Liberal Bias on the Network News

[FormerFundy]

I have just finished reading Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News by Bernard Goldberg, a CBS correspondent for 28 years.

Very interesting read. Anyone who doubts that the major networks in the US (with the exception of Fox) have a liberal bias should read this book.

The book grew out of the firestorm that erupted in 1996 when Goldberg wrote an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal entitled: Networks Need a Reality Check . You can read the article on line http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=95001668 .

After Goldberg wrote the article he was ostracized by the CBS elite, especially Dan Rather. Dan seems to have a hard time taking criticism (although he can certainly dish it out).

The book details how the news media are very biased on several fronts:

1) Hyping the AID epedemic way out of proportion to reality and trying to paint it as a heterosexual disease.

2) Hyping homelessness and making it the fault of the Republicans. He recounts the number of news stories about the subject during Republican and Democratic administrations. The story almost disappeared under the Democratic admin of Clinton but suddenly reappeared when George W. became President.

3) Hypocrisy on racial matters. News executives shy away from stories that have a black as the main character because they know that their audience is overwhelmingly white. This is epecially true on the news magazine shows such as 20-20, Dateline, 60 Minutes etc. It also is especially true during "sweeps week."

4) Pushing feminist goals. For example pushing the idea that the federal gov't needs to pour alot more money into daycare and that corporations should be required to provide this to women. He says that the implication is given that the majority of the women who need this are single women when in reality over 80% of the women using day care are part of a two income family.

5) Political bias. He points out that the news people will use the term "conservative" when referring to certain Congressmen, for example Trent Lott but never use the term "liberal" when referring to Congressmen such as Ted Kennedy or Dick Shumer, etc.

Anyway, this book is a fascinating look into the inner workings of the elite news media in the US. I highly recommend it.

[$cirisme]

Interesting. I will have to check it out. Thanks.

[EvoUK]

Sounds quite cool- never was impressed too much by the american news.

[Cowthulu]

Read this book a couple of years ago and it was definitely a good read. Most interesting IMO was some of the elites like Dan Rather feel they are actually middle of the road in their views. Goldberg felt this view came from them needing to basically get out more, people in the expensive areas of New York are not a good representation of the country.

[EvoUK]

I don't know- "middle of the road" means something different in the US- which is a mostly right-wing country.

For the Uk I'm pretty centralist, but by US standards I'm left. Funny that.

[Tfbandie]

Does he describe why, or just list accounts of it occuring?

[Meh_Gerbil]

I don't know- "middle of the road" means something different in the US- which is a mostly right-wing country.

For the Uk I'm pretty centralist, but by US standards I'm left. Funny that.

Left, Right, Centerist -- that doesn't matter as much as a bunch of people distorting the news in an attempt to make the country in their own image.

[Cowthulu]

I think the point was that their view of themselves was distorted from the reality of what was out there. So where their "Centrism" lay wasn't really the point. He gives a few examples of how they can't imagine why people disagree with them because no one "they know" does (most of of know the dangers of anecdotal evidence). I would have to read it again to be more specific. It is a pretty quick read though and enjoyable IMO.

[Meh_Gerbil]

I think the point was that their view of themselves was distorted from the reality of what was out there. So where their "Centrism" lay wasn't really the point. He gives a few examples of how they can't imagine why people disagree with them because no one "they know" does (most of of know the dangers of anecdotal evidence). I would have to read it again to be more specific. It is a pretty quick read though and enjoyable IMO.

Ah..this is the right answer.
They didn't intentionally distort anything -- they were just disconnected.

[Teallaura]

I don't know- "middle of the road" means something different in the US- which is a mostly right-wing country.

For the Uk I'm pretty centralist, but by US standards I'm left. Funny that.

This is a recurrent problem for analysis - terms like 'conservative' and 'liberal' do in fact vary significantly depending on which side of the Atlantic you happen to be on.

Our conservatives are actually far more moderate than European conservatives - and the same is true of liberals. Europe seems to spread out to the extremes more than in the US - making the transistion from one set of terminology to the other difficult. (I had a two hour discussion with some IR friends once on the comparison - it took most of that time to realize we weren't using the same words the same way. American studies pretty well assumes this, but IR doesn't since it doesn't deal with comparative much.)

