Centerfield

Yeah. It doesn't strike me as odd that we'd have a cable news channel that is conservative, nor that it would be quite popular. The proliferation of media outlets makes it likely that we would fragment into different audiences based on how we'd like to view things. And there are more conservatives in our country than liberals -- hence, good ratings.

The odd part is the "fair and balanced" thing. To tilt pretty heavily in one direction, and then call yourself "balanced", requires a fairly willful capacity to disregard reality.

It's part of the in-your-face style of partisan politics today. Not only will we have our opinion, we'll deny that it's an opinion at all. It's just the way it is.

Courts aren't going to grant anyone the exclusive right to claim that they are fair and balanced.

It's just a slogan. What's next? Are they going to sue to stop "all the news that's fit to print" or sue Coke for saying their product is the real thing? No.

This petition is just a PR stunt, a way to get free ink for "Fox is not fair and balanced, we are. "

I think it's a waste of energy.

While I agree that the petition is little more than a PR stunt, I fully believe that Fox brought it on themselves. After all, it is Fox that is trying to copyright the phrase "Fair and Balanced," and Fox that used its association with the phrase in an attempt to stifle Al Franken earlier this year. If anyone is trying to make "Fair and Balanced" into more than a slogan, it is Fox.

I've read the petition, and the tack they are taking is that "fair and balanced," whether mere slogan or copyrighted catchphrase, is false advertising. Maybe you Centerfielders are all too smart to fall for the "Fox is balanced, everything else has a liberal bias" pitch, but I assure you that there are a good number of people in this country who believe just that. Of course, those aren't the kind of people who will be convinced by a court order showing that Fox is neither fair nor balanced... especially when Fox will simply tell them that it is the fault of "activist judges." Commentary posing as news is extremely pernicious, and when it is done as deliberately and as extensively as Fox News does it, it can be dangerous.

I prefer to read my news as opposed to watching it on television, so I don't watch much Fox or CNN unless something important is happening.

But the criticisms I'm hearing about Fox echo seamlessly with the conservative complaints about the "liberal media". Numerous books have been written by defectors who argue that other networks pressure reporters to slant stories to the left.

Fox has many more right-wing opinion shows than other news networks. But those shows are clearly meant to convey an opinion.

As for the daily news coverage, I'm sure Fox leans to the right about as much as the other networks lean to the left. It's impossible for a reporter to keep his bias completely out of a news story. But every reporter I know tries their darndest to do so.

These charges reveal more about the complainer's bias than the news network's.

Anyone who has read Bernard Goldberg's excellent expose' Bias should be able to see what MoveOn is pulling here. FoxNews is a convenient boogeyman for leftists seeking to cover up their total dominance of most other news outlets. For example, the "snide comment" editorial was hardly invented at FoxNews -- its a long-standing staple of Dan Rather's style, in fact.

Of course FoxNews does seem to have a conservative bias that gives lie to its "Fair and Balanced" moniker, but MoveOn.org's selective reporting betrays their own bias. They are big at pooh-poohing media bias even in the face of clear examples from CBS, NBC, ABC, and CNN but when the subject turns to FoxNews, suddenly they convert into believers? Please.

As a moderate, I actually like FoxNews' transparent bias. It provides an essential counterpoint to the more devious bias in the other news outlets. Bias is pervasive in news reporting -- our only hope is to have bias that goes both ways so we can discern the truth that lies in the middle.

I watched a bit of Cal Thomas, et al debating this movie last night on FoxNews. Their basic defense of the network was their reporting wasn't unfairly biased toward conservatives - simply that they have completely fair coverage, and all other broadcast media outlets (the major networks, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC) were so liberal they themselves just look conservative in comparison.

To me that sounds like a speeder saying he's not breaking the law - everyone else is just driving too slow and makes me look like I'm driving over the limit.

What Tutakai said. We've gone over the subject of media bias again and again, and the one conclusion I keep drawing is that it's very real, but can be allowed for if you want to know what's going instead of believing everything you're told. All media outlets are biased. Some are upfront about their biases, some are not. Some report the news in a pretty straightforward fashion, and save the blatant bias for their editorial shows and articles. Some don't seem to have any line at all between editorialism and reportage. And as we've shown over and over, political bias is not the only bias involved, or even the predominant one. That'd be commercial bias.

The media outlets, regardless of political biases, are commercial organizations. Fox succeeds commercially because it's a blatant counterweight to differently-biased outlets. Market evolution in action. Not perfection, but still beats hell out of the old Soviet Pravda and Isvestya approach. "Heroic Grain Farmers Exceed Annual Quota Yet Again!"

