Hey Folks,  sorry about the long absence....   I've been buried at work and went away on a biz trip for a few days (Atlanta).   In any case, I'm back and blogging now   ;-)

I thought I'd point out this fantastic, and very necessary study outlining media bias in major TV / web news sources.   These guys extend the ADA scoring system - which is typically used to measure the left / right leanings of politicians - to news outlets.   

The authors, Tim Groseclose of UCLA/Stanford and Jeff Milyo of U. Chicago - provide this summary explanation of how ADA is computed -

To compute our measure, we count the times that a media outlet cites various think tanks. We compare this with the times that members of Congress cite the same think tanks in their speeches on the floor of the House and Senate. By comparing the citation patterns we can construct an ADA score for each media outlet.

ADA is far from perfect BUT, there's fair consensus from the folks who follow these things that it's the most prescriptive method devised to date.    I love it quantitativenes.

Their summary finding -

Our results show a very significant liberal bias. All of the news outlets except Fox News’ Special Report received a score to the left of the average member of Congress. Moreover, by one of our measures all but three of these media outlets (Special Report, the Drudge Report, and ABC’s World News Tonight) were closer to the average Democrat in Congress than to the median member of the House of Representatives. One of our measures found that the Drudge Report is the most centrist of all media outlets in our sample. Our other measure found that Fox News’ Special Report is the most centrist.

Of note - most other Fox News channel programs (beyond Special Report) also swing left of center!

...Based on sentences as the level of observation (the results of which are listed in Table 8), the Drudge Report is the most centrist, Fox News’ Special Report is second, ABC World News Tonight is third, and CBS Evening is last.

Given that the conventional wisdom is that the Drudge Report and Fox News are conservative news outlets, this ordering might be surprising. Perhaps more surprising is the degree to which the “mainstream” press is liberal. The results of Table 8 show that the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, USA Today, and CBS Evening News are not only liberal, they are closer to the average Democrat in Congress (who has a score of 74.1) than they are to the median of the whole House (who has a score of 39.0).

...the New York Times is twice as far from the center as Fox News’ Special Report, to gain a balanced perspective, one would need to spend twice as much time watching Special Report as he or she spends reading the New York Times.

...Our results contrast strongly with the prior expectations of many others. It is easy to find quotes from prominent journalists and academics who claim that there is no systematic bias among media outlets in the U.S. ... The main conclusion of our paper is that our results simply reject such claims.

Now, as a Libertarian, I'm a classic "forgotten child" in these kinds of political studies.   After all, in theory, we are neither Left (rejecting govt economic / social spending) nor Right (rejecting the traditionalism and conservative social policy).   So, I found it was interesting to dig up this table in the back to find out where my favorite thinktank, the Cato Institute, landed -

• 6.17 - Heritage Foundation
• 34.99 - ACLU
• 55.28 - Amnesty International
• 7.17 - Right to Life committee
• 25.6 - Cato
• 5.71 - Family Research Council
• 76.87 - Children's Defense Fund

Keep in mind that due to the methodology, a "centrist" score is closer to 40 rather than 50.   Given this, Cato rates as a "conservatve" organization but is also in the same statistical band as the ACLU.   The authors of the study note that during the time period sampled, several ACLU issues were disproportionately adopted by Conservative sources and hence the "surprising" score for the organization.  

The data does hint that the Libertarian mantle has somewhat more adoption within the Conservative swamp rather than the Liberal one.   Still it isn't fully embraced given the strong contrast between Cato scores and those for more "true blue" conservative think tanks like Heritage, Right to Life, and Family Research Council.  

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