Bias vs. Bucks

More than half of Americans believe media bias is the biggest problem in politics today.

And yet Fox News remains so very popular.  Go figure.

A Politico story reports on the survey of about 1,000 U.S. adults.  It finds 55 percent see media bias as the biggest issue while 32 percent blamed money.  Thirteen percent either didn't care or found the false dichotomy so off-putting they refused to answer any more stupid survey questions.

Slant and Exposure from D.C. Newspapers

Here's an interesting field experiment in which authors randomly assigned real live people to receive either the Washington Post or the Washington Times or to a control group of neither newspaper to see what effects were found.  I love real-world studies like this.  Sure, they're messy, but they're also generalizable beyond the intensive study of the college sophomore.

They looked at something they call a Fact Accuracy Index, which is a fancy name for accurately answering three questions about number of dead in Iraq and correctly identifying a couple of political actors.  The Specific Issue Index is a 5-question current events quiz.  The Broad Policy Index is an odd index of four questions about the parties, President Bush, and self-placement -- I think all on a left-right continuum (though it's not exactly clear).  The theoretical reasons for these interrelated measure is unclear to say the least, and to me rather baffling.  Even the study's cited references are disturbingly innocent of the serious, seminal works in political knowledge research.  Very odd.

Okay, enough bashing.  It mattered not at all whether subjects received the Post or the Times on political knowledge, turnout, or attitudes.  Receiving a paper did result in more support for the Democratic candidate (interesting given the Times is considered conservative).  The authors try, not very satisfactorily in my opinion, to explain this effect.  I don't envy them on this.  It's hard to figure.

As an aside, it is kinda odd to find this published American Economic Journal.  But, in defense, I've seen a few bias/slant studies of media content in economic journals, so maybe this makes more sense that it seems on the surface.

Google and What People Know

There is some wailing and gnashing of teeth among the right on whether that dominant net player, Google, is somehow biased in what pops up on our screen when we do a search. In this case, I assume it's a bias against conservatives (otherwise, would the bother complaining?).

Okay, so I did the same search on news from Yahoo and Google using two terms: Obama, and Blagojevich. Topical. Open for some bias. After all, while loonies and the left wish this would all go away, wackos on the right see a conspiracy. So if the theory holds, Google's news should be more supportive of Obama than the sites plucked out by Yahoo.

Top hit on Yahoo? A poll that says 45 percent of Americans suspect Obama or one of his top aides was involved in the job-selling scandal. The top hit on Google? A Republican advertisement about "unanswered questions" in the Obama-Blagojevich connection. In other words, a tie.

The Yahoo links come from CNN, Bloomberg, NPR, some newspapers. The Google links? Something called Right Pundits, then newspapers, Fox, CNN. Basically, a tie.

So in my quick-and-dirty, methodologically challenged approach, no real suspicious stuff going on here by Google, at least not when compared to Yahoo. Conspiracy theorists, sorry.

Media Bias and Presidential Campaigns

We all know the old mantra: the media is biased. First off, that's grammatically incorrect. The media are biased. Plural.

And yes, they are, but not in the way most people think.

But I'm not going there today. Instead I just read a research paper on whether the 2004 presidential election coverage was biased. The answer? Surprising. The authors, all four of them, looked at bias within stories and within segments. So you may have a single story that is biased (partisan), but if it's balanced by another piece just after, it comes out kinda even (structural). A good idea, one reflective of the way TV does "journalism" (and I'm being kind here).

The findings from the July-September 2008 Mass Communication & Society piece (Volume 11, #3):

• There is often a bias toward a challenger. That's the nature of politics, of journalism, and they found this in 2004 as well. We've seen a challenger bias in other studies. Change = news.
• The broadcast networks had more even partisan and structural balance than the cable news networks. The explanation? Broadcast networks like ABC, et al., have a less-interested news audience so they have to broaden their partisan perspective. Not sure Bill O'Reilly would buy this, but it makes sense.
• CBS and Fox showed the greatest "partisan tilt" in the study -- both for Kerry. Wow! Fox for Kerry? Odd, weird, counter intuitive. And cool. I honestly can't explain this one but the methodology seems sound.
• Broadcast networks spent less time on Swiftboat and National Guard stories than did the cable networks. You could argue this was partisan in nature, but I suspect it has more to do with bullet #1 above. Different audience, less consisting of news/partisan junkies.