report claims fox news and drudge to be most unbiased...WTF???

[Gato Moteado]

i just got into a discussion with a couple of co-workers that are staunch bushies. the conversation went to the media and these guys claimed there was a report done by the political science department at UCLA that concluded that fox news and the drudge report were the most unbiased sources of news. i said i didn't believe it and they emailed me this:

http://mason.gmu.edu/~atabarro/MediaBias.doc

has everyone seen this? i feel like i'm in a parallel universe. i mean i know there are plenty of studies that prove the opposite, but how in the world could any sane person come to these conclusions?

[TwentyFive]

1. Didn't you get the memo? We do live in a parallel universe.

up IS the new down.

[sui generis]

2. oh yeah

and Ann Coulter makes Mother Theresa look like the affable Eva Braun.

[aquart]

3. Who funded the study?

[Gato Moteado]

17. good question

i'd like to know.

[d_b]

4. That's right up there with saddam's yellow cake.

[Kali]

5. one word

Snopes

[KurtNYC]

6. Were they looking only for left wing bias?

if so the headline makes sense.

On edit: I think I got my answer... Do the major media outlets in the U.S. have a liberal bias? Few questions evoke stronger opinions, and we cannot think of a more important question to which objective statistical techniques can lend their service.

[Redleg]

12. Good find.

George Mason U. seems to have a lot of conservative among the faculty.

[Cocoa]

7. what part of "fair and balanced" don't you understand?

[Q3JR4]

8. This just in! Report on the bias in reporting BIASED! n/t.

[gbwarming]

18. No kidding! Read this critique (Geoff Nunberg).

(Edit: This critique was apparently be Geoff Nunberg. There's a reponse by G&C linked to the page too)

In summary, the method they chose was strange, and the execution deeply flawed. The critique is fairly long and damaging.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001169.html
...
Groseclose and Milyo describe their method as providing an "objective measure of the slant of the news." They proceded in several steps. First, they took a list of "200 of the most prominent think tanks" and looked in the Congressional Record for the period between between 1993 and 2002 to see how often a member of Congress cited each of them for a fact or opinion. Then they assigned a rating to each group that corresponded to the average ADA rating of the members who cited it. On this basis, for example, the conservative Family Research Council was assigned an ADA rating of 6, and the liberal Economic Policy Institute received an ADA rating of 72.

G & M divided the groups in their survey into liberal and conservative sets, according to whether their derived ADA ratings fell north or south of the House and Senate average ADA rating of 42.2. They then looked to see how often groups from each set were cited by news shows on various media sources, effectively giving the media source a point on one or the other side for each sentence of each citation of a group. On that basis, they calculated a derived ADA rating for the media source.
Their results showed, they say, that all the media sources they looked at were far to the left of the center, apart from the Drudge Report and Fox News' "Special Report," which was slightly to the right of center -- its ADA ranking, by their estimate, is equivalent to that of moderate Republicans like Olympia Snowe, and far more liberal than that of the average Republican. (Groseclose and Milyo didn't consider other Fox shows, since they say they were interested "strictly in the news stories of the outlets," the assumption being that a station can run wall-to-wall O'Reilly without being accused of being biased.)

Their conclusion: the media have a "strong liberal bias."
Conceptual Pitfalls

What's wrong with this picture? Just two things: its conception and its execution. Let's begin with the assumption that underlies Groseclose and Milyo's assignment of ratings to the various groups they looked at: if a group is cited by a liberal legislator, it's liberal; if it's cited by a conservative legislator, it's conservative.
(lots more...)

[Gato Moteado]

21. excellent!

thank you.

keep 'em coming if you got 'em. i'm gonna smash these guys on this one.

[sangh0]

9. You forgot the Golden Rule for debating idiots

MAKE THEM PROVE IT!!!

Only a fool would pay any attention to something another fools says without proof.

[K-W]

10. These studies are worthless.

I dont have time to look over thier methodology, but I can assure you the study is utterly invalid for at least several major methodological errors.

Call it a hunch.

[Cocoa]

14. they've been doing this since Nixon

Pat Buchanan I believe was part of the long-term project to discredit network news, and they used academic studies to do it. Studies that were proven worthless, but which got a lot of buzz, and sold a lot of books.

[immoderate]

16. I took a quick look.

Methodologically flawed was my first impression. See below.

--IMM

[Cannabian]

11. Send him this

http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Iraq/Media_10_02_03_Press.pdf

on edit - full report found here

http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Iraq/Media_10_02_03_Report.pdf

[Gato Moteado]

20. ah....i had forgotten all about that study

thanks for reminding me.

any other studies that anyone can think of will be greatly appreciated.

[Soopercali]

13. Look at the URL.

It's from George Mason University, breeding ground for wingnuts-in-training. It's obviously an elaborate hoax.

Come on. You think you wouldn't have heard of this in the media if it were true?

[immoderate]

15. On first glance, this study is nonsense.

Just first glance. But I compare it to the study that showed that the media had more negative stories for Bush and more positive stories for Kerry. Biased? Well...

That would be like saying the media is biased because they have more positive stories about MisterRogers and more nagative stories about Charles Manson.

--IMM

[MARALE]

19. I looked at it

It is based on the average of how many times they use sentences from liberal/conservative think tanks and also base it on the average liberal/conservative views of the house. We know that the house is very conservative and of course the news agencies seem to be bias liberal comparitively. Also they seem to have a long amount of time they are covering and really they are not doing the study objectively. I see a lot of dicrepancies on the data. You can make anything look the way that you want if you pick the right data.

[librechik]

22. Haven't you read the PNAC dictionary?

"unbiased" now means "support our President without question 100%"

silly.

[Gato Moteado]

23. i really am starting to realize that you can't argue with these people...

...because they're not sane.

when he told me that a study found that the only two fair and balanced news sources were fox and drudge i didn't know how to respond because it was so utterly ridiculous. now i have come to the conclusion that these people, despite their educations, have no sanity. that's all i can figure.