Sidebar: Yet ANOTHER Reason for More Republican Fact-checking

And Another Reason I don't believe in the "Liberal Media"

(AND Things You won't see at those Anti-PolitiFact Blog Sites)

As soon as I posted "Another Reason For More Republican Fact-checking" the other day, I got yet another fine surprise from the Daily Beast (via Yahoo News) as a follow-up: yet another study, by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which reported:

During the bruising Republican primaries, there was one candidate whose coverage was more relentlessly negative than the rest. In fact, he did not enjoy a single week where positive treatment by the media outweighed the negative.

His name is Barack Obama.

That is among the findings of a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a Washington nonprofit that examined 52 key newspaper, television, radio, and Web outlets.

“Day in and day out, he was criticized by the entire Republican field on a variety of policies,” Mark Jurkowitz, the group’s associate director, says of Obama. “And he was inextricably linked to events that generated negative coverage”—including rising gas prices, the ailing economy, and the renewed debate over his health care law.

In short, while the president was being hammered on both fronts, his message was somewhat drowned out by the volume of news coverage surrounding the GOP candidates.

As my recent Politi-Score analysis of Mitt Romney's rulings revealed, many of his statements concentrated on "hammering" Obama and his policies as noted in the above quote, with the end result of bringing down his overall "truthfulness."   The study also evidences the reality of there being so many of these type of  "Candidate Bio" (Obama) statements being checked.  And it doesn't seem that PolitiFact's "setting the record straight" with many of the claims it found misleading and false (as well as the other fact-checkers) had much effect.

Overall, it was no contest. From Jan. 2 through April 15, Romney’s coverage was 39 percent positive, 32 percent negative, and 29 percent neutral, the researchers found. Obama’s coverage was 18 percent positive, 34 percent negative, and 34 percent neutral. That means Romney’s depiction by the media was more than twice as positive as the president’s. So much for liberal bias.

So, consider this the next time you see those signs that say "Don't Believe the Liberal Media" often seen at some of the Republican presidential campaign events.  Because if the coverage of Obama has been found to be so negative, maybe those sign-holders are doing themselves a dis-service, because by extension they're telling anyone (i.e., swing-voters) reading the sign that what the media says about Obama is probably NOT true. 

Sidebar: Another Reason for More Republican Fact-checking

(...And Why I don’t believe in the “Liberal Media”)

Since I’ve started tracking PolitiFact’s Truth-o-Meter rulings, I’ve generally described an ongoing higher percentage of Republicans fact-checked as compared to Democrats. For example, when PolitiFact hit Ruling Number 5,000 this February, it was determined just over 53% of the 5,000 rulings were on Republicans /Conservatives, while only 39% were attributable to Democrats/Liberals. For the first quarter of 2012, it’s been even higher with almost 61% Republicans /Conservatives’ statements checked versus 34% Democrats/Liberals.

A recent article by David Ferguson of “The Raw Story” reports the results of a study (by media watchdog group FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy in Media and Reporting) on “guests featured in one-on-one interviews and roundtable discussions on the four main Sunday morning talk shows.” This is often where PolitiFact finds its “selections” of “facts” to investigate. And lo and behold, which party tends to dominate this format, which might very well explain the larger number?

…[The breakdown of guests were from] the four main Sunday morning talk shows, ABC’s “This Week,” NBC’s “Meet the Press,” CBS’s “Face the Nation” and “Fox News Sunday” from June 2011 to March 2012. The results skewed heavily Republican, white and male, with only token representation by blacks and Latinos, and virtually no appearances by guests outside of one of the two national political parties.

Extra! points to November 6 of 2011 as typical of the ideological breakdown of the Sunday shows. CBS’s Bob Schieffer welcomed “a cross section of Republicans” to discuss the issues facing the primary that week. On ABC’s “This Week,” lone liberal Arianna Huffington was featured alongside conservatives Matthew Dowd, George Will and Niall Ferguson. “Meet the Press” featured Republican operative Alex Castellanos with Wall Street Journal conservative scribe Kimberly Strassel alongside a pair of middle-of-the-road Beltway journalists.

The study showed that one-on-one interviews with policy makers and other national figures, which are the ratings bread and butter of the talk shows, featured 166 Republicans to Democrats’ 70. Roundtable discussions welcomed 189 Republican guests and 109 Democrats.

It’s worth noting, also, that the liberals typically presented on these programs are mostly centrists with very few out-and-out progressives, leading FAIR to quip that “corporate media’s idea of a debate is conservative ideologues matched by centrist-oriented journalists.”