The US is becoming more conservative (that's to be expected from demographics alone) but hardly 'right wing'. It's harder to evaluate when we get used to terms implying one thing in our home nation but find they mean something else again in another - this is a royal pain for the comparative guys, believe me!

[WinAce]

5) Political bias. He points out that the news people will use the term "conservative" when referring to certain Congressmen, for example Trent Lott but never use the term "liberal" when referring to Congressmen such as Ted Kennedy or Dick Shumer, etc.

At least this one's nonsense.

"Goldberg and the other critics of media bias also make their charges about the language of the press, which is available online. So I went to a big online database and did a search on the articles from about 30 major newspapers, including The New York Times , the LA Times, the Washington Post, The Boston Globe , the Miami Herald, and the San Francisco Chronicle .

For purposes of comparison, I took the names of ten well-known politicans, five liberals and five conservatives. On the liberal side were Senators Boxer, Wellstone, Harkin, and Kennedy, and Representative Barney Frank. On the conservative side were Senators Lott and Helms, John Ashcroft, and Representatives Dick Armey and Tom Delay. Then I looked to see how often each of those names occurred within seven words of liberal or conservative , whichever was appropriate. Of course some of those hits involved extraneous noise, say when the word liberal just happens to find itself near Barbara Boxer's name with no real connection between the two. But when I checked a sample of the results by hand, it turned out that more than 85 percent of them did in fact involve the assignment of a political point of view, with phrases like "Paul Wellstone, the liberal senator," or "Senate conservatives like Jesse Helms." And with a sample of more than 100,000 references to the names on the list, the results were statistically sound.

In fact, I did find a big disparity in the way the press labels liberals and conservatives, but not in the direction that Goldberg claims. On the contrary: the average liberal legislator has a thirty percent greater likelyhood of being identified with a partisan label than the average conservative does. The press describes Barney Frank as a liberal two-and-a-half times as frequently as it describes Dick Armey as a conservative. It gives Barbara Boxer a partisan label almost twice as often as it gives one to Trent Lott. And while it isn't surprising that the press applies the label conservative to Jesse Helms more often than to any other Republican in the group, it describes Paul Wellstone as a liberal twenty percent more frequently than that.

At first I wondered whether I had inadvertantly included a bunch of conservative newspapers in my sample. So I did the same search in just three papers that are routinely accused of having a liberal bias, The New York Times , the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times . Interestingly, those papers tend to use labels of both sorts slightly less than the other papers do. But even there, the liberals get partisan labels thirty percent more often than conservatives do, the same proportion as in the press at large."
--Geoffrey Nunberg

[Arnold]

At least this one's nonsense.

"Goldberg and the other critics of media bias also make their charges about the language of the press, which is available online. So I went to a big online database and did a search on the articles from about 30 major newspapers, including The New York Times , the LA Times, the Washington Post, The Boston Globe , the Miami Herald, and the San Francisco Chronicle .

For purposes of comparison, I took the names of ten well-known politicans, five liberals and five conservatives. On the liberal side were Senators Boxer, Wellstone, Harkin, and Kennedy, and Representative Barney Frank. On the conservative side were Senators Lott and Helms, John Ashcroft, and Representatives Dick Armey and Tom Delay. Then I looked to see how often each of those names occurred within seven words of liberal or conservative , whichever was appropriate. Of course some of those hits involved extraneous noise, say when the word liberal just happens to find itself near Barbara Boxer's name with no real connection between the two. But when I checked a sample of the results by hand, it turned out that more than 85 percent of them did in fact involve the assignment of a political point of view, with phrases like "Paul Wellstone, the liberal senator," or "Senate conservatives like Jesse Helms." And with a sample of more than 100,000 references to the names on the list, the results were statistically sound.

In fact, I did find a big disparity in the way the press labels liberals and conservatives, but not in the direction that Goldberg claims. On the contrary: the average liberal legislator has a thirty percent greater likelyhood of being identified with a partisan label than the average conservative does. The press describes Barney Frank as a liberal two-and-a-half times as frequently as it describes Dick Armey as a conservative. It gives Barbara Boxer a partisan label almost twice as often as it gives one to Trent Lott. And while it isn't surprising that the press applies the label conservative to Jesse Helms more often than to any other Republican in the group, it describes Paul Wellstone as a liberal twenty percent more frequently than that.

