MEDIA BIAS IS REAL, FINDS UCLA POLITICAL SCIENTIST.

Decmeber 14, 2005

While the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is conservative, the newspaper's news pages are liberal, even more liberal than The New York Times. The Drudge Report may have a right-wing reputation, but it leans left. Coverage by public television and radio is conservative compared to the rest of the mainstream media. Meanwhile, almost all major media outlets tilt to the left.

These are just a few of the surprising findings from a UCLA-led study, which is believed to be the first successful attempt at objectively quantifying bias in a range of media outlets and ranking them accordingly.

"I suspected that many media outlets would tilt to the left because surveys have shown that reporters tend to vote more Democrat than Republican," said Tim Groseclose, a UCLA political scientist and the study's lead author. "But I was surprised at just how pronounced the distinctions are."

The New York Post reports that there are "exactly 100 days until Katie Couric's contract on the 'Today' show expires — and NBC seems to be preparing for bad news."

Based on two different leaks, the Post says there is proof that Couric is ready to "take over the anchor desk at 'CBS Evening News.'"

First, TV Guide reports that Natalie Morales has moved to the top of the replace ment list if Katie bolts to CBS.

Morales is close to signing a long-term deal with the network, which would move her out of MSNBC, where she's been a daytime anchor since 2002, to become a "full-time correspondent" for "Today."

In an attempt to keep the New York Times-imposed NSA kerfluffle on somebody's radar screen, a rehash of the situation ran today in the paper's Washington section. The lede is particularly interesting, since it gets it wrong right out of the gate:

 After two months of insisting that President Bush did not need court approval to authorize the wiretapping of calls between the United States and suspected terrorists abroad, the administration is trying to resist pressure for judicial review while pushing for retroactive Congressional approval of the program.

Well, that certainly is news to everyone. The Presidency has never been required to obtain court orders to wiretap those communicating out of or into the country. I don't know what legal standard the New York Times thinks it is citing here (none is cited in the article), but the argument the paper was trying to make about two weeks ago was that he needed court orders to monitor domestic-to-domestic communications. Nobody, including the President, has disputed that. So exactly what premise is the lede attempting to set up? That the President has to get Congressional oversight (despite breifing the Senate Intel Committee dozens upon dozens of times since 9-11-01) to excercise the executive branch's Constitutionally granted authority to monitor international communications with terrorists?

One of the more astounding spectacles of the Cheney hunting-accident brouhaha was the media's all-too-typical tolerance of tremendous Clinton chutzpah: that is, Hillary's claim, as Brian Boyd noted last week, that Dick Cheney is way too secretive. ABC aired a clip of an angry-looking Senator Hillary Clinton arguing, "The refusal of this administration to level with the American people on matters large and small is very disturbing." The Clintons? Arguing that someone else isn't forthcoming? After the seven months of sticking with "I did not have sexual relations" with "Miss Lewinsky"? And the "vast right-wing conspiracy" trying to smear Clinton with the baseless accusation of intern nookie?

Noel’s piece on CNN drawing out Jimmy Carter’s foreign-policy genius on President’s Day also extended to The Washington Post op-ed page. I’m not saying you refuse an op-ed from a former president, but Carter offered quite a lulu, arguing for giving terrorists a fair shot at governing the Palestinian territories. (You can argue that the Post allowed George Will to completely mock Carter on this point. As Will has said, the Carters of the 1930s expected the Nazis to be pragmatic and moderate their extremes. Didn’t happen.)

Here’s the interesting media part. On Sunday night and Monday morning, the home-page headline at Washingtonpost.com aptly summarized his sentiment: "Let Hamas Govern." (An even better headline would have had a John Lennon-Yoko Ono echo: "All We Are Saying...Is Give Hamas A Chance.") But then, perhaps after someone complained, the homepage shifted to the actual op-ed page headline: "Don’t Punish the Palestinians."

