I have an article at Quadrant Online dealing with the media bias in the US. It brings together first Tim Groseclose’s video providing the evidence of media bias along with the Democrat, Pat Caddell, arguing that the bias now being shown is putting democracy itself in danger. The notion of a relatively objective press is in many ways a recent innovation and has become one that we have become used to. We are now instead in the process of getting used to the idea that the media is a grouper for the left and will lie and distort to whatever extent is necessary to get their people into office. Given how obvious that all is, they will not hold that position for long. The question of the moment is whether they can hold it long enough to sneak Obama back over the line in spite of his manifest and manifold failures.
The video of Tim Groseclose below provides a short summary of the points he raised in his book, Left Turn: How Liberal Media Distorts the American Mind, which I reviewed for Quadrant last year.
What good it is to know all this I am not entirely sure, since it is now pretty obvious that the media is bothered not at all by being exposed by those on the right so long as it gets to pour its message into the broader public consciousness? There is always the hope that we can shame the media into better behaviour but since they don’t appear even to notice their own bias themselves that may not work. But if everyone on our side at least knows the score about the media, that will be a start.
You may nevertheless find this noteworthy. As shown in the video and Tim’s book, if you are a typical Quadrant or Catallaxy reader of the non-troll variety you may be interested to learn from Groseclose that, were it not for the media bias, the overall view of the average voter would be similar to your own. Think how different politics would be then.
Hooray!
blogstrop
30 Sep 12 at 8:05 pm
This is why the collapse of Labor in QLD for example is interesting. The media was generally very pro Labor. Once the majority of the population clearly isn’t Labor, some media outlets ended up swinging big time. Even the ABC has been somewhat restrained in their attacks on Newmans public sector culling.
The medias heavy seems to be a fairly recent historical situation. As pointed out in the early article – with the invention of internet swollowing up traditional media – they are of course all tending to the left to try and establish rent seeking. I have seen the same thing happen in many industries. Engineering Australia for example was once very much right and about free trade and practice, but now of course they are left and about regulation and licensing.
mundi
30 Sep 12 at 8:13 pm
Engineering Australia for example was once very much right and about free trade and practice, but now of course they are left and about regulation and licensing.
Not to mention pro-global warming, pro women’s quotas, pro ‘happiness quotient’ rather than GDP, pro government ownership of everything, pro subsidised public transport and higher taxes for private transport, pro MRRT, pro subsidies for renewables, pro carbon tax………………………..
I’m just waiting for them to open a college of ‘Political Correctness and Social Engineering’. Next they’ll make it mandatory; if you aren’t deemed worthy of the PC Committee then you can’t join Engineers Australia.
John Mc
30 Sep 12 at 8:53 pm
“broader public consciousness?” Gullibility does have its limits.
stackja
30 Sep 12 at 9:54 pm
Sure he said that, but offered no hint of proof.
I have read his paper on media bias, and it is excellent. However the paper does not discuss the above issue.
Boris
30 Sep 12 at 10:08 pm
Please check:
unskewed polls.com
This service seems to level (or unskew the bias) in the large number of current USA Presidential polls.
Worth exploring!!!!!
ET
Eean Thorne
30 Sep 12 at 10:56 pm
One significant aspect is how organised and intergrated these people are.
Steve Turner
30 Sep 12 at 11:52 pm
I think you cannot separate what goes on in the media to affect public consciousness with what goes on in education to do the same. Certainly the statist schemers connect the two as a common communication policy. The media push gets at those adults who still have literate minds and believe they are well-informed because they go to trouble of watching evening news or reading something like the NYT. If you try to tell them it is filtered or even as in the case of the poll push wrong because of oversampling and incorrect assumptions, you get accused of believing in conspiracies. Somehow the schemers have trained the public that conspiracies are Black Swan events instead of the norm around government power.
Systems thinking/systems dynamics is being pushed in education all over the world. Schoolchildren are being cultivated to believe things that are not true to affect their values, feelings, and beliefs in order to impact their personal future behavior. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/develop-learners-who-think-and-behave-and-view-themselves-as-systems-citizens/ is a post I wrote to describe what such systems thinking in a K-12 classroom can do to a young impressionable mind.