OUTFOXED is a production of admittedly biased liberals, and as such has its own blatant bias. To expect it to be (or accept it as) "fair and balanced" itself is preposterous. Expect Fox to strike back with its own evidence about bias at the other networks, particularly CNN and MSNBC--and with just as much validity.

More on OUTFOXED can be found in this July 11 Howard Kurtz article.

I just finished reading "The Republican Noise Machine" by David Brock, a 'reformed propagandist' for the right. This book is an overview of 25+ year old conservative and right-wing effort to reframe the public debate in a way more favorable to the right.

This was mostly not new information for me. As a Goldwater supporter in 1964, I did then what I tend to do now when I'm passionate about something: read a lot. One of the books I read was "None Dare Call It Treason", which AT THAT TIME expressed a viewpoint far from the mainstream of most Americans in general and the GOP in particular. (It pales in comparison to what is COMMONLY heard from Limbaugh, Savage, and Coulter -- and eventually seeps into the discussion on FOX and other cable channels and beyond.) Anyway, my point is that over the years I've heard, seen and watched a reframing of issues occur over time. ONLY IN THE PAST TWO YEARS HAS THE LEFT BEGUN TO MOUNT A SIMILAR EFFORT.

Is Brock merely a partisan with an axe to grind? I'd say he's definitely reacting AGAINST the right-wing success in the framing wars. But one still must understand his argument and evaluate the evidence he presents. (It seems to be a well-researched book, although there were some assertions made that were not footnoted that I thought should have been.)

Well, if you're really interested, read the book. You probably will learn things you did not know. What I agree with is the basic thrust of the book: today the dominant framing of issues comes from the right -- not the left. This did not just happen, but is the result of a 25+ year effort that had its roots in the reaction to the civil rights movement, Richard Nixon's war with the media and a perception by business leaders that the media was anti-business.

Does that make all of this into a sinister plot? No -- but it's not serendipity either. Is the conservative/right-wing framing the WRONG frame? No -- but without other framing, issues are easily demagogued -- and have been.

What I find NOT ACCEPTABLE is framing that echoes "None Dare Call It Treason", that makes those with a different view into THEM: liberal, elite, un-American and evil. Although this language of exclusion is publicly acceptable in much of today's media, I personally believe it does not represent the best in America.

There's much more to say, but I'm sure there will be another opportunity (!) So I'll stop and come back later to read the argument that this is much ado about nothing because the other side has its excesses too. :)

That other networks are biased, makes it OK for Fox to be biased? Yeah, networks are biased, because they are made up of people, who cannot help but be biased. But it is professionalism to try to keep those biases in check when reporting the "news." I think the issue of Fox and lack of accuracy in their reporting is more revealing of the kind of network Fox is, than snide comments.

Ok. Assuming it's accurate, this is funny:

As Fox News prepares to defend itself against a complaint alleging false advertising, the news channel is airing comments admitting that the station is a Republican news channel.

The complaint filed today with the Federal Trade Commission by moveon.org alleges that Fox News is deceiving viewers when it uses the slogan "fair and balanced," while presenting a news product that is one-sided and slanted toward Republican views.

The network's defense should be interesting, given the discussion on Fox News Watch on Saturday (July 17) regarding the movie Outfoxed produced by Robert Greenwald. Using clips from Fox News programs, Greenwald documents ways in which the network twists and distorts the news to favor the Bush White House.

In his comments on the film Saturday, panelist Neal Gabler, a media critic and author, says that it doesn't tell people anything they don't already know about Fox. " ... I mean, look, to say that this network promotes the Republican view, not the conservative view, but the Republican view is like saying that the pope is Catholic. It's self-evident." Gabler went on to say that the Fox morning show, Fox and Friends, might as well be titled "Fox and Bush Friends," and that the host of Fox's Sunday morning political show, Brit Hume, is a "Republican spinmeister. It's undeniable that this is a Republican-oriented network, and designed for Republicans who watch it."

