Bob Felton's Civil Commotion is a blog I discovered doing a little technorati-surfing just now. I'm intrigued because the author is clearly a conservative, but clearly a thinking one. He wrote a really great post (actually, a bunch) about the current right-to-die case that's got everyone's attention.

So after approvingly linking to the above, and hopeful because of the very reasonable content, I'm going to dispute another post and use the ol' trackback. Maybe we can get a little cross-blog debate going. Here's an old movement-conservative saw I'd like to take a crack at:

Oh, yeah, that bias

The Columbia School of Journalism has just released a study which finds — GASP! — that news stories were slanted anti-Bush 3-times more often than slanted anti-Kerry during the 2004 election.

My prediction: The MSM will roll their eyes, insist it isn’t so, and continue to wonder where their readers are going.

It’s evolution at work, right in front of our eyes; non-adapters die.

It's fun to bash the MainStream Media and all, but I have serious doubts about the study in question. A look at the footnotes reveals the following:

The analysis of election coverage begins after March 1 (Super Tuesday) after John Kerry emerged as the all-but-official Democratic candidate. The cross-media comparisons of campaign coverage included stories focused at least 50% on one candidate or the other so that deriving a sense of tone about the candidate was logical. Those totaled 250 stories. The findings, moreover, reinforce what the Project found in a separate study that looked at tone in the final month of the campaign, surrounding the debates, and in a pre-convention study using a different methodology that mapped coverage of different character themes about the candidates.

This is highly problematic. Looking at a total of 250 stories in an eight-month timespan in which a 24-hour news cycle is at work is hardly a scientifically significant sample. There's no actual data given about the separate studies referenced, and it's also unclear from the footnotes what sources these 250 stories came from, as they were apparently not drawn from the same sample as the much broader study of the war coverage (which included 10x as many stories).

And then there's this:

The findings on tone also mirror those of Robert Lichter and the Center on Media and Public Affairs, which employs a different approach to studying tone.

Robert Lichter is a conservative activist, and the CMPA (while claiming non-partisan tax-exempt status) is a well known conservative organ with an agenda of hostility to environmentalism and consumer's rights. Their "scientific" the metrics for determining a "positive" or "negative" attitude are notoriously bogus, and Lichter has been pushing to discredit the press as liberally-biased and "elite" for more than two decades. The fact that he was cited as a supporting example raises many more questions about this study than it answers.

Furthermore, the study's small sample of stories voids the impact of contextualization, and clearly didn't take into account the influence of anchor-opinion, which is widely understood as having as much (or more) impact on public sentiment than individual press reports themselves. In fact, when Bob remarks that the MSM will continue to wonder "where their readers go," he fails to complete the loop which is that more and more people turn to opinionated columnists and news-roundup anchors (and, yes, bloggers) not for raw information, but more importantly for meaning.

To bring it on home, I'm as upset with the state of journalism and the media as anyone, but the idea that there's a "liberal bias" at work is crap. It's a documented revolutionary tactic designed to discredit sources of information that are hostile to movement conservativism. It's part of a conscious strategy that has been at work for decades, and the fact that intelligent and moral people still fall for it is a testiment to how well Trotskyite tactics have worked for the radical right.

If there's a bias in the mainstream media it's towards mediocrity, towards compacency, towards consumption, towards business as usual. I agree that there's an information revolution coming, but the reasons for this revolution have to do with the unaccountability of the media establishment -- note this is different from "elitism" -- how easily the press corps can be manipulated, and how poorly the current state of journalism fulfills its role of guarding the public interest against the private. The answer isn't a more partisan media or a more "balanced" media, it's a more inquisitive and truthful one which concerns itself not just with telling two sides of the story, but in finding out which one is right.

An honest media with a driving sense of public service would likely still be imbalanced in covering a presidential election. But it's hard to accuse the facts of bias.