I have a series on this blog that deals with media bias. As I have shown before, popular news sources lean strongly in the liberal direction, which might explain why "separation of church and state" is understood that way it is today. Conservative opinion is more likely to look to the original intent of the Constitution, while liberal opinion seems more content with the recent courts' interpretation of the Constitution (at odds with the intention of the Founding Fathers).
MSNBC President Phil Griffin recently did an interview and discussed how the network has evolved into its current version. In so doing, he also admitted that his network is liberal in orientation:
"But it was more organic than a conscious strategy to go left,' Griffin concludes. 'A vision of smart progressives just began to emerge ...'"
More of that interview is found here:
Newsbusters Website
Below is a new graph showing how various news sources lean on search results for the terms "ultraliberal" and "ultraconservative." As you can see, many news sources seem to feel the need to apply ultraconservative more often than ultraliberal. If that were justified, then we would have to believe that the political world has more extreme conservative voices than extreme liberal voices, or that they are quoted more often (and labeled more often). And yet, elections don't seem to show the same leaning, so where are all these untraconservative voters who outnumber the ultraliberal voters? And why is there such a long list of supporters of liberal organizations like moveon.org?
As a test of the valididty of the conclusions I made I have include two admittedly conservative sources in the graph: Rush Limbaugh's site and the Townhall.com site. Those show opposite tendencies, which would seem to say that Townhall.com is on the opposite site of the political fence than MSNBC. An interesting side note is that the Washington Times is almost perfectly balanced, as it was in one of my previous graphs.
For further comparisions, see the other articles below:
Friday, June 5, 2009
Media Bias, MSNBC Confirms Liberal Ideology
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2 comments:
Apparently you don't watch "Morning Joe". Mr. Scarborough is very much a Republican and has no problem espousing the rightwing ideology. So where would you classify Fox News? It's totally biased toward the far-right. You can't have every TV and radio station spewing out just your version of politics and religion. I know you find it difficult to believe but there are millions of Americans who consider themselves progressives and liberals. We have every right to our voices being heard as you do to yours. In fact, there are far more rightwing radio and TV programs than those in the middle and to the left. Not because people won't listen but because the majority of media outlets are owned by very conservative Republicans.
Anonymous,
I hope your comment today on a post from June means that you have been reading my blog from day #1 and have just gotten that far ;-)
I don't deny Joe is a conservative. And CNN also has Bill Bennett as a frequent guest. I'm more interested in the balance of hosts and guests, which is left-weighted for MSNBC and CNN.
I also care much more about bias in news reporting than bias on the opinion segments. Please see this post, which pretty well sums it up:
Media Bias Among National Reporters
Doesn't it seem barely possible or even likely that a strong leftward tilt in the Washington Press Corps will result in news reporting with a similar balance?
As far as Fox News goes, their news reporting has been pretty balanced. Studies after the last election cycle showed that Fox News' NEWS coverage was very well balanced (positive/negative coverage of Obama/McCain), more so than most other major media outlets.
A show I used to like on Fox News, when I was able to stand the arguing, was Hannity and Colmes. I actually liked (as a person) the liberal Alan Colmes better than the conservative Sean Hannity on that show. But in any case, the show gave listeners a chance to hear discussion of issues with points well made from both sides. It's too bad that Alan left. But that is still an opinion show and does not represent an attempt at balanced news reporting.
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