I wanna go back to this discussion of media bias.
Bias is inherently a perceptive claim. At the individual or societal level, it tends to be broadly measured using the softest of measurement tools: opinion. And nobody seems to be bothered that the ultimate bias delivery system (opinion built on narrow personal perceptions) is our benchmark for determining if the media is biased.
What statistics do we toss around whenever we discuss bias? Public faith in the media polling. There's noting scientific about faith. In fact, historically it's proven a damn good way to be wrong.
Now, there are a lot of overlapping types of coverage and forms of delivery that we treat as a singular entity called "the media," but they don't really share a lot of common ground. TV media has and responds to a very different kind of competition than print media. In many ways, it blurs the boundaries of what exactly constitutes journalism (vs, say, entertainment). It is also the most beholden to pundit-centric coverage, as it relies on dramatic debate as a delivery system for information and points of view. It requires a constant influx of fuel for this drama, and so it tends to overblow and over-repeat. Personally, I draw a huge line between TV news media and publications...particularly those that engage in investigative journalism.
Regardless of that distinction, however, the long-lived perception of liberal media doesn't really hold up to actual (as in not perceptual) evaluation.
Take a research study done on media representation during the 2000 election, which reviewed number of stories, and ratio of negative statements ("here's where Gore slipped up,") to positive ("Bush needed to demonstrate that he could do x, and he did"):
Gore’s coverage was decidedly more negative, more focused on the internal politics of campaigning and had less to do with citizens than did his Republican rival.
In contrast, George W. Bush was twice as likely as Gore to get coverage that was positive in tone. Coverage of the governor was also more issue-oriented and more likely to be directly connected to citizens.
Take a 2012 comparison of how public perceptions of media bias versus actual concrete, comparable data (
http://www.elon.edu/docs/e-web/academic ... Fall13.pdf). Sample quote:
The data presented in Figure 2 indicates the Romney campaign boasted a greater percentage of electoral coverage than the Obama campaign across the print, radio and television mediums. On average, the Romney campaign was allotted 3% more statements in election coverage than the Obama campaign.
Those of you around and paying attention in 1988 may remember a huge post-election self-analysis by the media, not unlike today's, after a similar report found a far more extreme imbalance that trend lines suggested directly injured the Dukakis candidacy.
Or you can look at Harvard's study of 2016 coverage:
Trump was covered more negatively than Clinton over the course of the general election, with coverage being 77 percent negative to 23 percent positive compared to Clinton coverage running 64 percent negative to 36 percent positive coverage. But over the course of the entire campaign, Clinton was covered more negatively than Trump, with 62 percent negative and 38 percent positive coverage compared to Trump's coverage, which was 56 percent negative and 44 percent positive.
One candidate was a lawsuit-riddled businessman who opened his campaign with a semi-racist jab, and went on to attack a gold star family, ask Russia for help, be exposed as a pussygrabber, threaten to jail his opponent, and attack the media directly. Under those circumstances, sorry, but unbiased coverage would not be that close unless his opponent was a woman.
Oh.
I'm sure more than one person's reaction will be "If out think the media isn't leftist, you're fooling yourself." The problem with relying on perceptions, rather than measured reviews of comparable data, is that human perceptions are informed primarily by biases, which often serve to simplify complex situations (an evolutionarily valuable mistake, early on) or to confirm what we have already decided to believe. It took centuries after medical service blossomed as a profession for doctors to realize that bleeding a sick person doesn't help...because the confirmation bias was so overwhelming. It took the collection of sizable, measurable data to prove that the perceptions were wrong.