The increase in Republican coverage in 2011-12 seems to have a similar explanation to mine for increased fact-checking of Republicans:

It could be argued that during this period the nation has been in the throes of a long and competitive Republican primary race, hence the heavy percentages of Republicans and right wing operatives. A similar study done by the group Media Matters during the 2004 Democratic primary race still found 56 percent of the guests chosen for the Sunday morning shows were Republicans to 44 percent Democrats.

So it appears what’s needed is an off-election-year study to make a comparison. In the meantime what this all brings to mind for me is when certain conservatives I know speak of the “Obama News Network” or that perennial favorite the “lame stream media.” Which is to say, this is just one more of the many facts that doesn’t seem to fit their narrative.

Sidebar: On Media Bias--Guest Blog (3)

By Paul Waldman (written June 17)

Note:  This title of this review is called "Tomorrow's Bogus Liberal Bias Claim Today" as posted by Paul Waldman and is the third part of a series about the book by Tim Groseclose as pictured directed at those who might view it as definitive proof of liberal media bias.

I hesitated somewhat to write about this, but since this book -- Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind -- will almost certainly be promoted across the conservative media and become a hit, I figured I had no choice. Although the book has not been released yet, I have read a study the author, Tim Groseclose, conducted on the subject, which sounds as though it was the basis for the book, so there are some things I can say.

Groseclose is a political scientist at UCLA, and in 2005, he and a co-author (an economist) published this study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, in which they claim to document widespread liberal bias in the media. I detailed some of its problems back when I was at Media Matters for America, but it's worth recounting briefly. This study was perhaps the most extraordinary methodological train wreck I have ever encountered outside of a freshman term paper. That it was published in a peer-reviewed journal can only be explained by the fact that it was an economics journal, and presumably, the referees and editors, like the authors themselves, not only had no idea how media analysis is done, but seemed unaware that lots of scholars had approached the issue with a variety of methods. To quote myself:

Standard scholarly practice dictates the assembly of a literature review as part of any published study, and meta-analyses, as they gather together the findings of multiple studies, are particularly critical to literature reviews. That Groseclose and Milyo overlooked not only the Journal of Communication meta-analysis, but also the 59 studies it surveyed, raises questions about the seriousness with which they conducted this study.

Indeed, they seem to be unaware that an academic discipline of media studies even exists. Their bibliography includes works by right-wing media critics such as Media Research Center founder and president L. Brent Bozell III and Accuracy in Media founder Reed Irvine (now deceased), as well as an article from the right-wing website WorldNetDaily. But Groseclose and Milyo failed to cite a single entry from any of the dozens of respected scholarly journals of communication and media studies in which media bias is a relatively frequent topic of inquiry -- nothing from Journal of Communication, Communication Research, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Political Communication, or any other media studies journal.

This is relevant because the promotion of this book is going to rest on the idea that it's a serious, objective, scholarly work. Yet in addition to ignoring the dozens of studies on media bias in the apparent belief that they were the first ones to ever attempt to address the topic quantitatively, Groseclose and his co-author used the most bizarre methodology I've ever encountered to come up with their assertion of liberal bias. See if you can follow: They took members of Congress' ideology scores from Americans for Democratic Action; searched the Congressional Record to see which think tanks each member cited in floor speeches; assigned ideological scores to each think tank based on who cited them on the floor; then counted how often the think tanks were quoted in news sources. If a news outlet quoted think tanks cited more often by liberal members, the outlet had "liberal bias." That's it.

Sidebar: On Media Bias--Guest Blog (2)

By Mark Wylie (written August 7)

Note:  This is an Amazon.com review of the book "Turn Left: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind" by Tim Groseclose.  Mark's was one of fifteen reviews.  Two of those fifteen reviews were by individuals who had received advance copies.  Thirty-one of seventy-six people who read Mark's review found it "helpful."  This is being posted as the second of a series directed at those who might view his book and research as definitive proof of liberal media bias.

In this book Tim Groseclose, a political scientist at UCLA, tackles the issue of supposed "liberal bias" in the news media. He reaches conclusions that are very provocative, and which will be warmly greeted by conservatives; however, his analysis is flawed, even crippled, by numerous, serious failings. His conclusions should be rejected.

