The mainstream media has a liberal bias

It's easy to see media bias every day. The New York Times had fifty front page stories on Abu Ghraib, each one suggesting that links to higher ups would soon be revealed. They never were, despite the Times' fondest hopes and dreams. However, there are not many unbiased objective studies that form a basis for generalization. If you ask journalists, they are sure they are "centrist." That's subjective, depending upon where one thinks the center is. An objective study requires an objective methodology that relates news coverage to positions on issues. UCLA released such a study at the end of 2005. http://newsroom.ucla.edu... they defined "liberal" in accordance with the Americans for Democratic Action scoring of issues. The ADA rates Congress people on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 being "perfectly" liberal. The average ADA score, weighing districts by population, is 50.1 I will note that in 2005 congress was considerably to the left of center, so the comparison is to a left-of-center center. Nonetheless, the study is objective relative to the center of Congress. "Of the 20 major media outlets studied, 18 scored left of center, with CBS' "Evening News," The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ranking second, third and fourth most liberal behind the news pages of The Wall Street Journal. ... The fourth most centrist outlet was "Special Report With Brit Hume" on Fox News, which often is cited by liberals as an egregious example of a right-wing outlet. While this news program proved to be right of center, the study found ABC's "World News Tonight" and NBC's "Nightly News" to be left of center. All three outlets were approximately equidistant from the center, the report found." ... "The researchers took numerous steps to safeguard against bias — or the appearance of same — in the work, which took close to three years to complete. They went to great lengths to ensure that as many research assistants supported Democratic candidate Al Gore in the 2000 election as supported President George Bush. They also sought no outside funding, a rarity in scholarly research." So 18 of 20 of the mainstream media news outlets had a liberal bias. Keep in mind that editorial pages are not included in the study, only news reporting. The New York Times editorial page is not pulling their score to the left, and the Wall Street Journal's editorials are not pulling them right. Bill Moyers is not counted on PBS, only Jim Lehrer. Early in the 2008 Presidential campaign, the press had a wide field of candidates to cover. The quantity of coverage a candidate received might be attributed to the pure novelty of the candidate, but even so there were no incumbents running, so all the candidates had to stake out their positions on issues and their political philosophies. The tone of the coverage therefore expresses media bias, in terms of what the media found appealing or not. Positive and negative coverage as a percent of all studies as determined by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. The results were telling: (http://journalism.org...) Barack Obama 47/16 (positive/negative percentages) Rudy Giuliani 28/37 Hillary Clinton 27/38 John McCain 12/48 The favorability of coverage is tied to how liberal the candidate was perceived by the press. Giuliani is admittedly a little hard to classify, as he is a liberal on social issues and a conservative on defense. There is no doubt about Obama and McCain, however. The Schorenstein Center http://www.hks.harvard.edu... performing the study is affiliated with Harvard University, rarely accused of conservative bias. Moving to the campaign, the Pew Research Center studied the tone of press coverage from September 8 to October 16, 2008. http://www.journalism.org... "For Obama during this period, just over a third of the stories were clearly positive in tone (36%), while a similar number (35%) were neutral or mixed. A smaller number (29%) were negative. ... For McCain, by comparison, nearly six in ten of the stories studied were decidedly negative in nature (57%), while fewer than two in ten (14%) were positive." Regarding methodology: "To examine tone, the Project takes a particularly cautious and conservative approach. Unlike some researchers, we examine not just whether assertions in stories are positive or negative, but also whether they are inherently neutral. ... the Project measures coverage by story, and for a story to be deemed as having a negative or positive tone, it must be clearly so, not a close call: for example, the negative assertions in a story must outweigh positive assertions by a margin of at least 1.5 to 1 for that story to be deemed negative." To get to specifics, the biased coverage of candidates Sarah Palin versus that of Joe Biden is notable. "In a room full of television industry executives, no one seemed inclined to defend MSNBC on Monday for what some were calling its lopsidedly liberal coverage of the presidential election." Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, a self-described liberal and close friend of the Clinton's punctuated the belief by saying that she would prefer a lunch date with right-leaning Fox News host Sean Hannity over MSNBC host Keith Olbermann. According to the report, one aspect of the coverage that bothered Ms. Bloodworth-Thomason and others was the way MSNBC — and other media — has attacked Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and demeaned her supporters." http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com... Biden is as noted for dumb statements as any candidate since Dan Quayle. For "When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened,'" Senator Obama's running mate told the "CBS Evening News." Except Republican Herbert Hoover was in office when the stock market crashed in October 1929. There also was no television at the time; TV wasn't introduced to the public until a decade later, at the 1939 World's Fair." http://www.nysun.com... Perhaps more importantly, Biden clearly fabricated his notion of how FDR explained the market crash in terms of root causes. The press consistently passed off Biden's incredible gaffes with an "there goes ol' Joe again" attitude, while Palin's gaffes were savaged. The press reveled in personal attacks on Palin and her family. We have had exactly one evangelical religious president: Jimmy Carter. Liberal Carter's religion was forgivable and remains so. Not Palin's. Liberal bias is inevitable from liberal reporters. That reporters are liberal is admitted even by defenders of the press: "From studies of the elite national press to those focused on medium- and small-town newspapers, working journalists consistently register positive on the liberal litmus test and have since the 1930s when Leo Rosten first examined the character, background and practices of the Washington press corps." http://www.asne.org... Liberals argue that even though journalists are liberal, this is offset by their management being conservative. If that were true we ought to see it in the coverage, but we do not. The UCLA study found that even though the editorial position of the Wall Street Journal was heavily right wing, the news reporting was left of center. The only way for a management to enforce their view of the news is to hire like minded employees. Fox News hires right-of-center journalists; the New York times hires convinced Leftists. That works. Overall, left-leaning journalists greatly outnumber right-leaning. Liberals believe that diversity is required to avoid bias in every area of human endeavor except journalism, where they carve a unique exception for liberal group-think. The resolution is affirmed.