The mainstream media has a liberal bias

In 1995, I published a short paper in the academic journal 'Science.' In that study, I reviewed how borehole temperature recorded a warming of about one degree Celsius in North America over the last 100 to 150 years. The week the article appeared, I was contacted by a reporter for National Public Radio. He offered to interview me. but only if I would state that the warming was due to human activity. When I refused to do so, he hung up on me." David Deming, in Senate testimony Dec 2006, quoted in Singer: "Unstoppable Global Warming" p 115 Con initiated the debate with definition of mainstream media specifying "news sources." That excludes entertainment, analysis, and opinion programming. Programs like those of Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh are not, and do not claim to be news sources. They are commentary programs. The editorial pages of newspapers are not news sources. That's how the Wall Street Journal ended up classified as liberal, even though their editorial page is clearly conservative. A remarkable number of people form political opinions based upon entertainment shows like Saturday Night Live, The Daily Show, Colbert Report, David Letterman's show, and even South Park. http://www.philly.com... We could look at the media as a whole in another debate. We could count in incessant trashing of conservatives on Letterman and the like. We could count the endless pseudo-documentaries on PBS where Bill Meyers pushes socialism, and the endless one-sided pseudo-documentaries propagandizing global warming crisis. About the only significant bastions of conservative opinion are talk radio, Fox News, and editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. Compared to viewership of all the liberal media, conservatives are a distinct minority. We should not expect opinion and entertainment programs to be unbiased. We should expect news sources to be unbiased. No one expects Rush Limbaugh to be unbiased, and Limbaugh makes no pretense about it. So everyone who listens to his program knows that he is selecting topics that suit his preferences and marshalling evidence to make his points. Similarly, anyone who believes Keith Olbermann is reporting news needs counseling. All of the opinion programming makes news sources important, because they are viewed with more credibility. This debate is about news sources. The UCLA study was conducted by political scientists used an unbiased methodology. The even took care to make sure the research staff was equally weighted with liberals and conservatives. The results showed that 18 of 20 mainstream media news sources had a liberal bias. The study methodology compared the citation used by the news sources with those of Congress people classified left/right by the ADA. Con says, "After all, a news outlet may refer to a source merely to criticize it." The study was performed in academia by trained political science analysts. It is not plausible that they would overlook whether a citation was used in agreement or not. Specifically, a "citation pattern" implies they took that into accord. In any case, it would be uncommon for a news program to make critical references. Moreover, if this mistake were made, the liberal half of the research staff would surely have protested that the study results were flawed. It's even doubtful that there were a significant number of critical references. As Con suggest, critical references would be expected in commentary, but news deals almost entirely with affirmative statements. The same is true of Congress people. They are not in the business of criticizing the Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute. They are going to be using citations to bolster their position or offering data that undermines an opponents position. It is also not plausible that political science academic would fail to correctly distinguish critical citations. The UCLA is an academic study. Con is not well-grounded in attacking it with pure speculation that they might have made simple gross errors in methodology. If Con has evidence that they in fact made any such mistakes, he should present it. Con claims it is easy to spot bias in news reporting, like the New York Times wildly biased coverage of Abu Ghraib, but that the excesses split among liberal and conservative bias. I see no evidence of that. The excesses are overwhelmingly liberal. Palin is portrayed as a nutcase fundamentalist, while born-again Jimmy Carter is and was wonderfully spiritual. About a third of evangelicals are liberals, but you would never guess that from press coverage. Palin is portrayed as stupid, while Biden is just being good ol' Joe. I challenge Con to cite examples of news bias, reported as hard news, comparable to the Times fifty front page news stories touting utterly bogus claims about Abu Ghraib. I can think of none. Con sites the Times early credence to claims of Saddam having WMD programs as evidence of conservative bias, but it is not true that giving the claims credence showed a departure from type. Virtually everyone at the time believed the claims credible, including Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama. Obama said he believed the claims of WMDs, but opposed the war in Iraq because the WMDs had not been used against the United States. Hans Blix said in his book believed the claims, but could not confirm them. Even Saddam's own generals believed the claims. We now know that Saddam was deliberately fostering the belief so as to scare the Iranians and Kurds, confident that the US would never intervene no matter what. That case of the Times reporting shows that news organizations can be fooled, not that they cut both ways in their bias. I am not claiming that the mainstream media are uniformly radical leftists who would have been at home working at Pravda. They are liberal, with the liberal bias one would expect. If something is an obvious news story, they will report it. The Lewinsky scandal made everyone's newscasts. Right before the 2000 election, Fox News broke the story of Bush having a DUI conviction. Journalists will always jump at red meat dragged before them. Similarly, John Edwards received favorable press coverage until his scandalous affair came to light. But it was not the investigative reporters of the Times or the Washington Post who followed up on all the rumors to covered the scandal, it was the less-than-mainstream National Enquirer. The Times, however, published an unverified and ultimately proven false accusation of scandal against John McCain. The bias is in what is an interesting story, and how well it has to be established before it is reported. Coverage of the recent "tea party" demonstrations against liberal policies showed substantial bias. There were about 100,000 participants, but press coverage focused on the "small" turnout of a thousand people in rainy Washington DC, not a very conservative place. Coverage featured one or two mildly racist signs. By contrast, when anti-war rallies turn out a thousand people, they are covered as significant, and blatantly anti-American signs and speakers are ignored. http://www.newsmax.com... Who believes that Hillary Clinton was to the left of Barack Obama? Ann Coulter favored Clinton over McCain, believing Sen. Clinton was to the right of McCain on foreign policy. http://www.advocate.com... I rest my case. I pointed out that journalists are overwhelming liberal in their personal views, that the UCLA study proves that media management does not temper that bias, and that liberals believe that diversity is critical to avoiding bias in every area of endeavor except journalism. Con did not rebut.