sunndoggy8
03-26-2002, 03:23 PM
This is taken from the "Fiar and Accuract in reporting" website. I was just curious as to what the board's thoughts were about this article.
<i>March 21, 2002
"The Liberal Media" -- A Poltergeist That Will Not Die
By Norman Solomon
You've probably heard a lot of spooky tales about "the liberal media."
Ever since Vice President Spiro Agnew denounced news outlets that were offending the Nixon administration in the autumn of 1969, the specter has been much more often cited than sighted. "The liberal media" is largely an apparition -- but the epithet serves as an effective weapon, brandished against journalists who might confront social inequities and imbalances of power.
During the last few months, former CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg's new book "Bias" has stoked the "liberal media" canard. His anecdote-filled book continues to benefit from enormous media exposure.
In interviews on major networks, Goldberg has emphasized his book's charge that American media outlets are typically in step with the biased practices he noticed at CBS News -- where "we pointedly identified conservatives as conservatives, for example, but for some crazy reason didn't bother to identify liberals as liberals."
But do facts support Goldberg's undocumented generalization? To find out, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg searched a database of 30 large daily newspapers in the United States. He disclosed the results in an analysis that aired March 19 on the national radio program "Fresh Air."
Nunberg discovered "a big disparity in the way the press labels liberals and conservatives -- but not in the direction that Goldberg claims." Actually, the data showed, "the average liberal legislator has a 30 percent greater likelihood of being identified with a partisan label than the average conservative does."
When Nunberg narrowed his search to the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times -- three dailies "routinely accused of having a liberal bias" -- he learned that "in those papers, too, liberals get partisan labels 30 percent more often than conservatives do, the same proportion as in the press at large."
And what about Goldberg's claim that media coverage is also slanted by unfairly pigeonholing stars of the entertainment industry? His book declares flatly: "If we do a Hollywood story, it's not unusual to identify certain actors, like Tom Selleck or Bruce Willis, as conservatives. But Barbra Streisand or Rob Reiner, no matter how active they are in liberal Democratic politics, are just Barbra Streisand and Rob Reiner."
Again, Nunberg found, the facts prove Goldberg wrong: "The press gives partisan labels to Streisand and Reiner almost five times as frequently as it does to Selleck and Willis. For that matter, Warren Beatty gets a partisan label twice as often as Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Norman Lear gets one more frequently than Charlton Heston does."
The results are especially striking because the word "liberal" has been widely stigmatized, observes Nunberg, a senior researcher at Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information. "It turns out that newspapers label liberals much more readily than they do conservatives."
So, while Goldberg hotly contends -- without statistical backup -- that conservatives get a raw deal because they're singled out for ideological labeling more than liberals are, Nunberg relies on empirical evidence to reach a very different conclusion: "If there is a bias here, in fact, the data suggests that it goes the other way -- that the media consider liberals to be farther from the mainstream than conservatives are."
It's unlikely that factual debunking will do much to slow the momentum of those who are intent on riding the "liberal media" poltergeist. It has already carried them a long way.
Not surprisingly, President Bush displayed Goldberg's book for photographers at the White House a couple of months ago. For a long time, GOP strategists have been "working the refs" -- crying foul about supposed media bias while benefitting greatly from the
<i>March 21, 2002
"The Liberal Media" -- A Poltergeist That Will Not Die
By Norman Solomon
You've probably heard a lot of spooky tales about "the liberal media."
Ever since Vice President Spiro Agnew denounced news outlets that were offending the Nixon administration in the autumn of 1969, the specter has been much more often cited than sighted. "The liberal media" is largely an apparition -- but the epithet serves as an effective weapon, brandished against journalists who might confront social inequities and imbalances of power.
During the last few months, former CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg's new book "Bias" has stoked the "liberal media" canard. His anecdote-filled book continues to benefit from enormous media exposure.
In interviews on major networks, Goldberg has emphasized his book's charge that American media outlets are typically in step with the biased practices he noticed at CBS News -- where "we pointedly identified conservatives as conservatives, for example, but for some crazy reason didn't bother to identify liberals as liberals."
But do facts support Goldberg's undocumented generalization? To find out, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg searched a database of 30 large daily newspapers in the United States. He disclosed the results in an analysis that aired March 19 on the national radio program "Fresh Air."
Nunberg discovered "a big disparity in the way the press labels liberals and conservatives -- but not in the direction that Goldberg claims." Actually, the data showed, "the average liberal legislator has a 30 percent greater likelihood of being identified with a partisan label than the average conservative does."
When Nunberg narrowed his search to the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times -- three dailies "routinely accused of having a liberal bias" -- he learned that "in those papers, too, liberals get partisan labels 30 percent more often than conservatives do, the same proportion as in the press at large."
And what about Goldberg's claim that media coverage is also slanted by unfairly pigeonholing stars of the entertainment industry? His book declares flatly: "If we do a Hollywood story, it's not unusual to identify certain actors, like Tom Selleck or Bruce Willis, as conservatives. But Barbra Streisand or Rob Reiner, no matter how active they are in liberal Democratic politics, are just Barbra Streisand and Rob Reiner."
Again, Nunberg found, the facts prove Goldberg wrong: "The press gives partisan labels to Streisand and Reiner almost five times as frequently as it does to Selleck and Willis. For that matter, Warren Beatty gets a partisan label twice as often as Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Norman Lear gets one more frequently than Charlton Heston does."
The results are especially striking because the word "liberal" has been widely stigmatized, observes Nunberg, a senior researcher at Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information. "It turns out that newspapers label liberals much more readily than they do conservatives."
So, while Goldberg hotly contends -- without statistical backup -- that conservatives get a raw deal because they're singled out for ideological labeling more than liberals are, Nunberg relies on empirical evidence to reach a very different conclusion: "If there is a bias here, in fact, the data suggests that it goes the other way -- that the media consider liberals to be farther from the mainstream than conservatives are."
It's unlikely that factual debunking will do much to slow the momentum of those who are intent on riding the "liberal media" poltergeist. It has already carried them a long way.
Not surprisingly, President Bush displayed Goldberg's book for photographers at the White House a couple of months ago. For a long time, GOP strategists have been "working the refs" -- crying foul about supposed media bias while benefitting greatly from the