Those That Preach About The Data
Should have a look at this study showing an effect in the MSM in how the presidential election coverage has favored democrats.
The most flagrant bias, however, was found in newspapers. In reviewing front-page coverage in 11 newspapers, the study found the tone positive in nearly six times as many stories about Democrats as it was negative.
November 2nd, 2007 at 8:25 pm
This isn’t shocking at all. I’ve never thought that a bias didn’t exist. In this case I will point to a few things that make the bias even more pronounced.
1.) A republican is in office. History shows that the party in office is often viewed as the enemy. See each midterm election of the past century to back this up.
2.) MSM are companies that attempt to make money. If they weren’t making money writing these articles, they would stop. NPR i the only organization that one could make a case against, if they were truly a “market” guy. I’d have no argument with a case against them.
3.) Republican candidates aren’t intersting to the the public. This is definitely conjecture, but one has to look at the candidates. The Dems are throwing out some individuals that are terribly polarizing to the population as a whole. A woman candidate and a black candidate are indeed news. McCain and Guillinai sold a bunch of papers in the past, but aren’t necessarily front page news these days. Unless Rudy gets another divorce or something like that!! Note that I am not making a case that the dems are better candidates than the elephants, but you do have to think about what is newsworthy in our crazy society. I mean, hell, we are a society that is more obsessed with Britney Spears than politics. A couple of old white guys that have been in politics for the past 3 decades just won’t sell product. This isn’t political - it’s social.
November 3rd, 2007 at 1:29 am
The problem with observational studies is you can’t control for confounds, and there’s some pretty big ones right here. For instance - for the first time EVER, a black man or a woman is likely to end up as the Democratic nominee. I’m not surprised that that’s getting more coverage than the republican candidates (is there anything interesting about any of them?). Similarly, I would have been a lot happier if the study had told us the total number of negative stories about republicans vs democrats- if there are an equal number of negative stories about each (because one gets printed every time they do something stupid), but there are just a lot more random or general stories about Hillary and Obama because of the black/woman thing, then I’m not sure it’s showing anything.
Not too be too dismissive, this is evidence towards your position, but there’s too much of a confound (specifically, a confound which favors the results you wanted) for me to be convinced.
November 4th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
Yeah, we all know how the MSM completely ignored it when Bill Clinton was caught doing something naughty. Clearly they’re biased, or they would have given more attention to the shortcomings of a democratic president.
November 5th, 2007 at 6:35 pm
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