Too many in media and education are effectively acting as Fifth Columnists in what they push and write about and even reject. Even if they have no idea what a Fifth Columnist is. I was reading through what a trophy school district described as the classroom dynamics and thought it sounded just like Dialectical Materialism training behind the old Iron Curtain.
So I did a search and came across repeated references to the Chinese among others on what a nice bridge philosophy systems thinking makes. That’s the reality. How it makes the mind frame what it experiences and how it guides behavior. So if no one in the West refers to systems thinking by its function and essential political essences does it then get a pass? Eligible to be used in any classroom in the West as long as the pusher has the magic ed degree?
With this going on in K-12, a compliant media may be irrelevant in elections soon.
Robin
1 Oct 12 at 2:38 am
“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”
― C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
Ellen of Tasmania
1 Oct 12 at 4:37 am
Coupled to a biased media, we have a sizeable biased audience. And so long as they have that, they are going to keep on turning out this turgid, fellatory Leftist bullshit.
perturbed
1 Oct 12 at 5:36 am
Ellen-what a great quote. Happy October to you.Still marching down September where I am.
And if Romney prevails in the US, the media will have lost what is left of their credibility and they know it. Pravda I believe was less overt.
Robin
1 Oct 12 at 7:57 am
Ellen-what a great quote. Happy October to you.Still marching down September where I am.
And if Romney prevails in the US, the media will have lost what is left of their credibility and they know it. Pravda I believe was less overt.
Robin
1 Oct 12 at 7:57 am
That’s weird. I suppose you can take that as a double round of applause.
Robin
1 Oct 12 at 7:58 am
That’s weird. I suppose you can take that as a double round of applause.
Robin
1 Oct 12 at 7:58 am
“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.”
― Mark Twain
Incidentally i’ve ordered Tim’s book. I think it’ll be a good read.
Poidar
1 Oct 12 at 8:04 am
Sorry Robin, it won’t get better when Romney is elected. The partisan’s will take the approach of dung throwing screaming howler monkeys.
We’re seeing in states like Queensland where the media comes from 1 private newspaper and endless government news agencies the endless list of shrill beat ups based upon stories that are loose on the truth.
When the government responds, they roll onto the next topic.
The Romney presidency will be trench warfare.
Token
1 Oct 12 at 8:22 am
I watched a bit of Planet America yesterday. They interviewed an “expert” on US presidential debates and the media. One of the hosts – the one in the tie – asked the “expert” if there was media bias for one candidate of another (fair dinkum). The expert dodged the question but later claimed that at a later stage, the media might pretend that the race was close so they can sell their product.
The whole exchange reminded me of Sgt Shultz: “I see nothing!”
jupes
1 Oct 12 at 8:35 am
Token-I don’t say that as a Romney partisan. But I have all the documents related to much of the 2nd term agenda and I do not think Romney will be pushing the Belmont Challenge or Future Earth Alliance global transformations in the name of AGW.
And the message that education has in fact become a social, political, and economic weapon is getting through. And the word that many a school principal or district administrator and super are pursuing a political insurrection without anyone’s permission is also gradually getting through.
Reps may go along with too many bad ed ideas but they are rarely the instigators except in the Chamber of Commerce/isn’t Corporatism lucrative guise.
And that’s an opportunity to remind people just how much of the prosperity they take for granted relies on economic freedom. And a wide variety of knowledge and marketable skills and a work ethic. The opposite of what Ed World is currently fostering.
Robin
1 Oct 12 at 9:34 am
I occasionally read Pravda articles online; definitely not as hard left biased as ABC / Fairdax here.
Chris M
1 Oct 12 at 9:49 am
I’m unconvinced by these arguments that left media bias are detrimental for society.
If the media holds a preponderance of lefties, then some other profession(s) must hold a preponderance of the right – that’s mathematical necessity.
Why is the left bias of the media more pernicious than the right bias of these other professions?
PSC
1 Oct 12 at 11:53 am
I’ll assume you’re serious for a moment. It is, because it has widespread potential to affect outcomes in elections. We have a system which tends to make a two point swing important, and media bias achieves at least that, probably more like 3-4.
