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Media bias: It's not what you say, it's who you quote

A study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs and George Mason University finds that there are differences in how the candidates are covered by different news outlets. When it comes to giving equal time to each candidate's partisans, they do a good job. The differences surface in who among the officially unaffiliated gets airtime.

From June 1 through September 2, ABC, CBS, NBC, Newsweek and Time ran two favorable comments about Democrat John Kerry for every negative comment. When partisan sources are excluded, the ratio goes to three to one. Meanwhile, Republican George Bush took three hits for every two positive comments.

To say that the situation was somewhat different at the Fox News Channel is perhaps an understatement. However, its treatment of Bush was very similar to that of the broadcast nets/print weeklies.

It is when Kerry is being discussed that Fox shows its differences. Kerry is bashed five times for every one time he receives a positive mention.

Dr. L. Robert Lichter of CMPA put together the study, saying it follows strict guidelines to give as objective a rating as possible to the highly subjective material inherent to campaign coverage.

Former Washington Post ombudsman Geneva Overholser questioned just how reliable such a study could be. For example, the study would not take a position one way or another on a story about, say, a bad monthly employment report. Lichter answered saying that was true, but such a story would probably include negative commentary, and that a study of the "media agenda" would probably yield similar results.

Lichter went short of saying that there was liberal bias in the mainstream media, now countered by conservative bias from Fox and much of Talk radio, nor did he offer a judgment on how it should be. He said his job was to simply show how it is.

Brooks Jackson of Factcheck.org, and formerly of CNN, said that he thought there was media bias, but that it mainly took the form of 1) a bias against institutions, since the press' job is to act as watchdog; 2) a bias toward the negative - - everyone knows that good news happy stories get old very quickly - - and that the new 24/7 news cycle has magnified the inevitable echo chamber.

Jackson's organization tries to correct questionable statements, implications and innuendoes made in paid political advertisements. "I know I'm biased," he said, "from the thousands of email I get. I'm just a little cloudy about what my biases are." That's because he is frequently finds himself in the position of making one statement which results in vitriolic responses from both ends of the spectrum.

Overholser noted that the increasing use of interpretive reporting is blurring the lines between news and commentary, and it is putting journalists in a position where their personal objectivity requires questioning.

Lichter noted that part of the problem is the journalistic industrial decision, which he dated to the late 80s, to force the debate into meaningful areas, rather than letting the candidates' campaign organizations dictate the agenda. "This is a case of no good deed goes unpunished," he said, agreeing with Overholser that journalists have put their own necks in the guillotine of public scrutiny.

RBR observation:

Everyone who wants to can easily see media bias, but accurately measuring it seems as difficult as chewing cotton candy. You can get it in your mouth, but... And what's this stuff about interpretive reporting? It's as if news organizations routinely run around appending "observations" to their hard news stories...