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CNN’s Wolf Blitzer interviewed former President Jimmy Carter on “The Situation Room” Monday to discuss Mr. Carter’s views on Israel and Hamas. From suggesting that Israel has stolen money from the Palestinians, to implying that Hamas is no longer a terrorist organization, and recommending that America get around laws preventing the funding of terrorist states by – get this – giving dollars to the United Nations so that it can funnel American money to the Palestinians, Mr. Carter was in rare form. What follows is a LexisNexis transcript of the first half of this interview, and a video link courtesy of Expose the Left.

*****UPDATE***** With thanks to a reader that sent me an e-mail regarding this subject, it appears that Mr. Carter is wrong about a key statement made to CNN:

“Since August of 2004, Hamas has participated in a cease fire, which I think in Arab is called a hadna (ph). And they have not violated this cease fire all. There have been no terrorist activities attributed to Hamas for the last year and a half, 18 months.”

According to a February 6, 2006 Jerusalem Post article, this is quite inaccurate:

On Monday night's Countdown, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann devoted a segment to Bryant Gumbel's race-baiting admonition on HBO, about the Winter Olympics, to “try not to laugh when someone says these are the world's greatest athletes, despite a paucity of blacks that makes the Winter Games look like a GOP convention." Olbermann aired a video clip of Gumbel playing "an unusual race card," and given its blurry nature and tinny sound, as well as how it exactly matched what was posted last week on NewsBusters, I'd bet the MSNBC producers lifted it from that Web-quality posting.

When the video ended, Olbermann reported that “as the transcript of that inched its way around the Internet, Gumbel was attacked by far-right bloggers.” Though the NewsBusters posting was quite critical of Gumbel, Olbermann cited how “a writer at the right-wing Web site NewsBusters noted Gumbel's remarks 'perfectly sums up my feelings regarding the Olympics.'” Olbermann also suggested Gumbel was either vindicated or somewhat undermined over the weekend when Shani Davis won “the gold in the men's thousand meter speed skating, the first African-American ever to win a gold in an individual Winter Olympic event.” (Transcript follows.)

Video excerpt of Olbermann (1:28): Real (2.5 MB) or Windows Media (2.9 MB). Plus MP3 audio (500 KB)

A year after Bill Moyers won a “career” award, the 2005 winners of the “George Polk Awards,” which “memorialize the CBS correspondent who was murdered while covering the civil war in Greece in 1948,” were announced late Monday. The winners, as selected by an advisory panel assembled by Long Island University, are a who's who of liberal activists, including left-wing New York Times columnist Frank Rich and Victor Navasky, the long-time Editor of the far-left The Nation magazine. Virtually all the winners in reporting categories went to journalists who revealed secret anti-terror operations, undermined the Bush administration's anti-terror efforts or embarrassed people and/or contractors linked to the Bush administration.

As posted tonight (Monday) by Romenesko, the “Television Reporting” award went to ABC's Brian Ross “for revealing the treatment, which many experts consider to be torture, that the CIA used in secret detention facilities. In naming the countries where the facilities were located as well as exposing the White House-approved 'enhanced interrogation techniques' used by the CIA...the reports triggered an avalanche of critical reaction from governments and the public around the world.” The “National Reporting” nod was earned by “Dana Priest of the Washington Post for unveiling the existence of secret CIA-run prisons and wrongdoing that included the death of an Afghan detainee and the attempted cover up of the mistaken imprisonment of a German citizen. Priest detailed the elaborate covert operations in a series of 10 articles that unleashed an international furor and raised troubling questions at home about the government's counter-terrorism campaign.” (More award winners follow.)

How do members of the media really feel about Dick Cheney? Mark Shields, a syndicated columnist appeared on the roundtable discussion show Inside Washington, which airs on Friday nights on local PBS powerhouse WETA. He blasted Cheney, linking the accident to his Vietnam deferments, saying:

"I’m just grateful that he had his five deferments, because, my God, if he’d had gotten a platoon, he would have wiped out half his own men."

Shields, who has previously connected Tom DeLay to the West Virginia coal mine tragedy, also accused the Vice President of not caring about the troops and possibly being drunk when he shot Harry Whittington. Shields, in one sentence, brought up the old canard that Cheney is running the country and also suggested that the Vice President doesn’t care as much about American soldiers as he does Harry Whittington: