Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Liberal Media Bias?

According to UCLA political science professor Tim Groseclose, there is a systematic leftward bias among major US media outlets. Groseclose came to this conclusion by basically counting how many times a particular paper refers to work by conservative think tanks and policy groups vs liberal ones, ending up with something called an ADA score, where 100 is very liberal and 0 is very conservative. His results show that of all the major US media outlets, only Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume was right-of-center.

Media OutletADA Score

ABC Good Morning America56
ABC World News Tonight61
CBS Early Show67
CBS Evening News74
CNN NewsNight with Aaron Brown56
Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume40
LA Times70
NBC Nightly News62
NBC Today Show64
New York Times74
Newshour with Jim Lehrer56
Newsweek66
NPR Morning Edition66
Time Magazine65
U.S. News and World Report66
USA Today63
Wall Street Journal85
Washington Post67
Washington Times35


There are a lot of interesting details, so if you're interested I suggest reading the full text. Thanks to Matt for a heads up on the article, years ago.

1 comment:

Laura said...

I think that this study is really interesting. I was actually surprised to read the ADA scores of some of my favorite news media outlets. As someone who i think most would be pretty quick to call a liberal, i was happy to find out that some of my favorite news outlets (namely the news hour with Jim Lehrer, NPR's morning edition, and TIME magazine) are less liberal-leaning than i thought they might be. Now, when people try and discount what I'm saying because of where i got my news, i can just tell them they are wrong.

 
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