Political scientist Tim Groseclose has a book on media bias in which he has tried to quantify and measure political leaning in politicians and voters. His book, Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind
Mr. Groseclose says he didn’t want to write just another book claiming to expose bias among reporters and broadcasters. He wanted a scientific book that proposed solutions. Among those solutions is determining your own political quotient. On his website, you can take a 40-question quiz based on congressional roll-call votes in 2009 to see what your PQ is and how it compares to other politicians. This is not an easy quiz. The first two questions are a bit deep in the weeds, but I trudged through them to get a 7.7 PQ.
Even though this is all fairly interesting, I doubt it will change many minds. I hate thinking so cynically, but how many of us think about our civil responsibilities at all? Maybe a book like David Mamet’s The Secret Knowledge
And yet the Christian in me still holds on to the hope that even this can get better. Maybe I can’t help believing America is exceptional in this way, that all of us really can have liberty and justice.
Interesting. Maybe reading the newspaper made readers more “liberal” because being liberal is more in the “reality-based community”?
A fair conclusion, but I don’t think that’s what the study or maybe Groseclose concluded. You bring up an important problem in the media bias discussion. What exactly is a fair and balanced news report? It’s one that reports the truth, no matter whom it favors, right? What viewer/readers appear to want, however, is what reaffirms their preconceptions. So what kind of reporting would change someone’s mind on the various dangers of entitlements? Maybe feature stories on people who abuse and are abused by the system.
On NPR this afternoon I heard an interview that went something like this:
Number one, I couldn’t believe the circular reasoning of the White House Spokesman, but when the interviewer didn’t pick up on the circular reasoning that it’s ok because the people we like say it’s ok and then fed the guy the answer he wanted to hear I was totally flamboozled.
Yes, it may be exactly as you say, and it may be merely shallowness. I didn’t think of this when writing the post above, but I remember a column which argued that we are afflicted not with bias in various media, but with simpleminded reporting. I got irritated at an NPR report several days ago–it was during the deficit spending debate–that focused only on the horse race part of the story: Boener said this, Reed rejected it. One side puts up a bill, the other side votes it down. NPR said nothing about the substance of the bills and I never heard them (in any of there reporting) criticize the President for having no plan. He and his people said he had a plan, but any details were always forthcoming. It’s ridiculous.