W6. Learning Activity – In Class

In fact, there are a number of stories you can tell about why a media/Congress discrepancy in think tank citation would not necessarily imply ideological bias on the part of members of the elite media (including those listed above) and if any of them are true, the argument as stated does not hold.

But on another level my views and background do matter.  As I will explain, the topics that journalists choose depend partly upon their political views and the views of the people who surround them.  So let me admit, I don’t think I would have written a book about media bias if I weren’t conservative or if my parents hadn’t instilled Central Time Zone values in me.

Setting aside the methodological criticisms raised by Nyhan and others, my big problem with the Groseclose and Milyo estimates of media bias is that they are indirect.

Consider first some simple, direct measures of bias: Counting how many Democrats and Republicans, or liberals and conservatives, appear on op-ed pages or TV interviews. Tabulating the frequency of political sales terms such as “death tax” or “Operation Freedom” or “Affordable Care Act” (as compared to “estate tax” or “Iraq war” or “the Obama health care plan”). Measuring the prominence of positive or negative economic stories (is the bad news always on page 1 and the good news on page 14?).

It makes sense for Groseclose, as a conservative media analyst, to want to shift journalism to the right, just as, from the other direction, a liberal businessman might want to persuade businesses to move in the other direction.

With a coding scheme this strange, you get strange results. To wit: according to Groseclose, the most liberally biased major news organization in America is…the Wall Street Journal. When your method produces results telling that the Journal is the most liberally biased news organization, or that RAND is more liberal than the ACLU, the logical response is to reexamine your method and assess whether you’re measuring what you think you are. But maybe not, if it’s serving your ideological ends.

Short version: Groseclose’s study on media bias is a methodological train wreck. He has always seemed quite taken with himself for coming up with the indirect method of measuring bias Andrew mentions above. But what should be explained is that the method produces results that are self-evidently absurd. For example, it codes the RAND Corporation and the Council on Foreign Relations as “liberal,” and the ACLU as “conservative,” and so if a newspaper quotes RAND more than the ACLU, it has displayed “liberal bias.” That sounds like a joke, but it’s actually what the study does. At the risk of repeating what I’ve written elsewhere, if a student in his first semester of research methods designed a study that came up with that result, you’d tell him that his instrument had failed the test of external reliability, and he ought to go back and redesign it.

In other words, the study rests on a presumption that can only be described as bizarre: If a member of Congress cites a think tank approvingly, and if that think tank is also cited by a news organization, then the news organization has a “bias” making it an ideological mirror of the member of Congress who cited the think tank. This, as Groseclose and Milyo define it, is what constitutes “media bias.”

Today, historians point to the Spanish-American War as the first press-driven war. Although it may be an exaggeration to claim that Hearst and the other yellow journalists started the war, it is fair to say that the press fueled the public’s passion for war. Without sensational headlines and stories about Cuban affairs, the mood for Cuban intervention may have been very different. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the United States emerged as a world power, and the U.S. press proved its influence.

The Spanish-American War was the first “media war.” CRUCIBLE OF EMPIRE explores the role sensationalist journalism played in the war and pays particular attention to William Randolph Hearst. Hearst, then the upstart editor of The New York Journal, understood that a war with Spain over Cuba would not only sell newspapers, but also move him into a position of national prominence. Hearst’s propaganda offensive, the first in modern media history, demonized Spain for its brutal suppression of the Cuban rebellion and fueled pro-war feeling. With the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana harbor in 1898, Hearst had the perfect pretext for war. The Hearst press saw to it that Spain shouldered the blame and a reluctant President McKinley capitulated.