From the Christian Science Monitor: Pope Francis calls out journalists: Does the media needlessly foster fear?

The media can shape opinions about current events, does it so proper;y?

For our look at media bias.

- Click here for the article.

The Vatican’s Pope Francis has strived to be a voice of peace and unity on a continent struggling to deal with a refugee crisis. On Thursday he spoke out once again, this time against mass media, which he says has the power to shape the public’s response to that challenge.

During an address to Italy’s national journalism guild, Pope Francis told leaders of the industry that the press has the power to act like “terrorists” when it relies on gossip and rumors, particularly while covering humanitarian crises such as Europe’s influx of migrants. Yet while studies show that the press can help shape public dialogue, some experts say that the public opinion also plays a major role in shaping the tone that is reflected in the press.

“The bottom line is that there is a complex interaction between media, public opinion, and policymaking. To some extent, they’re indistinguishable from one another,” says Oxford University media analyst Robert McNeil. “They all drive one another.”

. . . As Europe struggles to understand and manage its uneasy new role as social support provider to thousands of migrants and refugees, the press plays a major role in educating existing citizens about their new neighbors.

And while some news providers have done an excellent job maintaining balance and showing humanity, according to Georgetown University refugee expert Rochelle Davis, others are showcasing Europe’s worst fears.

In 2013, the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, in Britain, combed through hundreds of news articles to quantitatively examine press coverage of the surge of refugees pouring into Europe by analyzing the frequency of words used in articles about the subject.

The resulting report found that the word “illegal” was most frequently used to modify the word “immigrants” in British publications, whereas “failed” was most often used to describe asylum seekers. “Jobs” and “economic” were also high-frequency words, perhaps speaking to British concerns about the job market due to high rates of immigration.

Thoughts on Media Bias

If you have the stamina, this is a terrific analysis of a book which purports to measure liberal bias among journalists. It also touches on the ideological bias of various other institutions and professions, and perhaps most important, how we determine whether they are in fact biased. How does one measure bias?

Another World

As if a segment of society lives in a completely different world than the author of the post below, Foxnews tells us not only that the recession is a media myth designed to elect a Democrat in the White House, but that media stories are actually creating the depression.

A Study of Media Bias

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?

Et Tu Wiki?

I had no idea, but apparently I have been sending you biased information by linking to pages from Wikipedia. We all know that the infomration can be factually suspect because it is produced by readers. I link anyway because the better articles themselves link to worthy outside sources, but apparently the antire site is part of the liberally biased media.

To the rescue comes Conservapedia with, one assumes, fair and balanced definitions of words and terms and such like.

We can all rest easier now.