Questionable Media Bias Study Leads to Troubling Conclusions
Posted December 29th, 2006 by Jen Howard
Yet another study claiming to uncover the “liberal media bias”‘ has been making the rounds in recent weeks — popping up in a New York Times column, cited on NPR and gaining traction in the blogosphere.
Authored by two University of Chicago economists, the yet-unpublished study tracks 1,000 “politically loaded” phrases in over 400 newspapers and concludes that newspapers mirror the ideology of their market. More controversially, the study also suggests that the average paper’s language is “similar to that of a left-of-center member of Congress” — a finding supposedly “consistent” with other studies showing “strong liberal bias.”
But a recent article in the American Journalism Review blasts holes through the study, questioning both the quality of the data and the basic structure of the research.
Much of the study’s analysis rests on a newspaper’s use of “politically loaded” terms — so defined by the authors. On closer review, the AJR discovered that many of the phrases included in the research had nothing to do with ideology — with terms like “credit card” and “Justice Department” as the “partisan phrases” used most. Some other notable examples of partisan language include: “Hurricane Katrina,” “assistant secretary,” “nursing home,” and “natural gas.”
On top of questionable term choices, the research had strange gaps — like finding that the Washington Post did not use the terms “political party” or “National Security Advisory” in an entire year.
The AJR article also pointed out that the newspapers used in the study include almost all the larger papers in the country — which fall on the “liberal side” of the researcher’s rankings — but a much smaller share of smaller papers.
And while the study claimed to have excluded opinion pieces “whenever possible,” the AJR writer’s informal review found that many uses of the “politically loaded” terms had to come from editorial content — a result that would certainly skew a paper’s ideological slant.
It only took some quick investigation from a noted journal to cast serious doubts on the latest “liberal bias” study. But some people are already unquestioningly taking the study at face value.
Among the most troubling is Austan Goolsbee — a University of Chicago colleague to the two authors, and the man selected by the FCC to conduct its studies on vertical integration in the media.
Saying that the “ultimate ownership of the news media” does not matter as much as what the readers want to hear, Goolsbee finds “good news” in the study’s findings:
“If slant comes from customers, then the views of the owners and the reporters do not matter. We do not need to fear that some partisan billionaire will buy up newspapers and use them for propaganda.”
That the person selected by the FCC to study media economics finds media ownership irrelevant — based on a questionable study — is bad news for the millions of Americans relying on the FCC to make our media more fair, diverse and local.
Click here to read the American Journalism Review’s article
