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Biases revealed in news media

BY Timothy Groseclose

Do the major media outlets in the U.S. have a liberal bias? Few questions evoke stronger opinions, and it’s hard to think of a more important question to which objective statistical techniques can lend their service. So far, the debate has largely been one of anecdotes (“How can CBS News be balanced when it calls Steve Forbes’ tax plan ‘wacky’?”) and untested theories (“If the news industry is a competitive market, then how can media outlets be systematically biased?”).

Few studies provide an objective measure of the slant of news, and none has provided a way to link such a measure to ideological measures of other political actors. That is, none of the existing measures can say, for example, whether The New York Times is more liberal than Ted Kennedy or whether Fox News is more conservative than Bill Frist.

Along with Jeff Milyo, an economics professor at the University of Missouri, and a team of research assistants, I have provided such a measure. We compute a score for various news outlets, including the major national dailies and all three networks’ nightly news shows. Our results show a strong liberal bias in news coverage, confirming survey research that shows an almost overwhelming fraction of journalists is liberal.

To compute our measure, we counted the times that a media outlet cited various think tanks and other policy groups in their news. We compared this with the times that members of Congress cited the same think tanks in their speeches on the floor of the House and Senate. By comparing the citation patterns, we constructed a score for each media outlet.

As a simplified example, imagine that there are only two think tanks, one liberal and one conservative. Suppose that The New York Times cited the liberal think tank twice as often as the conservative one. Our method asks: What is the estimated score of a member of Congress who exhibits the same frequency (2:1) in his or her speeches?

All the outlets except Fox News’ “Special Report” and the Washington Times received a score to the left of the average member of Congress. A few outlets, including The New York Times and CBS Evening News, were closer to the average Democrat in Congress than the center.The most centrist outlet was “NewsHour” with Jim Lehrer. CNN’s “NewsNight” with Aaron Brown and ABC’s “Good Morning America” were a close second and third­. Consistent with our results, three of the four moderators for the 2004 presidential and vice-presidential debates came from these three news outlets (Jim Lehrer, Charlie Gibson and Gwen Ifill).

The fourth most centrist was Fox News’ “Special Report with Brit Hume.” While we found it to be right of center, we 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. Thus, if viewers spent the same amount of time watching “Special Report” as they spent watching “World News Tonight” and “Nightly News,” they would receive a nearly perfectly balanced version of the news.

Groseclose is a professor of political science.