Who's the Fairest of them All? An Empirical Test for Partisan Bias on ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox News

"We [Democrats] stayed off FOX for a long time because your news department is, in fact, biased ... there are some things in the news department that have really been shockingly biased, and I think that's wrong. And I'll just say so right up front." --Howard Dean, appearing on Fox News Sunday, May 4, 2008 "I think Fox News has come on the scene and identified itself as 'fair and balanced.' We try to do that every day. I think others, instead of trying to get more fair and balanced, probably are offended by that or worried about it ... What they're trying to do is say that Fox News is mixing opinion and fact. That's just simply not true ... Bias can be a lot of different ways--story selection, story placement, story emphasis ... I looked at other people's polls, national polls, and most of the people thought the news was either biased or boring or both. And they generally thought it was biased in one direction." --Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes, interview with C-SPAN's Brian Lamb, 2004 For many decades, Republicans have repeated a mantra alleging that the media as a whole are biased against their party and their politicians. This attitude toward the media was perhaps best exemplified by a popular 1992 Republican bumper sticker that said, "Annoy the Media: Re-elect George Bush." However, with the rise of new media such as conservative Web sites, talk radio, and especially the Fox News Channel, Republicans have seen Democrats begin to embrace and extend their complaints of bias in the news. (1) In the run-up to the 2008 elections, those complaints only increased in volume and ferocity. In early 2007, these complaints actually affected the conduct of the campaign when liberal activists pressured the Nevada Democratic Party to cancel a Fox-sponsored Democratic candidate debate. In launching the successful campaign to drop Fox as a debate sponsor, liberal blogger Chris Bowers of MyDD.com argued that, "... instead of giving [Fox] a golden opportunity to further distort the image of Democratic presidential candidates, and instead of providing them with credibility for all of their past and future attacks against Democrats, it would be best if the Nevada Democratic Party chose a different media partner to broadcast this debate" (Bowers 2007). (2) In this study, I will attempt to empirically measure whether Fox News has, in fact, systematically skewed its news over the past decade and compare its news choices to those of the network evening newscasts. Specifically, I will be examining whether Fox's Special Report, ABC's World News (Tonight), the CBS Evening News, and the NBC Nightly News presented biased portrayals of public opinion regarding the president in their coverage. Empirically Examining Media Bias Claims of media bias raised by politicians from either party should be regarded as exceptionally suspect for several reasons. First, politicians might prefer that a news source be perceived as biased against them, even if the source is actually unbiased. As Matthew Baum and I demonstrate elsewhere (Baum and Groeling forthcoming), when members of the public perceive the news to be biased against a candidate or party, harmful messages from that outlet are discounted, while favorable messages are seen as particularly credible. Similarly, partisans might strategically choose to allege bias--even in the absence of such bias--in an attempt to "work the ref"--that is, vociferously protest a close call in an attempt to have the next one go your way. And, because of well-documented cognitive biases--such as confirmation and disconfirmation biases, selective perception, anchoring, attention bias, the clustering illusion, and selective perception, among others--partisans might sincerely perceive news as being biased against their preferred stance, even when it is actually unbiased (see Hastorf and Cantril 1954; Dalton et al. 1998; Baum and Groeling n.d.) The possibility that perceptions of bias rest in the eye of the beholder is not lost on journalists, who readily turn to that explanation to blunt charges of favoritism. …