The mainstream media has a liberal bias

Thank you for agreeing to debate me on this topic. I agree that it is easy to see bias in the media every day. News outlets try to seem objective, yet biases always appear. However, these biases are running in both directions. For every example you find of a supposed liberal bias, there are plenty of counterexamples of conservative bias to be found. Just staying with the New York Times, it is true that when it comes to issues such as Abu Ghraib and torture, the Times took many liberal stances and highlighted these issues in their articles. However, there was perhaps no other paper that was so strongly sounding the trumpets of war in 2003. A paper that had a full out liberal bias might, one would expect, show some skepticism for the "facts" that the White House was using to justify the invasion. A really liberal paper might just be antiwar in general, and oppose a war waged so hastily and without enough thought given towards the consequences. The Times did none of these things. Thank you for including this study, which I admire for its safeguards against subjectivity. However, upon careful observation of the article you cited for this study, there were several problems that stuck out at me. First, although the study included many major outlets that are considered sources from which a large number of Americans derived their news, such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, there were some significant other sources missing from the study. For instance, the study observed many specific news shows, such as "Nightly News" and "World News Tonight", yet aside from "Special Report With Brit Hume", few were from the Fox News Channel. Now, you may think the exclusion of one network may not be that significant, but in this case, it might actually affect the results to a considerable degree. I have defined the mainstream media in this debate to be the "news sources from which the majority of Americans get their news". Of all news networks, the Fox News Channel has the most regular viewers (http://www.stateofthemedia.org...). Additionally, The O'Reilly Factor, notoriously conservative, has the most viewers per night than any other cable news channel. Moving to radio, while the study did include NPR's "Morning Edition", which has 13 million listeners a week, it left out the Rush Limbaugh Show, the only radio news program to have more weekly listeners than "Morning Edition". With about 20 million listeners a week, the Rush Limbaugh Show is roughly on par with all of NPR's shows combined. Does the exclusion of these major, notoriously conservative news outlets throw the conclusions of this study? Perhaps. The point is that the study does not have a perfectly objective way of deciding what news outlets are to be observed in the study. Another problem I encountered with the study is the method by which the scores of the news outlets were calculated. "Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) tracks the percentage of times that each lawmaker votes on the liberal side of an issue. Based on these votes, the ADA assigns a numerical score to each lawmaker, where "100" is the most liberal and "0" is the most conservative. After adjustments to compensate for disproportionate representation that the Senate gives to low‑population states and the lack of representation for the District of Columbia, the average ADA score in Congress (50.1) was assumed to represent the political position of the average U.S. voter." This part seems reasonable enough. The researchers were able to assign a score to specific lawmakers based on their voting records. The second component of the calculation, however, is what I find troubling: "They tallied the number of times each media outlet referred to think tanks and policy groups, such as the left-leaning NAACP or the right-leaning Heritage Foundation. Next, they did the same exercise with speeches of U.S. lawmakers. If a media outlet displayed a citation pattern similar to that of a lawmaker, then Groseclose and Milyo's method assigned both a similar ADA score." It seems like a bit of a jump to me to assign similar scores to news outlets based on the citation patterns of their articles compared to the speeches of lawmakers. After all, a news outlet may refer to a source merely to criticize it. Fox News does this with the ACLU and ACORN all the time. Should Fox News be scored similarly to lawmakers who cite the ACLU and ACORN in a positive light? With regards to your sources on the election, there is no doubt that Obama was covered in a very positive light when compared to McCain. However, I don't think this is good evidence of a liberal bias. A truly liberal media would have not given so much negative coverage to Hillary Clinton, whom many considered to be even more liberal than Obama. In addition, John Edwards, whom many thought to be the most liberal of the three major candidates for the Democratic nomination, was largely attacked by the press. During the debates, not only was he given significantly less speaking time than Obama or Clinton, but he was also oriented more towards the edge of the stage than Obama and Clinton, who were often dead center. It is easily argued that above any other bias, news sources are mostly driven by the profit motive. As businesses, it is in their interests to appear prophetic and insightful. This spawn the media's tendency to want to "pick the winner". I think that the positive coverage of Obama is due mostly to his large popularity among the public. From early on in the election, it was clear that Obama had a distinct advantage, what with the previous president's unpopularity and Obama's promises of progress and change. Indicative of the fact that the press wanted to pick the winner is the observation, reported in the very Pew Research Center study that you cited, that Obama's favorable coverage varied directly with his popularity in the polls. When he became more popular, the media subsequently grew more positive on his campaign. If the media were motivated by a liberal bias instead of a motivation to choose the winner, they would have performed differently during the 2000 election. A study by the Pew Charitable Trusts Project for Excellence in Journalism revealed the respective coverage of the two candidates during this election: Gore: Positive - 13%, Neutral - 31%, Negative - 56%; Bush: Positive - 24%, Neutral - 27%, Negative - 49%. Bush's claims of "Compassionate Conservatism" grew his popularity with the public greatly, and the media, sensing this, went on the attack on Gore. This is why they tore apart "lies" by Gore that he had "invented the internet", even though this was not what he had originally said, yet when Bush claimed that the majority of his tax cuts would go "to the bottom end of the spectrum", the press was quiet. I don't consider this coverage evidence of an overall conservative bias in the media. Instead, I think it shows that media outlets are businesses that want to increase their profit by appearing knowledgeable and prophetic. It seems I am running out of space. I will try to address your other points in my next argument.