Is current media coverage of poor media coverage poor?

Mathloom · Oct 23, 2011

If you were able to repeat the title of the thread 10 times consecutively, welcome.

I was wondering what everyone thought. I was surprised to have a discussion with people yesterday who said they didn't think overall media coverage is nearly as biased as people claim.

But how would he know this if not for the very same media coverage that we are scrutinizing in this example?

If media coverage was horrendous, the media wouldn't cover it, unless it was a competitor and it's profitable - the motive is profit, not good sources, truthfulness, transparency, etc. So that's never going to happen.

But since we know that poor media coverage could be poorly covered by the media, how sincere has the media been (in your opinion) when it comes to covering things that make the entire industry look bad?

AroundTheWorld · Oct 23, 2011

I thought you didn't drink.

Mathloom · Oct 23, 2011

AroundTheWorld said: ↑

I thought you didn't drink.
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lol funny you should say that, I quit drinking years ago and today is probably the first time since then that I've said to myself I'd love to have a drink. Weird.

The Real Shady · Oct 23, 2011

da_juice · Oct 23, 2011

There was special on Fox News in April that tried to paint the picture of bias at CNN.

CNN responded by pointing out the out-on-context footage laden through the presentation.

Colbert & Stewart talk about media bias quite a bit.

Hightop · Oct 23, 2011

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rocketsjudoka · Oct 23, 2011

The answer to your rather convoluted question is to look at a variety of news services. If you are limited to very few news services you may never be aware of bias. Only comparing what is reported on a variety of news sources and considering context, such as a local service versus national, can you get a sense of how biased any particular service is.

Mathloom · Oct 24, 2011

rocketsjudoka said: ↑

The answer to your rather convoluted question is to look at a variety of news services. If you are limited to very few news services you may never be aware of bias. Only comparing what is reported on a variety of news sources and considering context, such as a local service versus national, can you get a sense of how biased any particular service is.
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Exactly. My view is that a far larger percentage of people than we think do not have access to (or don't care or don't know how to access) a variety of news sources which would eliminate bias.

Mathloom · Oct 24, 2011

Here's an article that pretty much expresses what I'm trying to say:

Nothing ratchets up the perennial debate over media bias like a presidential election. But as Tim Groeling, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, observes, public discussions about media bias are often just “food fights,” with pundits and partisans throwing around anecdotes.

Groeling is hoping to advance scientific (and public) knowledge beyond this mush with research he used to demonstrate selection bias in television networks’ decision to run or withhold the results of presidential approval polls. For an article appearing in Presidential Studies Quarterly this December, Groeling designed a method to deal with a problem that often besets research on the media: people can identify all the news that journalists saw fit to print, but it’s more difficult to determine what they chose to ignore.

To counter the problem of the “unobserved population,” Groeling collected two different data sets: in-house presidential approval polling by ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX News and the networks’ broadcasts of such polls on evening news shows from January 1997 to February 2008. Groeling found that, with varying degrees of statistical significance, CBS, NBC and ABC showed what Groeling calls a pro-Democrat bias. For instance, CBS was 35 percent less likely to report a five-point drop in approval for Bill Clinton than a similar rise in approval and was 33 percent more likely to report a five-point drop than a rise for George W. Bush. Meanwhile FOX News showed a statistically significant pro-Republican bias in the most controlled of the three models Groeling tested: its Special Report program was 67 percent less likely to report a rise in approval for Clinton than a decrease and 36 percent more likely to report the increase rather than the decrease for Bush.

Groeling’s work is one of the few studies to quantify partisan bias in the media, a subject notoriously difficult for social scientists to research and discuss. These scientists work with theories such as the socalled hostile media effect to predict that ardent supporters of a cause will view media as slanted for the other side, and they have conducted hundreds of studies that have revealed imbalances in the ways journalists frame news on topics ranging from AIDS to the war in Iraq. But there is not a cohesive literature on media bias. Maxwell McCombs of the University of Texas at Austin, who pioneered agenda-setting theory, one of the leading paradigms on news media, says that a researcher would need a few years to make sense of existing data and develop an approach to study media bias. Like many scholars, McCombs sees “bias” as a loaded term, preferring to speak of journalists’ “predilections.”

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=media-bias-presidential-election
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