Media Bias

The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, 2007

Presidency and political communication scholars have given scant attention to how local news media cover the presidency. The author offers a comparative study of coverage of the Bush presidency on the front pages of 100 American newspapers during a five-month period in 2006. Sociological and economic theories predict slanted coverage of national politics by America's newspapers, despite journalistic professional norms to the contrary.The analyses suggest there is a slant to the coverage of President Bush that is partly explained by the political leanings of the newspaper and its audience. Newspapers that endorsed Bush's reelection in 2004 tended to write more favorable headlines, and newspapers in states where Democrats are strong politically tended to write less favorable headlines.

The Journal of Politics, 1998

In recent years presidential charges of maltreatment by the press have become commonplace. Various scholarly research into political communication appears to confirm the validity of these charges. However, a number of issues prevent one from inferring bias from the high levels of unfavorable presidential news these studies report. The research reported here is designed to overcome these problems and allow us to test the bias hypothesis more conclusively. Applying this design to the three networks' evening news programs during the years 1990 through 1995, we find qualified support for the bias hypothesis but even more compelling evidence that changes in presidential approval, whether favorable or unfavorable, drive news coverage of the president's public support. We also find surprising differences in the networks' routines and patterns of coverage that call into question the common assumption of homogenous network behavior. Question: We have a poll oult tonight that shows that your-job approval rating has gone from 64 to 49 percent in the last 2 months.... Why do you think this has happened? President Clinton: I bet not five percent of the American people know that we passed a budget ... and it passed at the most rapid point of any budget in 17 years. I bet not one in 20 American voters knows that because . . . success and the lack of discord are not as noteworthy as failure. _May 7,

Network TV presidential opinion poll stories dealing with Republican George W. Bush (N = 85 stories) and Democrat Barack Obama (N = 82 stories) were analyzed with two lexical analysis software programs (Diction 6.0 and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count 2007) to look for relative news bias in the treatment of the two presidents. Even though Bush had significantly higher public approval scores, the verbal framing of the news stories was exactly the opposite. Five out of six hypotheses demonstrated that the networks employed significantly more favorable word choices in Obama stories than in Bush stories. The empirical results of this study clearly support national poll findings of public perceptions of liberal news bias.

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2005

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. Consistent with claims made by conservative critics, CBS Evening News and the New York Times received scores far to the left of center. The most centrist media outlets were PBS NewsHour, CNN's Newsnight, and ABC's Good Morning America; among print outlets, USA Today was closest to the center. All of our findings refer strictly to news content; that is, we exclude editorials, letters, and the like. "The editors in Los Angeles killed the story. They told Witcover that it didn't 'come off ' and that it was an 'opinion' story.. .. The solution was simple, they told him. All he had to do was get other people to make the same points and draw the same conclusions and then write the article in their words" (emphasis in original). Timothy Crouse, Boys on the Bus [1973, p. 116].

Retrieved January, 2001

The power and influence of the media has been the subject of numerous studies over the years. If the media does indeed have this ability to persuade the public and affect a particular voting behavior, the implications are enormous in a democratic society. The 2016 Presidential election was no exception to examples of media bias on the left and the right. Historically, 'slant' or bias in the media has been utilized in various ways, some more effective than others. Outright endorsements by print media and internet sources are the more obvious. Bias in reporting, however, is more subdued and uses ambiguity and subtleness toward a particular political lean. With this recognizable slant, the question of ethics and

Presented at the 2007 National Communication Association Annual Convention; Co-authors: Weirui Wang, Jesse Clark -- This study explores the relationship between media exposure and political attitudes. It seeks the influence of overall media exposure, exposure to various medium types (Newspaper, TV, Internet, etc.) and exposure to media sources (The NY Times, Fox News, etc.). A survey was conducted with 169 undergraduates in a large eastern university participating. Political attitudes are divided into measures of political attitudes on economic issues and political attitudes on social issues. Additionally, self-ratings of economic and social political attitudes were used. ANCOVA and regression analyses showed that overall media exposure only correlates with political attitudes on the public broadcasting funding issue significantly. However, news consumption through magazines, radio, and newspapers do show some degree of correlation with self rating of political attitudes on economic issues, as well as political attitudes on the death penalty. The presumed liberal or conservative position of a source doesn’t result in liberal or conservative political attitudes necessarily. However, the study finds that Fox News and The New York Times are the sources that most correlate with people’s political attitudes. It turns out that the consumption of a presumed liberal news source such as The Daily Show or CNN correlate with conservative political attitudes on several economic and social issues. Fox News also approached correlations with some liberal political attitudes.

Social Science Quarterly, 2007

Objective. This study is an effort to produce a more systematic, empirically-based, historical-comparative understanding of media bias than generally is found in previous works.Methods. The research employs a quantitative measure of ideological bias in a formal content analysis of the United States' two largest circulation news magazines, Time and Newsweek. Findings are compared with the results of an identical examination of two of the nation's leading partisan journals, the conservative National Review and the liberal Progressive.Results. Bias scores reveal stark differences between the mainstream and the partisan news magazines' coverage of four issue areas: crime, the environment, gender, and poverty.Conclusion. Data provide little support for those claiming significant media bias in either ideological direction.

Newspaper Research Journal, 1987

Data show newspaper journalists' tendency toward liberal philosophies is reflected in attitudes toward credibility, the wayjournalists and newspapers approach doing their jobs, coverage ofdifferent kinds ofpeople, newsjudgment issues, pressfreedoms and evaluations oftheir newspapers. This tendency may contribute indirectly to public distrust ofnewspapers and other media because thepublic tends to be more conservative than journalists on these issues. Journalists' attitudes seem related to a "world view" which sets journalists, and one subgroup in particular, apart from the public as a whole.