PSST, CNN! Your Bias Is Showing
By Gerry Daly Posted in The Courts — Comments (15) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
I'll probably be posting later more on the Gallup poll taken last night about reactions to the Miers withdrawal, but I did want to quickly hit CNN for showing their liberal bias once again. In their writeup about the poll, they report:
On the question of the philosophy of Bush's next nominee, respondents came down solidly on the side of someone who has moderate or liberal views -- with 34 percent choosing "moderate" and 24 percent picking "liberal."
The poll results do show 34% responding "moderate", and 24% saying some flavor of "liberal." However, it is more than a little bit deceptive to write it up in a manner that makes it sound as if the public displayed a preference for a liberal. 8% answered that they wanted the next nominee to be "very liberal", while 14% said "very conservative." 16% said they wanted a "somewhat liberal" nominee, while 23% said they wanted a "somewhat conservative" one. For both modifiers, the conservative side garnered more support than the liberal side.
The excerpted paragraph could just as easily been written as follows:
On the question of the philosophy of Bush's next nominee, respondents came down solidly on the side of someone who has moderate or conservative views -- with 34 percent choosing "moderate" and 37 percent picking "conservative."
Or, alternatively, one could have said that a clear majority prefers a candidate with discernibly ideologic views rather than a moderate-- 61% to 34%.
The choice of phrasing was totally at the discretion of the reporter and the editors. A slight plurality of adults, when choosing between a conservative, moderate, or liberal, prefer a conservative. That fact cannot be gleaned from CNN's article, and the impression given is precisely the opposite.
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PSST, CNN! Your Bias Is Showing 15 Comments (0 topical, 15 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
notice the asterisk around the liberals....very small sample size!! I guess its gettin harder and harder to find them out of Massacussetts and San Francisco. Even the Upper West side of Manhattan is going to vote for a Republican (a RINO no doubt, but the "R" is there)
They will categorize republicans with clear vision and fortitude "extreme right wing", the religious right will be dubbed "The Rabid Right wing", and moderates will of course be seen as siding with the libs.
MSM - So predictable
Taking well done polls and biasing the results is easy, and unless the entire survey is released, not always visible. On these liberal/moderate/conservative questions for instance, pollsters will often probe moderates with a follow-up question--do you lean conservative/liberal? You then have two ways of running your crosstabs--one with "leaners" counted as moderates, and one where they are counted as liberals or conservatives.
This probably isn't a factor here, but it is often a factor in horse-race polls. When your moderate or independent or undecided group looks suspiciously small, there's a good chance that's the reason.
In general, Gallup gives the asterisk when the subsample is smaller than 100. Given that the overall sample size is 516, and given that Americans generally self-identify as "liberal" between 15-20% when the choices are liberal, conservative, or moderate, the asterisk seems right here.
I stopped watching in the mid-90s when their idea of fairness was the three-on-one Mark Shields-Al Novak-Margaret Carlson beatdown on Bob Novak every week on Capitol Gang.
... if Bill Clinton was about to choose a judge, I'd write up the results the way you suggest, because what would be at issue is whether the American people wanted a liberal or a non-liberal. In this case, Bush is choosing between a conservative or a moderate, so the relevant question is which of those options has broader support.
Of course, even that answer is only of limited value, as Miers showed, because deep support is often more important than broad support.
The media aren't liberal. The media are owned by corporations, and those corporations answer to bankers, neither of whom are likely to be liberal -- after all, why would they want people in office who are for market regulations and such? At any rate, the bottom line for all of them is money, which means attracting viewers in order to sell ad space. Often that means slanting things against the party in charge, because that's more exciting (whether in a positive or negative sense) to the general populace. It works the other way, too. It's all just subtle sensationalism, whatever will sell most at the moment.
for the left.
Watching them yesterday in the airport terminal was almost more than I could bear. Thier spin about the Miers withdrawal and the absolutely ridiculous statements they were allowing regarding the Fitzgerald grand jury were just unbelievable.
They have absolutely NO credibility as a valid news source.
Thanks for bring this matter to our attention... it's really an obvious outrage.
reporters in Washington are 9-1 Democrat. And the national numbers are 3-1 Democrat (or 75%). That's significantly out of whack with the distribution of the population. And the biggest biases are ones like this one. They aren't diabolical plots hatched by bosses to screw one side. They are accidental individual errors due to personal bias.
The writer of this story thinks of the administration and its supporters as conservative in opposition to the moderates and liberals. Thus s/he groups the moderates and liberals separate from conservatives. That's not a sinister media bias, but it's far reaching, often-repeated, and not repudiated often enough. There are many ways to present the same data. It isn't a surprise that the 9-1 Democratic media core seem to make little editorial biases that favor the left and Democrats. The surprise is that they don't find a way to fix for it or that many people still find them impartial.
Of course I think the long term effect since Cronkite became an anti-War activist has been for the MSM to lose their mantle of impartiality. They are a special interest group just like so many others. And conservatives have spent a generation trying to get around them. Blogs are just the latest method in that effort. Although I think they may be the final blow that ends the supremacy of the MSM and drives the stack through the "impartiality" claim.
...whereas there is a higher percentage of reporters who identify themselves as liberal than as conservative, the majority identified themselves as moderate. For example, a survey by the Pew Research Center and Project for Excellence in Journalism in 2004 found 34% of journalists describing themselves as liberal, 54% as moderate, and only 7% as conservative.
Either way, if you accept the premise of a liberal media, you then need to accept that there is also a conservative one -- Fox, the Wash. Post, etc. I would venture that if anything, the media are actually more conservative than liberal. During the Florida election debacle, I remember Kerry being cast in a much more negative light than was Bush. Kerry was basically made out to be a jerk and a sore loser for a requesting a recount, whereas Bush was put in the role of someone who simply sat back and let the courts decide. That wouldn't have happened in a liberal media, and more attention would have been given to what Bush was doing during that time, and on the fact that Kerry got the popular vote. Similarly, in the most recent election, a lib media would have given more attention to the fact that although many more voters turned out than in previous elections and voted for Bush, Bush won by only a slim margin; instead, the media basically told the country to breathe a sigh of relief, because it was all settled clearly this time. (It was settled, but it wouldn't have bee for a lib media.)
And with all the indictments and suggestions and even evidence of wrongdoing by the current administration, the media STILL are taking it easy on Bush and company (even after Katrina gave reporters a temporary backbone); in contrast, Clinton and other Dems were and are roasted for doing things that all politicians do. If Biden or Hilary had been accused of the same shady dealings as Frist and Delay, the media would've jumped all over them like it was a White Water scandal. Instead, Frist and Delay get some momentary coverage and then fade onto page 60.
Also, regarding corporate ownership, I JUST found this link on google. Haven't had a chance to thoroughly examine it, but you might find it interesting.
http://www.liberalslant.com/mediaownership.htm
On another note, what does MSM stand for? I see it all over this blog.
the MSM is now spinning that "moderates" automatically side with liberals. Fairness would dictate to throw the sheep out, compare Libs to Conservatives and that would be more telling. This is so biased I think any fair minded person would see right through it immediately.