65
7
|
Posted by HockeyGod Promoted 380 days 15 hours ago 2627 views
editorial
Politics / US Politics
|
26 comments
|
|
Anybody who's watched "faux news" may claim bias, but is there any evidence?
A big fan of the book Freakonomics, I couldn't help but pick up a book called Freedomnomics today when I saw it in the Seattle - Tacoma airport. If you haven't heard of Freedomnomics, it's a rebuttal to the popular Freakonomics book. If you haven't heard of either, don't worry - it's not that important.
I managed to finish the book on my trip from Seattle to Detroit (which, for some reason requires a stop in Dallas.) The author did a great job of arguing some of the main points of Freakonomics - at least good enough to cause me to scrutinize them.
One of the topics he discusses is political bias in the media. I know, many of you are thinking about Fox News right now - so am I - but he's talking about all media in general.
While many of us think that there's a big republican influence in the news, Lott concludes that there's actually a democratic bias. He gives a few reasons for this conclusions.
Firstly, he shows that most journalists are liberals - a fact that's very hard to doubt when you look at voter registrations among journalists.
Secondly he shows that of all the Fox employees who donated to political parties, over 80% donated democrat. This would imply that any bias would have to be mandated from above - but there's no evidence of that (as if there would be even it if were true.)
Perhaps the most important factor at play here is the inability to objectively define bias. For example, If I were to talk bad about Senator Obama many republicans would think I'm talking the truth while democrats would scream bias. If I were to say Bush is the greatest president ever, hard core creationist republicans would smile and everybody else would have me committed. (As they know Jimmy Carter was the best.)
Lott then did a study to try to objectify the bias. He took headlines from the current administration and the previous administration and limited them to headlines about economic statistics. The theory was that since numbers aren't subjective, he'd simply have to count the positive spun headlines vs the negative spun headlines.
His findings were that headlines were more positively spun during democratic regimes, and negatively spun during republican regimes. This lead him to conclude that there IS in fact a democratic bias.
Not so fast though! Anybody involved in the media (or who has read the Fark.com book) can tell you that most journalists don't write about what they want or feel - they write what sells papers. We can't forget that newspapers are a business too - a business dependent upon selling papers.
To sell more papers, you have to print stories that people want to read. So does it come as a surprise that headlines are pro democrat during a time when republican approval ratings are at an all time low? It shouldn't. It's simply journalists writing headlines geared toward mass public interest.
It seems that Lott may have committed the economist's cardinal sin: confusing correlation and causation. It's hard to say if there actually is a political bias in the media. Clearly some sort of accurate research is needed. It's also unclear as to why Fox is perceived as ultra conservative when most of the employees are liberal. If anything, at least I've given you 3 excellent book recommendations.
What do you think about bias in the media?
Related Links:The Truth About Michigan's Proposal 2 The Mechanism of Media in Politics Kennedy Vs. The Federal Reserve Board, Inc. Why Not to Ride Your Bike on Acid at 1:30 in The Morning A Letter I Wrote After The Bailout