At first I wondered whether I had inadvertantly included a bunch of conservative newspapers in my sample. So I did the same search in just three papers that are routinely accused of having a liberal bias, The New York Times , the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times . Interestingly, those papers tend to use labels of both sorts slightly less than the other papers do. But even there, the liberals get partisan labels thirty percent more often than conservatives do, the same proportion as in the press at large."
--Geoffrey Nunberg

I've read an article or two about Goldberg's book and heard him interviewed a few times. Having been a TV broadcaster his focus is the three big television network news and news magazine broadcasts. This study does not address them and so may be of no consequence to Goldberg's assertions.

[FormerFundy]

Arnold, you are right. Goldberg is speaking specifically about TV news and even more specifically about CBS.

[BeHereNow]

I have just finished reading Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News by Bernard Goldberg, a CBS correspondent for 28 years.

Very interesting read. Anyone who doubts that the major networks in the US (with the exception of Fox) have a liberal bias should read this book.

The book grew out of the firestorm that erupted in 1996 when Goldberg wrote an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal entitled: Networks Need a Reality Check . You can read the article on line http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=95001668 .

After Goldberg wrote the article he was ostracized by the CBS elite, especially Dan Rather. Dan seems to have a hard time taking criticism (although he can certainly dish it out).

The book details how the news media are very biased on several fronts:

1) Hyping the AID epedemic way out of proportion to reality and trying to paint it as a heterosexual disease.

2) Hyping homelessness and making it the fault of the Republicans. He recounts the number of news stories about the subject during Republican and Democratic administrations. The story almost disappeared under the Democratic admin of Clinton but suddenly reappeared when George W. became President.

3) Hypocrisy on racial matters. News executives shy away from stories that have a black as the main character because they know that their audience is overwhelmingly white. This is epecially true on the news magazine shows such as 20-20, Dateline, 60 Minutes etc. It also is especially true during "sweeps week."

4) Pushing feminist goals. For example pushing the idea that the federal gov't needs to pour alot more money into daycare and that corporations should be required to provide this to women. He says that the implication is given that the majority of the women who need this are single women when in reality over 80% of the women using day care are part of a two income family.

5) Political bias. He points out that the news people will use the term "conservative" when referring to certain Congressmen, for example Trent Lott but never use the term "liberal" when referring to Congressmen such as Ted Kennedy or Dick Shumer, etc.

Anyway, this book is a fascinating look into the inner workings of the elite news media in the US. I highly recommend it.

I read it in two sittings when I was visiting my brother at Princeton a few years ago. He has quite the conservative Christian book collection. Goldberg did a great job of establishing his case, no doubt. I especially liked the part where he questioned why Dan Rather (was it Rather, or another big name?) talked a big talk about giving minorities prominent positions, but was unwilling to walk the walk by giving up his own job to a minority.

What I haven't read are similar books that claim a right wing bias. I'm curious how well they make their case.

[FormerFundy]

I read it in two sittings when I was visiting my brother at Princeton a few years ago. He has quite the conservative Christian book collection. Goldberg did a great job of establishing his case, no doubt. I especially liked the part where he questioned why Dan Rather (was it Rather, or another big name?) talked a big talk about giving minorities prominent positions, but was unwilling to walk the walk by giving up his own job to a minority.

I believe it was Heyward, President of CBS News that he was referring to.

I was somewhat surprised by how vindictive Dan Rather is and quite petty in my opinion.

What I haven't read are similar books that claim a right wing bias. I'm curious how well they make their case.

I think there is an obvious right wing bias on most of radio talk shows (Limbaugh, Hannity, etc.) I do not necessarily see the same thing with Fox News Channel. I think they do a fairly good job of trying to provide both sides. Something that the major networks definitely do not do.

For example on the News program with Brit Hume every night, they have a panel discussion with 2 liberal reporters and 2 conservative reporters. Now it is true that Brit Hume is conservative so one could argue that since he leads the discussion he is directing the way he wants it to go.