January 20, 2006

Anecdotally

I don't much mind that American news media has a pro-Democrat or moderate lefty bias, although I find it rather silly that some argue that it doesn't exist. I don't think I've written on the subject before.

David Boaz has found what looks to be a pretty good example:

In the past three months, the major media have repeatedly hammered away at the theme that Judge Samuel Alito Jr. would "shift the Supreme Court to the right" if he replaced retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

According to Lexis/Nexis, major newspapers have used the phrase "shift the court" 36 times in their Alito coverage. They have referred to the "balance of the court" 32 times and "the court's balance" another 15. "Shift to the right" accounted for another 18 mentions.

Major radio and television programs indexed by Lexis/Nexis have used those phrases 63 times. CNN told viewers that Alito would "tilt the balance of the court" twice on the day President Bush nominated him. NPR's first-day story on "Morning Edition" was headlined "Alito could move court dramatically to the right."
[...]
Not a single major newspaper used the phrases "shift the court," "shift to the left," or "balance of the court" in the six weeks between Clinton's nomination and the Senate's ratification of Ginsburg. Only one story in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer mentioned the "court's balance," and that writer thought that Ginsburg would move a "far right" court "toward the center."

The only network broadcast to use any of those phrases was an NPR interview in which liberal law professor Paul Rothstein of Georgetown University said that Ginsburg might offer a "subtle change...a nuance" in "the balance of the court" because she would line up with Justice O'Connor in the center.

Yes, I realize one example doesn't prove much.

Posted by Walter at January 20, 2006 03:29 PM
Comments

Um, what would you cite in regard to the underlying assertion that Justice Ginsburg did, in fact, "shift the court" significantly to the left?

She replaced Justice Byron "Whizzer" White; was he a conservative or originalist? Has Ginsburg been some sort of radical leftist on the Court?

On the news bias thing, I think it's silly to generalize. There are a jillion news publications in the U.S. and innumerable major ones; each has their own bias, but moreover, save for the overtly ideological ones -- say, The Nation, or Weekly Standard, pretty much all of the real news publications publish a range of views and perspectives.

The main thing about this, though, is that "bias" is always perceived as existing on "the other side." The water we swim in tends to be invisible to ourselves, in most cases.

Thus, to leftists, the NY Times is an infamously right-wing, pro-Administration, paper, whereas to conservatives it is notoriously left-wing.

And the last point I'll make in short is that an awful lot of people confuse the news departments of various papers with the editorial departments, despite most papers (not all, to be sure, but then we're mostly talking minor papers) keeping a "wall of separation."

Thus the Times might be said to have a vaguely liberal editorial department, sure, but the news department is separate. Ditto the Wall Street Journal in the opposite direction.

Posted by: Gary Farber at January 23, 2006 12:02 AM

Glad to see we have an uplifting dialogue going.

:-)

Posted by: Gary Farber at January 24, 2006 06:10 PM