Media Bias Is Real, Finds UCLA Political Scientist

Seriously? You had me fooled. Uh...not really. According to the survey,

"Overall, the major media outlets are quite moderate compared to members of Congress, but even so, there is a quantifiable and significant bias in that nearly all of them lean to the left," said co‑author Jeffrey Milyo, University of Missouri economist and public policy scholar."

This is so blatantly obvious that it's almost not worth repeating. I just thought it interesting that a formal, long-term academic survey confirmed it. It's so important to be informed about the political leanings of the media outlets from which we get our information to maintain a healthy level of skepticism.

Naturally, some news sources are better than others. My home town paper is the ultra-liberal LA Times. Saying that the LA Times has a strong liberal bias in its news reporting is like saying Jeanene Garafolo is bitter and unfunny. It's self evident. Every once in a while they hit a home run (like their recent multi-part series on the massive problems and incompent management of
the King-Drew medical center), and their sports page is great. But, oftentimes the paper has such an obvious political ax to grind that the value of the news story almost gets lost.

That's why I wasn't surprised to see this article on Page 1, above the fold. The article is about how the U.S. military covertly pays Iraqi newspapers to publish favorable stories about the war effort. You can agree or disagree with the military's use of propaganda during a war, but some of the reporting in this article is a joke, particularly considering the paper's own bias. The Times states,

"Many of the articles are presented in the Iraqi press as unbiased news accounts written and reported by independent journalists."

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. For those of us treated to daily doses of the LA Times, this sentence could easily read, "Many of the articles are presented in the LA Times as unbiased news accounts written and reported by independent journalists."

Here's another laugher:

"Though the articles are basically factual, they present only one side of events and omit information that might reflect poorly on the U.S. or Iraqi governments, officials said."

I couldn't have described the "reporting" at the Times better...in reverse. Anything to harm the Bush administration--from the negatively declarative headlines, to the breakneck speed in which they brush past the positive news to quote what "critics of the administration say..." (these critics are virtually always anonymous, of course). At least the Times grudginly admits that the military's articles are factual before immediately proceeding to discount them.

This is not just one article. This happens everyday in the Times. In fact the aforementioned study reportedly took into account news articles (it excluded op-ed pages) over the past 10 years and found,

"Of the 20 major media outlets studied, 18 scored left of center, with CBS' "Evening News," The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ranking second, third and fourth most liberal behind the news pages of The Wall Street Journal."

Look. I don't care if the Times has a liberal op-ed page. I just expect to see it on the op-ed page, not on the front page under a thin disguise of news reportage. Just report the facts and quit insidiously shading the meaning and context in an attempt to tell me what I should believe about them. It's disengenuous for a professional organization like the LA Times to claim that they are providing objective news when it's so shamelessly biased. What an embarrassment.