No one disagreed with Gabler. Cal Thomas admitted that the network looks "conservative" but said it was because other networks "tilt to the left." In fact, another panelist and Fox News contributor Jane Hall, took Gabler's point even farther. Not only is the network dominated by Republican hosts, those hosts treat Democrats unfairly when they do allow another viewpoint to be presented. In Hall's words, " ... if you look at some of the talk shows, the conservative hosts are much better at demonizing the Democrats than the liberal hosts of those shows."

http://www.newshounds.us/2004/07/19/foot_in_mouth_disease.php

Did anybody catch the media bias study that appeared in BusinessWeek a few weeks ago? They attempted to quantify the slant of the different media outlets with a numerical metric. Basically, they kept track of which networks were quoting which think tanks. They used the ADA's (not the American Dental Association) liberal/conservative numerical ratings for those think tanks. That's the oft-quoted organization that came up with the political rankings of Senate members. The composite number took into account which sources were being quoted, and how liberal or conservative those sources were.

The result? Fox News was right of center. TIME and Newsweek, along with two broadcast networks (can't remember which) were twice as far to the left of center as Fox was to the right. This surprised me. The study only looked at news shows. Commentary shows like O'Reilly, Crossfire, and Hannity were omitted. I think UCLA conducted the study.

Epic, such results are entirely dependent upon where you place the center, no?

I went over that UCLA study here weeks ago in a thread on media bias. It showed Fox News Nightly Report and ABC Evening News to be the closest to the center, with all other outlets studied farther to the left, with a decided left "tail" in the distribution and almost no right "tail". IOW, Fox (news only, mind you, not op/ed shows such as O'Reilly, Hannity, etc.) and ABC were pretty close to center, if on different sides of the "hump."

The study had some serious methodological problems, as most such studies do, but was still better than having no evidence at all.

Again, the ratings are ENTIRELY dependent on where you place the "center." That's where the wiggle is. The ratings may have some relative value, for comparative purposes. It's worth looking at it for some take on "is ABC more conservative than CNN," but for purposes of proving that most of the media is slanted to one side or the other it has FAR less utility. How big a grain of salt ya got?

Don't even get me started on scoring rubrics. Hmm, let's take something that by its very nature is not quantifiable, and then let's make, oh, a 5 point scale that allows us to pretend that it IS quantifiable. Next, let's score the content using subjective judgement. Oh, score!

Let me be clear- I haven't read the study and I don't object to good faith efforts. I just can't emphasize enough just how much such studies MUST be viewed as inherently limited. Their danger lies in the risk that partisans will use them as "evidence" supporting grandiose claims, when in fact the best they can do is suggest a few modest plausible conclusions.

Yes indeed, Brian, the results of such studies depend entirely on what the "center" is. There is an interesting examination of the methodology of the study at Language Log that found:

the "liberal" groups in the study were far more moderate than the "conservative" groups, owing to where G & M [Groseclose & Milyo, who conducted the study] drew the line. The average ADA score for the conservative groups in G & M's top 20 was 16.3, whereas the average score for the liberal groups was 65.2 -- slightly less than the ADA rating they calculated for Joe Lieberman. In effect, they achieved their result by classifying a number of moderate groups as liberal.

This effect was compounded still more when G & M took the dividing line between left-wing and right-wing think tanks to be the midpoint of the House and Senate average ADA ratings, making the voting record of the Congress over recent years the criterion for defining the political center. At another point, G & M defend their decision to use the median ADA ranking of all House members to determine the dividing line between left- and right-wing media outlets. But the Republican majority in the House is proportionally much greater than the disproportion in the popular votes for the two parties in Congressional elections, and the aggregate voting records of House members are hardly representative of voters' views on the issues as revealed in polls. In a Times/CBS poll last year, for example, respondents felt by by 46 percent to 36 percent that Democrats would do a better job than Republicans at making the tax system fair, and just 11 percent believed the President's tax cuts were very likely to create new jobs. By G & M's criterion, however, the "centrist" position would be one that supported the administration's tax  proposals.

In effect, G & M have located the political center somewhere in the middle of the Republican Party, by which standard the majority of American voters would count as left-of-center.

Darn that liberal media! They're always failing to conform to the standards of the Republican Party.

Oops. Failed html encoding on my part. The italicized quote should consist of the three middle paragraphs in their entirety.

Jeremy, the deconstruction at Language Log was interesting, but it was also quite wrong in many ways. The original paper in question can be found here. (PDF) Check the math. G & M did indeed jump through the hoops to obtain a reasonable data group.

The study indeed has serious methodological flaws, as I said both then and now. But much of the free-lance assignment of what those flaws are has been off-base. Claiming a shift bias, for example, as the citation from LL does, assumes that the data was properly acquired but interpreted wrongly by incorrect assignment of median/mean (that the base "center" is shifted rightward). This doesn't change the relative positional grouping of outlets at all, just the assignment of the center. So the spread is still there showing definitive media bias, but the argument then gets diverted over to which outlets are biased (Answer: All) and where the center really is when the relavant question is how the outlets are biased compared to each other.

