Sunday, July 24, 2011

Relevant: "Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind"

Power Line blog has published some excerpted material from a new book,  "Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind."  We find the material relevant in helping explain the liberal bias manifest at PolitiFact.

Find the excerpts here:

Part 1 (the Introduction)
Part 2 (Forward)
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

The book's author, Tim Groseclose, co-published a study of media bias back in 2004, perhaps the first study to succeed at objectively measuring media bias in practice.

From the report:
We measure media bias by estimating ideological scores for several major media outlets. To compute this, we count the times that a particular media outlet cites various think tanks and policy groups, and then compare this with the times that members of Congress cite the same groups. Our results show a strong liberal bias: all of the news outlets we examine, except Fox News’ Special Report and the Washington Times, received scores to the left of the average member of Congress.
It's worth noting that Republicans held a majority in Congress for a good long time during the period from which the study arose.

The Chapter 8 emphasis on Katherine Kersten at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reinforces one of the repeated emphases here at PFB:  Regardless of any conscious attempt to bias the news, journalists tend to lean left.  The left tilt skews story selection (selection bias) and the factual emphasis in the story.  People who think like Kersten, when their presence is known, make up a type of alien minority population in newsrooms.

Groseclose's book is very likely to make reading lists at PFB.

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