Media Bias? Meet Academic Bias!

Media Bias? Meet Academic Bias! - Power Line has an excellent piece on a Harvard study that purports to prove that liberal editorial pages are more balanced and less overheated than conservative ones.

The article is long, excellent, thought-provoking, and raises some very good questions about the "data" used to create the study.

Some of the best are from this set of questions about the study's balanced, cool-calm-collected author:

"And what of Mr. Tomasky himself? If we are to give any credence to his paper, we must have confidence in his selection of 'comparable' issues and his subjective classification of 'positive,' 'negative' and 'mixed' editorials. Who, exactly, is this advocate of objective journalism, shorn of ad hominem attacks and strong language?

Well, for starters he is a columnist for the left-wing American Prospect magazine. Here is one of his recent columns, titled: 'Prevaricating President: Why Democrats Need to Seize on Bush's WMD Lies.' Here are just a few samples of Mr. Tomasky's non-partisan, ad hominen-free journalism:

'We're living in times that I don't even know how to describe....Under most normal circumstances...the Iraq War would have been a scandal. There are many reasons historically why war for a democracy should be a last resort....But when you bullied your way into office in obvious contravention of the will of the people, what difference does all that hoo-ha make?...And while Bush was in this serene state, he and his servants were out on the hustings selling the American people a story about an imminent threat that did not exist in order to gin up public support for sending young Americans off to risk death.'

So says our arbiter of what constitutes fair and balanced news coverage."

Hindrocket's conclusion is a great one:

Liberals who publish "studies" rely on the fact that virtually no one will ever read them. Liberal newspapers--that is, all major papers except the Washington Times and the editorial section (only) of the Wall Street Journal--will dutifully report the alleged results without questioning whether there are any data to support them. And so, who can deny that liberal papers are objective and measured while conservative papers are shrill and partisan? That's what a "Harvard study" has concluded. Just ask Howard Kurtz.

Posted by Mitch at August 6, 2003 06:50 AM