The media isn't liberal

"But I stick by my quote "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." "But what about what America thinks, a Gallup poll in September 2002 showed 47% of Americans believed the media was too liberal " You state these two points. It is logically inconsistent to refer to a source that you are attempting to discredit. If people are skewed due to the 'legend', it would not be consistent to then use a poll that asks for their opinion on the issue. While I understand you may believe you may be safe to do so because an out right majority does not think there is a liberal bias, it is not to say that the bias does not exist nor do the results (more think there is a bias left than right) augment your argument. Polls are extremely difficult to make policy from. Consumer sentiment in the economic realm is almost useless as a gauge of consumer behavior. In this case, I do not know whether or not this poll is accurate. Here is some other data: http://www.gargaro.com... "The following are the results of a poll (December, 1996) conducted by Louis Harris and Associates for the nonpartisan Center for Media and Public Affairs: 1) most Americans think that the media are biased. Almost half (49%) think that the media usually don't "get the facts straight." 2) some two-thirds believe the media don't "deal fairly with all sides" in social and political reporting. 3) almost three-fourths of Americans see a "fair amount" or "great deal" of political bias in the news. And by more than a 2-to-1 ratio, poll resondents said that bias is liberal rather than conservative (43%-19%). 4) more than 60% of Americans surveyed prefer the media to "simply report the facts" and not "weigh the facts and offer suggestions about how to solve problems." This is a sharp break from ABC News' motto "News With Solutions." 5) some 65% do not believe that "journalists should point out what they believe are inaccuracies and distortions in the statements of public figures." 6) nearly 60% believe the news media have "too much influence." 7) some 47% think journalists have values different from their own. " "Most reporters aren't liberal or biased - right? Let's see.... - 9 white house correspondents survey voted for Clinton in 1992, while 2 voted for Bush - 12 voted for Dukakis in 1988 - one for Bush - 10 voted for Mondale in 1984 - zero for Reagan - 8 voted for Jimmy Carter in 1980 - 2 for Reagan Of course, none of these reporters could be biased at all in their reporting....... Source: US News and World Report White House Reporter Kenneth Walsh Another survey... Of the 1400 members of the national media who were surveyed: * 44% considered themselves Democrats * 16% Repubs * 34% independents * 89% voted for Clinton in 1992 * 7% voted for Bush in 1992 Freedom Forum sponsored poll, 1992 " Here are some excerpts from wiki: "The academic study cited most frequently by critics of a "liberal media bias" in American journalism is The Media Elite,* a 1986 book co-authored by political scientists Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda Lichter. They surveyed journalists at national media outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and the broadcast networks. The survey found that most of these journalists were Democratic voters whose attitudes were well to the left of the general public on a variety of topics, including such hot-button social issues such as abortion, affirmative action, and gay rights. Then they compared journalists' attitudes to their coverage of controversial issues such as the safety of nuclear power, school busing to promote racial integration, and the energy crisis of the 1970s. Many of the positions in the preceding study are supported by a 2002 study by Jim A. Kuypers: Press Bias and Politics: How the Media Frame Controversial Issues. In this study of 116 mainstream US papers (including The New York Times, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle), Kuypers found that the mainstream print press in America operate within a narrow range of liberal beliefs. Along the same lines, David Baron of Stanford GSB presents a game-theoretic model of mass media behaviour in which, given that the pool of journalists systematically leans towards the left or the right, mass media outlets maximise their profits by providing content that is biased in the same direction.[6] They can do so, because it is cheaper to hire journalists that write stories which are consistent with their political position. A concurrent theory would be that supply and demand would cause media to attain a neutral balance because consumers would of course gravitate towards the media they agreed with. This argument fails in considering the imbalance in self-reported political allegiances by journalists themselves, that distort any market analogy as regards offer: (...) Indeed, in 1982, 85 percent of Columbia Graduate School of Journalism students identified themselves as liberal, versus 11 percent conservative" (Lichter, Rothman, and Lichter 1986: 48), quoted in Sutter, 2001.[7] As mentioned above, Tim Groseclose of UCLA and Jeff Milyo of the University of Missouri at Columbia[8] use think tank quotes, in order to estimate the relative position of mass media outlets in the political spectrum. The idea is to trace out which think tanks are quoted by various mass media outlets within news stories, and to match these think tanks with the political position of members of the U.S. Congress who quote them in a non-negative way. Using this procedure, Groseclose and Milyo obtain the stark result that all sampled news providers -except Fox News' Special Report and the Washington Times- are located to the left of the average Congress member, i.e. there are signs of a liberal bias in the US news media. The economics empirical literature on mass media bias mainly focuses on the United States. Steve Ansolabehere, Rebecca Lessem and Jim Snyder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology analyze the political orientation of endorsements by U.S. newspapers.[13] They find an upward trend in the average propensity to endorse a candidate, and in particular an incumbent one. There are also some changes in the average ideological slant of endorsements: while in the 40s and in the 50s there was a clear advantage to Republican candidates, this advantage continuously eroded in subsequent decades, to the extent that in the 90s the authors find a slight Democratic lead in the average endorsement choice. John Lott and Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute study the coverage of economic news by looking at a panel of 389 U.S. newspapers from 1991 to 2004, and from 1985 to 2004 for a subsample comprising the top 10 newspapers and the Associated Press.[14] For each release of official data about a set of economic indicators, the authors analyze how newspapers decide to report on them, as reflected by the tone of the related headlines. The idea is to check whether newspapers display some kind of partisan bias, by giving more positive or negative coverage to the same economic figure, as a function of the political affiliation of the incumbent President. Controlling for the economic data being released, the authors find that there are between 9.6 and 14.7 percent fewer positive stories when the incumbent President is a Republican. Riccardo Puglisi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology looks at the editorial choices of the New York Times from 1946 to 1997.[15] He finds that the Times displays Democratic partisanship, with some watchdog aspects. etc. etc. etc. Peoples perceptions seem to be validated by the academic research into this topic. The reporters are liberal and so is their reporting. *shrug* just the way it is :D