Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind by Tim Groseclose PhD

Author:Tim Groseclose PhD [Groseclose PhD, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2011-07-19T04:00:00+00:00

How to Escape the Trap

The key to avoiding the Fundamental Trap is to find a source of information that is independent of the media and also independent of the personal beliefs of the analyst judging the media. This may seem difficult, but it can be done.

One excellent example is a study by John Lott and Kevin Hassett.3 They analyze newspaper headlines that focus on economic news, specifically unemployment, GDP growth, durable goods production, and retail sales. They note whether a given headline describes the news in a positive or negative fashion, and they analyze whether the media outlet’s choice was related to whether the president was Republican or Democrat.

One noteworthy aspect of the study is that it documents a well-kept secret in journalism: two media outlets covering the exact same story can use vastly different headlines to describe it. For instance, on January 31, 2004, the Commerce Department reported that GDP grew 4 percent (annualized) during the fourth quarter of 2004. “Economy Remained Strong in 4th Quarter” was The New York Times headline. In contrast, “GDP Growth Disappoints” was the Chicago Tribune’s headline.

At this point, if you are a careful reader, you should sense that the Fundamental Trap potentially applies to the Lott-Hassett study. That is, there is no reason for journalists necessarily to describe economic conditions under Democrat and Republican presidents equally. That is, for instance, economies under Democratic administrations might in general perform better than economies under Republican administrations. If so, then a newspaper should describe them asymmetrically.

But if “unbiased” does not necessarily mean symmetric, then how should a journalist, or a researcher of media bias, decide upon the proper degree of asymmetry? After all, won’t the judgments of Lott and Hassett regarding whether a headline should be positive or negative be colored by what they have read or heard in the news?

Yes, but here’s the most brilliant aspect of their study … and the way they escape the Fundamental Trap. Lott and Hassett focus only on news stories that describe official statistics from the U.S. Commerce Department. Thus, the authors focus only on stories where the underlying news is an objective piece of data, which does not come from the media. They then construct a statistical technique that explicitly controls for these data. Most important, their assessment, whether the economy is good or bad, does not rely on their own judgment and intuition.

Lott and Hassett indeed find a liberal bias in the media. They find that for the same piece of news, major U.S. newspapers are 20 to 40 percent more likely to report a negative headline if the administration is Republican than if it is Democratic.

At least for now, however, the details of their conclusions are unimportant. What is important is that the Lott-Hassett study demonstrates that it really is possible to measure media bias while avoiding the Fundamental Trap.

In later chapters I describe three additional methods—two of which I helped to develop—that judge media bias while avoiding the Fundamental Trap.

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