So...AgapePress, the online news site for the American Family Association, directed me to a new study on "media bias". AgapePress reported the following results - the higher the score, the more "liberal":

Wall Street Journal - 85.1

New York Times - 73.7

CBS Evening News - 73.7

Los Angeles Times - 70.0

CBS The Early Show - 66.6

Washington Post - 66.6

Newsweek - 66.3

NPR Morning Edition - 66.3

U.S. News & World Report - 65.8

Time Magazine - 65.4

NBC Today Show - 64.0

USA Today - 63.4

NBC Nightly News - 61.6

ABC World News Tonight - 61.0

ABC Good Morning America - 56.1

CNN Newslight with Aaron Brown - 56.0

PBS Newshour with Jim Lehrer - 55.8

Fox News Special Report with Brit Hume - 39.7

U.S. Representative Average - 44.5

U.S. Senator Average - 40.0

Well...the first thing that caught my eye was that the Wall Street Journal ranked as the most "liberal" of the media in the studied...yea, I think that we have a problem here. Any time you do social research, you must look at your findings and compare it to what you know. In this case what we know is that the Wall Street Journal is far from being liberal.

So I took a look at the actual study, surprised at what I felt was faulty methodology:

To compute our measure, we count the times that a media outlet cites various think tanks and other policy groups. 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 construct an ADA score. As a simplified example, imagine that there were only two think tanks, one liberal and one conservative. Suppose that the New York Times cited the liberal think tank twice as often as the conservative one. Our method asks: What is the typical ADA score of members of Congress who exhibit the same frequency (2:1) in their speeches? This is the score that we would assign to the New York Times.

Their idea of bias was whether or not a media outlet cited certain "think tanks" more than congressman. There are clear reliability problems with this methodology.

• One, citing a think tank does not show bias, regardless of the political ideology of the "think tank". For example, Fox News could cite an Amnesty International without them being labeled liberal.
• Two, the study only looked at "news" stories, and ignored all opinion or editorials. This related to the first problem. A news show could be expected to cite "think tanks" from all over the spectrum. What really shows the bias of a news outlet is the opinion and editorial segments.
• Third, the study compares the scores to the "average" member of congress. In a Republican dominated congress and a Democratic party heavily influenced by centrists, it would be expected that the average news outlet would be to the "left" of the average congressman. The problem with this is that it does not mean that the news outlet is liberal. It only means that it is more "liberal" than the average congressman (who leans to the right).

This study is poorly designed and in turn produces poor result. It is just one more instance where one attempts to show that the media has a "liberal bias" through faulty research. In order to attempt a legitimate study on media bias, one needs to actually sit down and analyze the content of the media outlet, not their citations of a think tank or policy group. One would need to create a scale that is capable of determining the ideological tilt of the content, and then place each media outlet on a scale according to the actual content of their news.

Citing liberal think tanks does not equate with liberal bias, as is proven by this studies findings where The Wall Street Journal is liberal! There is do doubt that the media leans Democrat (I refuse to say liberal, because the Democratic Party is NOT liberal), but this study has failed to prove it.

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