A bigger flaw, and to me the relevant one, is that quoting an institute doesn't really say anything objective about the quoter, because the context of the citations can't be assessed by objective means. For example, under the G & M methodology if Tommy Frist on the Senate floor cites the ACLU as an enemy of freedom, that citation drags the ACLU comparitive scoring incrementally to the right. If John Kerry mentions the Heritage Foundation as a fascist zombie factory, that citation drags the Heritage Foundation comparitive scoring incrementally to the left!

G & M tried to adjust for that to some extent, but it's non-eradicable in an objective mathematical sense because of the context assessment problem, among other things. Too many subjective non-quantifiables.

I agree entirely with what Brian said above. I just can't emphasize enough just how much such studies MUST be viewed as inherently limited. Their danger lies in the risk that partisans will use them as "evidence" supporting grandiose claims, when in fact the best they can do is suggest a few modest plausible conclusions.

Useful for thought and discussion, but not definitive proof of anything.

Tully,

I don't see how you can dismiss as irrelevent the skewed placement of the center, given how this study has been rallied in support of Fox News' supposed objectivity. Yes, the relative positions are correct, but the study is not merely being used to say "Look, Fox is further to the right than CNN." Rather, it is being used to suggest that Fox is on the right, but closer to the center than the other networks on the left are. In other words, it is being used to support the proposition that Fox is less biased than the other networks.

In fact, that is exactly how you phrased it in your initial comment raising the study: It showed Fox News Nightly Report and ABC Evening News to be the closest to the center, with all other outlets studied farther to the left, so I don't see how you can now pretend you were talking only about relative position.

In fact, that is exactly how you phrased it in your initial comment raising the study: It showed Fox News Nightly Report and ABC Evening News to be the closest to the center, with all other outlets studied farther to the left, so I don't see how you can now pretend you were talking only about relative position.

Jeremy, I loosely stated what the study actually said, in its own terms. If I accurately report that Joe Smedley's neighbor sez that Joe Smedley believes that the sun rises in the West, would that mean I agreed with either of them as to the accuracy of Joe's belief? Or that I'm being contradictory by pointing out what's wrong with his reported statements? Or that I'm supporting them when I immediately go on to note that folk arguing about which celestial elevation the suns rises at in the West is kinda pointless, when it doesn't? GMAFB!

After that initial statement, I went on to say that the study had serious methodological flaws, pointed out that its usefullness was limited, seconded Brian's statement about the partisan misuse of such things, and pointed out one of several major fundamental flaws. When I originally posted about the study, weeks ago, I said all these same things. I'm no more responsible for how others misrepresent this study than I am responsible for how others misinterpret what I say. Go with what I actually said, but go with ALL of it. Reading hidden meanings into my words by selective quotation is a look in the mirror, not a look at me.

And what I did in my last post was note that most of the critics make the assumption that the data is correct but the placement of the median/mean, the political and/or bias "center," is wrong. (We all think we're moderates, and the center is either where we are, or close by.) Then I pointed out that there were serious problems with the data generation and assignment technique itself. This makes the study results ambiguous and non-objective before you even get to arguing about the interpretation. If the data's bad, the interpretation is de facto flawed. First principles. But both the critics and the boosters started much farther down the road, skipping the essential basics.

My point was that the study has serious basic problems with its very formulation of data, making the claims (and misrepresentations) of both the study fans and the study slammers pretty damn thin as regards analysis of where the "center of bias balance" really lies, even in terms of the study itself. From a strictly agnostic slant, all the study really shows at all is how the various media outlets included stack up relative to each other in terms of the authors' (flawed and subjective) data and assumptions. In terms of agnostic critique of the study itself, there is no "center", at least in the sense the term is being used by the critics and boosters. There is only the statistical mean of the secondary statistical data itself, data gathered by fundamentally flawed methods from dubious primary data, generating results utterly dependent on the initial subjective assumptions of the authors in the primary formulation of the study.

I don't see how you can dismiss as irrelevent the skewed placement of the center, given how this study has been rallied in support of Fox News' supposed objectivity.

Was that a comprehensive enough explanation on how I can do exactly such a thing? I'm assessing the evidence, not cheering on the assorted misuses of it.