My apologies for forgetting how I stumbled across this report. It's just over a year old from UCLA and purports to be the first to find a truly objective way to assess media bias. Bias is line of study that is difficult to explore in an unbiased manner, so the researchers deserve applause for making the attempt, though I'm sure there are other ways to over come it--possibly yielding different results.
They looked at the citation patterns of major news sources (whether they referred to interest groups and think tanks that tend to lean to the left) and compared these patterns to members of Congress that also referred to those groups. They then assigned the ADA score given to the member of Congress to the media source.
What is an ADA score you ask? It's the score that the Americans for Democratic Action assign to members of Congress based on an analysis of their voting record. 100 means most liberal, 0 means most conservative. Many groups do similar studies. It can often be used as guide for whom to support and whom to oppose in an election.
That's (roughly) the methodology, here are some results. The results, as should be expected, confirm some hunches and disprove others.
- 18 of 20 media outlets leaned to the left, but
- the Wall Street Journal news pages (not the editorial pages) were most liberal, followed by
#2 - CBS' "Evening News"
#3 - The New York Times
#4 - The Los Angeles Times
The most conservative source of news were:
- Fox News' "Special Report With Brit Hume"
- The Washington Times
The most centrist sources were
- the "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer"
- CNN's "NewsNight With Aaron Brown"
- ABC's "Good Morning America"
A huge surprise was that the Drudge Report, an online news source, scored liberal but the authors believe that that has less to do with Matt Drudge's own positions than with those of the stories he links to.
The authors suggest that: "If viewers spent an equal amount of time watching Fox's 'Special Report' as ABC's 'World News' and NBC's 'Nightly News,' then they would receive a nearly perfectly balanced version of the news."
Fine, but what's the fun in that?
