to excerpt from pdf means that I must refer you to Strange Fictions and to Abelard for some direct quotes from the 62-page pdf document such as:
contrary to the prediction of the typical firm-location model, we find a a systematic liberal bias of the U.S. media. This is echoed by three other studies— Hamilton [2004], Lott and Hassett [2004], and Sutter [2004], the only empirical studies of media bias by economists of which we are aware.
No surprise there
All of the news outlets except Fox News’ Special Report and the Washington Times received a score to the left of the average member of Congress. And a few outlets, including the New York Times and CBS Evening News, were closer to the average Democrat in Congress than the center. These findings refer strictly to the news stories of the outlets. That is, we omitted editorials, book reviews, and letters to the editor from our sample.
So basically 18 of the 20 media outlets are left of the average Congressperson and the NYT and CBS are virtually Democratic institutions for all practical purposes.
Suffice it to say that the study took three years to compile the glaringly obvious fact [to a disinterested observer] that the privately-owned American media leans to the left at about an ADA rating of 62.8 percent. For those lucky enough to have escaped living inside the Beltway-Boston Corridor and the Left Coast, this revelation concerning the distortion of political reality on TV and in the elite national news outlets is hardly surprising.
The QJE text notes that six percent [6%] of Washington correspondents voted for Bush in 1992, as opposed to 12% in the ninth CD in Berkeley, California and 19% in the sixth CD in Cambridge, MA. Around ninety percent [90%] voted for Clinton and two percent for Perot.
In 2004, the NYT found that only eight percent of all Washington correspondents thought that Bush would make a better President than Kerry, versus fifty-one percent of American voters.
For every Washington reporter that contributed to Bush’s campaign, NINETY-THREE gave to the Kerry campaign.
Some of the Quarterly article’s quotes are genuinely [as well as unintentionally] hilarious. One has to read Howell Raines flatulent tribute to his own objectivity to realize the scope of his catastrophic failure as NYT Chief Editor.
Paul Krugman is a failed analyst of the media as well as a bust as an economist.
Al Franken is a humorist, and he is unintentionally funny in touting how hard the elite outlets of the electronic and print media attempt to be fair.
But the pointed hat and the chair in the corner of the classroom belong to perennial political hack, and darling of the Volvo/brie/chardonnay set, Bill Moyers. Bill, whose recent arrest in Vermont for driving while intoxicated was covered up by the MSM, lost his swizzle stick in his triple martini when he said the MSM was interested only in the bottom line while the "right-wing press" followed an "ideological agenda."
Yes, Bill. Another mimosa or three for the road and too bad about getting the bum’s rush out of PBS. [Or maybe Bill's "bubble" is inside a champagne flute?]
BTW, new left-wing PBS NOW host FNU Brancaccio is zestfully carrying on Bill's slanted tradition para sinistra, already getting reprimanded publicly by PBS Ombudsman William Getler last week for willfully neglecting to cite information that might have balanced a skewed report on NO and Katrina. Go after that Order of Lenin, Brancaccio!
Surprisingly, aberrations like NOW to the contrary, overall the public PBS and NPR are rated less liberal than the private media, although not by much [61%].
The biggest surprise is that the most liberal of all media outlets is theWSJ, with CBS Evening News, the NYT and LAT all close behind at 2,3,4.
Although as mentioned above, the only two out of the twenty major outlets who scored right of center were Fox News Brit Hume and the Washington Times, Brit Hume's TV news was almost dead-center near the ADA 50 yard line.
Another surprise, the Drudgereport scores left of center, probably because many of the stories it links are to dogma-laden leftist chronicles like the NYT, LAT, and WaPo.
As mentioned above, the study will appear soon in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
The University of Missouri was a major participant in the study, led by UCLA, and elaborate precautions---including funding safeguards---were taken to ensure an objective overview.
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