Media Bias Is Real, Finds UCLA Political Scientist

"While the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is conservative, the newspaper's news pages are liberal, even more liberal than The New York Times. The Drudge Report may have a right-wing reputation, but it leans left. Coverage by public television and radio is conservative compared to the rest of the mainstream media. Meanwhile, almost all major media outlets tilt to the left."

"These are just a few of the surprising findings from a UCLA-led study, which is believed to be the first successful attempt at objectively quantifying bias in a range of media outlets and ranking them accordingly."

"I suspected that many media outlets would tilt to the left because surveys have shown that reporters tend to vote more Democrat than Republican," said Tim Groseclose, a UCLA political scientist and the study's lead author. "But I was surprised at just how pronounced the distinctions are."

Interesting study, but they consider the results surprising, because they left out the main reason many people judge the bias of a media report, namely......

"Since Groseclose and Milyo were more concerned with bias in news reporting than opinion pieces, which are designed to stake a political position, they omitted editorials and Op‑Eds from their tallies. This is one reason their study finds The Wall Street Journal more liberal than conventional wisdom asserts."

It's those same omitted opinion pieces that are the ones most used to judge the bias of a paper or program. I would've liked them to do a study of local news outlets as well. While the media sources studied, were all national outlets, I believe that many more opinions are expressed within news stories by the talking-head anchors, and are slanted.

I won't get off on a rant here about local news, as I already did in a previous post entitled; Not Necessarily the News. In it, you'll find an article showing how one company that owns several media outlets, manipulates the news on the stations they own.

I believe it's the local media that really should be studied.