Let me start by briefly summarizing the core research Groseclose did, which was originally published in a journal article co-written with economist Jeffrey Milyo. Groseclose and Milyo first assembled two large databases: one of citations of 200 political organizations (Groseclose constantly uses the term think tanks, but many of them are activist groups like the NAACP or the NRA) in speeches made in Congressional debate, the other of citations of the same organizations by 20 news media outlets. Their next step is to estimate "political quotients" for the think tanks, using the Americans for Democratic Action voting ratings for Senators and Representatives to impute an ADA rating for the organizations they cite. Finally, they construct an algorithm to compare the citation patterns of news organizations to those of Senators and Representatives, and from that they estimate the "slant quotients"--again, these are imputed ADA ratings--of the 20 media outlets.

The basic conclusions they reach are repeated in the book. Groseclose and Milyo find that almost every media outlet they studied has a "slant quotient" of well over 50, which they claim is a leftward slant (more on this issue below). In the book Groseclose goes further, and concludes that the "bias" of the media significantly impacts American elections, by swinging 8-10% of the vote to the Democrats; he claims that without media "bias," John McCain would have won in a landslide in 2008 with 56% of the vote.

So what's wrong here? Plenty. A full discussion of the shortcomings of this book would far exceed the word limit for reviews. There have been some significant online critiques of Groseclose's work, and I encourage readers who want to learn more to track down those written by Andrew Gelman, Brendan Nyhan and Paul Waldman, in particular. I'm going to focus on three basic criticisms:

1) One big problem with Groseclose's basic method concerns his use of the ADA voting ratings as a measure of ideology. Not only is he assuming that we can numerically measure political ideology at all by doing this, he is making the assumption that you can capture all major differences in ideology with a one-dimensional statistical measure.

To see why he's wrong let's do a little hypothetical exercise. Suppose we have two members of Congress, Ms. A and Mr. B. Ms. A is a consistent, principled libertarian; Mr. B is an equally principled communitarian. On economic issues, Ms. A almost never votes in favor of government intervention in the economy, while Mr. B is much more likely to vote in favor. Likewise, on social issues, Ms. A will vote to maximize individual freedom, while Mr. B is likely to vote in favor of many government limits on individual freedom. To a liberal group, like the ADA, or a conservative group, like the American Conservative Union, both Ms. A and Mr. B are going to be perceived as voting the "right" way about 50% of the time; they would tend to have voting scores that were about equal.

Sidebar: On Media Bias--Guest Blog (1)

By Andrew Gelman of The Monkey Cage (July 29, 2011)

Respected political scientist Tim Groseclose just came out with a book, “Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind.” I was familiar with Groseclose’s article (with Jeffrey Milyo) on media bias that came out several years ago—it was an interesting study but I was not convinced by its central claim that they were measuring an absolute level of bias—and then recently heard about this new book in the context of some intemperate things Groseclose said in a interview on the conservative Fox TV network.

Groseclose’s big conclusion is that in the absence of media bias, the average American voter would be positioned at around 25 on a 0-100 scale, where 0 is a right-wing Republican and 100 is a left-wing Democrat. (Seeing as the number line is conventionally drawn from left to right, I think it would make more sense for 0 to represent the left and 100 to be on the right, but I guess it’s too late for him to change now.) Groseclose places the average voter now at around 50, so, by his assessment, media bias is a huge deal.

After some further blog discussion, I became curious enough to head over to the local Barnes & Noble and take a look at the book.

Before I get to the details, let me again link to Brendan Nyhan’s thorough methodological discussion of the Groseclose and Milyo article from 2004.

Journalism as one of many institutions that affect politics

Stepping away from the data for a moment, it makes sense that the news media would generally fall on the left side of the political spectrum. Whether this is good or bad is another question, but newspapers generally seem to position themselves on the side of the underdog. Consider, for example, the slogan that a newspaper should “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

Another way to think about media bias is to think about the communication industry as a whole. I imagine that “journalism,” taken as a whole, leans left, while “public relations,” taken as a whole, leans right.

And if most of the news media in a country moved from journalism to public relations (as in Berlusconi’s Italy), I could imagine it could make a difference in the country’s politics.

The question, “What would public opinion be like if journalists expressed views comparable to the average American?”, while interesting, could perhaps be combined with similar questions such as, What would U.S. politics be like if there were no public relations industry? Or, What would U.S. politics be like if campaign contributions were given equally to the left and the right? Or even, What would U.S. politics be like if religious leaders were, on average, in the political center?

Tchotchkes: Media Bias (to Republicans)

Oops, just had to get this one in before I signed off until mid-June!