Media Bias Analysis

How bias is your media? And if at all, can you determine to what degree and in what direction of the spectrum? That is the question that economists, political analysts and the American public have been trying to answer for years. The two articles that I analyzed are in response to studies, and a subsequent book, written by Tim Groseclose called Left Turn: How liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind. Both articles review the findings of Groseclose’s book, but do so in very different ways. The first text I annotated is from a review symposium written by Brendan Nyhan, Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College, simply titled “Does the US Media Have a Liberal Bias?” Following my readings of Nyhan, I analyzed an article and podcast
Groseclose, with partner Jeff Milyo (hereafter GM), published a study that created two quotients to help us understand which news outlets have a liberal slant, which have a conservative slant, and how those favoritisms compare to their respective Politicians slant. They began with what was easy to compute: the political leanings of Politicians based on roll call votes in Congress. They created a linear scale from 0 to 100 to quantify how far a person or group deviates from center. 0 being far right (conservative) and 100 being far left (liberal). Knowing they are strong conservatives, to keep their research as unbiased as possible they even let the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a liberal interest group, pick the votes for them. They assigned each Politician a number, based on what they call the Political Quotient (PQ). The next step of their study was to cite more than 150 think tanks and interest groups and assign them a PQ. Having 20 of the nation’s top media outlets under close scrutiny, they could start to measure media bias. They did so by simply counting how many times the names of these think tanks and groups were cited throughout the news. So, the more a newspaper or corporation mentioned a particular group, based on the groups PQ, it would hike up the score of what they called the Slant Quotient (SQ). Their findings were that 18 of the 20 media outlets were left leaning, stating a
There are nine “authors” throughout the article that give incite on media bias and what role it plays in political election. Among those is Groseclose himself, who calculates his PQ to be a 13, strongly conservative. The political backgrounds of these debaters portray two things to the audience. One, they are all highly educated in the world of politics, economics, and journalism which provides credibility to their discussion. However, they are all conservative leaning people, except Andrew Rosenthal, which gives the audience a sense of bias throughout the discussion. Writer Steve Levitt starts the transcript by clarifying that “Measuring media bias is a really difficult endeavor because unlike what economists usually study, which are numbers and quantities, media bias is all expressed in words.” Although the meat of this article is informal, the author provides the audience with some quantitative tables and lists in the introduction to promote the logical appeal of their argument. To simplify the argument they all agree on a common goal of media outlets that can best be summed up by Mathew Gentzkow, “what the people making the decisions at the newspapers are doing is trying to sell newspapers.” The fact that they all can concur that the biggest thing driving political slant is the consumer makes the audience feel as though it is fact, and common