Sometimes neglected in such studies, however, is which news outlets have the fairest and unfairest political coverage. A recent study by political scientists Tim Groseclose of UCLA and Jeff Milyo of the University of Chicago tried to answer that question in a very innovative way. In their research (PDF original, HTML cache), Groseclose and Milyo declined to analyze the content of each news story but instead looked for how often a news organization quoted 200 particular think tanks as an objective source. But simply looking at think tank citations is hardly a reliable metric, especially if one is going to attempt to place a political label on a research institution. Such attempts can lead to erroneous results such as those arrived at by the liberal group FAIR whose refusal to classify the Brookings Institution (which is run by a former Clinton Administration official and consistently opposes conservative ideas) as a liberal organization led it to conclude that the national media favor conservatives.

To avoid such errors, Groseclose and Milyo declined to ascertain think tanks' ideologies and instead took their media numbers and compared them to how often members of the U.S. House and Senate cited the same 200 think tanks by matching up media outlets with members of Congress with similar tastes in research institutions. Based upon its citation habits, each news organization was given a liberal quotient as if it were a member of congress. The results were fairly unsurprising to savvier media consumers.

# posted by Squach : 12:59 PM   |