If you bother to read about the study done by Tim Groseclose, you’ll get the picture, if tat’s what you want.
If you just want to defend the status quo, carry on with more of what you said above. We have about 6 characters here on the blog doing something like that already, on almost every thread, and it adds no value – in fact a distraction, thread pollution most of it.
blogstrop
1 Oct 12 at 12:11 pm
Competition forces news outlets to cater to their customer’s preferences.
• Realised profit is the criterion by which the market process selects survivors: those who realize positive profits survive; the rest disappear.
• Positive profits accrue to those news outlets who are better than their competitors. their lesser rivals will exhaust their retained earnings and fail to attract further investor support.
The form of organization that survives is the one that delivers the product demanded by customers at the lowest price while covering costs.
All news outlets except Fox News’ Special Report and Washington Times received scores to the left of the average member of Congress as rated by Groseclose-Milyo. However, this liberal bias is aid to essentially disappear the citations of the National Taxpayers Union is excluded from their analysis!
Why do slighly leftist news outlets survive in competition?
1. young females tend to be one of the groups of news consumers most willing to switch to activities besides reading or watching the news. This group often makes the consumption decisions for the household. Advertisers are willing to pay more to outlets that reach this group.
2. Since young females tend to be more liberal on average, a news outlet may want to slant its coverage to the left.
3. Newspapers sell space to advertisers tailor the way they cover politics to gain more readers.
4. If the majority of journalists have left-of-center views, liberal news might cost less to supply than unbiased news! Owners indulge this if skilled journalists will trade salary for discretion.
Charges of a liberal bias essentially require the existence of a worker run cartel in the USA: the biggest, most competitive media market in the world.
What protects the cartel against defectors and new entrants?
An analysis using endorsements of state-level initiatives and referendums found that newspapers are located almost exactly at the median voter in their home states. Another finding is that U.S. media outlets are relatively moderate, in the sense that they are located between the median Democratic and median Republican congressmen. U.S. newspapers also tend to be centrist relative to interest groups.
The U.S. marketplace for mass media works well – see http://www.voxeu.org/article/fair-and-balanced-after-all-bias-us-press
Jim Rose
1 Oct 12 at 5:52 pm
How do you explain Journolist?
TV licensing restrictions.
dd
1 Oct 12 at 6:18 pm
Because you can’t really practice right wing accounting, I-banking, engineering, small business, farming or medicine, you idiot.
JC
1 Oct 12 at 6:23 pm
PSC
Show me how say one builds a rightwing bridge or sells righwing meat in a butcher shop.
JC
1 Oct 12 at 6:24 pm
Wrong, my friend. Under the Fisk Doctrine, the medical profession will declare Leftism to be a treatable illness and all Leftists will be medicated whether they like it or not.
Fisky
1 Oct 12 at 6:31 pm
Oh Yea, Good point Fisk. No light dosing either. That would be cause for immediate de-registeration.
JC
1 Oct 12 at 6:33 pm
Looks like quite a few need to visit the Uncommon Knowledge site and listen to the full interview conducted by Peter Robinson with Prof. Groseclose
.
Blogstrop
2 Oct 12 at 6:36 am
Fortunately for the purposes of this thread Leigh and Gans published How Partisan is the Press? Multiple Measures of Media Slant in THE ECONOMIC RECORD, VOL. 88, NO. 280, MARCH, 2012, 127–147.
They employed several different approaches to find that the Australian media are quite centrist, with very few outlets being statistically distinguishable from the middle of Australian politics.
The minor exceptions were the ABC channel 2 and perhaps the Melbourne Age in its news slant in the 2004 election. Their media slants were small.
Australian newspapers tended to endorse the coalition in the federal elections from 1996 to 2007 although The Australian, right-wing rag that it is, backed the ALP in 2007!
The editorial endorsements series should have been longer because some newspapers back winners just before they become winners and oppose the re-election of tiered and smelly governments that have being there too long no matter what the party.
Jim Rose
19 Oct 12 at 5:07 pm