Fair and balanced? Um ... no

[Rupert Pupkin]

Originally Posted by Riot

I just said, "I like the UCLA study, but comparing "left" and "right" to "the average member of Congress" as the benchmark definition?

I was laughing at the benchmark, but that obviously doesn't invalidate the scale from the reference.

I don't think they said that was the actual benchmark. When they mentioned the thing about "the average member of Congress", they were just giving one example of their findings. They also compared news organizations to the most liberal and the most conservative members of congress.

Here is some more interesting information:

Survey research has shown that an almost overwhelming fraction of journalists are liberal. For instance, Elaine Povich (1996) reports that only seven percent of all Washington correspondents voted for George H.W. Bush in 1992, compared to 37 percent of the American public.[2] Lichter, Rothman and Lichter, (1986) and Weaver and Wilhoit (1996) report similar findings for earlier elections. More recently, the New York Times reported that only eight percent of Washington correspondents thought George W. Bush would be a better president than John Kerry.[3] This compares to 51% of all American voters. David Brooks notes that for every journalist who contributed to George W. Bush’s campaign, 93 contributed to Kerry’s.[4]


These statistics suggest that journalists, as a group, are more liberal than almost any congressional district in the country. For instance, in the Ninth California district, which includes Berkeley, twelve percent voted for Bush in 1992, nearly double the rate of journalists. In the Eighth Massachusetts district, which includes Cambridge, nineteen percent voted for Bush, approximately triple the rate of journalists.[


http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/f...dia.Bias.8.htm