Left, right and center

There is always talk about media bias. If you listen to conservative talkradio, they will be citing examples of the media favoring the left. If you listen to Bob Scheer of KCRW's Left, Right and Center, you will think the right owns the media and they are all shills for President Bush.

I saw this item over at Instapundit (Glenn Reynolds) who cites this column by Linda Seebach of Rocky Mountain News who gives her summary of this Yale report on media political leanings.

The premise of the report is to measure the media's use of think tank reports and compare it with how politicians use think tank reports. Since politicians are rated by a self-described liberal advocacy group called ADA (Americans for Democratic Action), one can then rate the media outlet by extension of how closely they match the politician who have ADA numbers calculated for them.

Seebach writes:

People trying to persuade others to adopt their views are very likely to cite think-tank experts who agree with them. And the liberal lobbying group Americans for Democratic Action (their description of themselves) regularly grades politicians from 0 to 100 based on their votes on selected issues, with the most liberal members of Congress earning 100.
.................
The media outlets were The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the three network news shows, Fox News' Special Report and The Drudge Report (the paper is online at www.yale.edu/isps/seminars/american_pol/groseclose.pdf).

"Our results show a very significant liberal bias," they write. "One of our measures found that The Drudge Report is the most centrist of all media outlets in our sample. Our other measure found that Fox News' Special Report is the most centrist." And all three papers, plus NBC and CBS, "were closer to the average Democrat in Congress than to the median member of the House of Representatives." Fair and balanced, anyone? To use a simplified example, they say, suppose there were only two think tanks, and The New York Times cited the liberal one twice as often as the conservative one. Then the newspaper's ADA score would be the same as that of a member of Congress who did the same.

The estimated ADA score for Fox, based on citations, was 35.6. That puts it in the company of Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and a few points below the House median, 39.0. The two highest were The New York Times, at 67.6, and CBS Evening News, at 70.0. The average Republican in Congress has an ADA score of 11.2, and the average Democrat 74.1.

Interesting, no?

Instapundit has this motto: If you've got a modem, I've got an opinion!

Well, suffice to say, bloggers are generally pretty opinionated and I'm a typical blogger and I don't claim to be an unbiased media outlet.