PressEthic

On Tuesday, the New York Times ran an op-ed piece (Times Select) by John Tierney about political polarization. In it, Tierney claims that people who discuss politics with one another become more extreme in their views. He further argues that journalists become politically biased simply by being exposed to one another. In other words, we're all a bad influence on one another.

In fact, most journalists do try to be objective, but as a group they, too, can become polarized by spending most of their time talking to fellow journalists and experts with similar views. One of the cleverest demonstrations of this effect was a study published last year in Harvard’s Quarterly Journal of Economics. The researchers, Tim Groseclose and Jeffrey Milyo, devised a scale for measuring the slant of news reports by keeping track of which think tanks — liberal or conservative — were quoted most often.

The researchers found that The Washington Times and Brit Hume’s evening newscast on Fox fell on the conservative side of the scale, while all the other news media outlets they studied fell on the liberal side. The surprising result — to liberals, at least — was that Fox was closer to the ideological center than the Big Three evening newscasts as well as all the major newspapers and newsweeklies.

Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting offers another perspective, which challenges the methodology behind the study.

This approach is based on the problematic notion that politicians cite the think tanks that they most agree with rather than the ones whose citation will be the most politically effective—a problem the researchers acknowledge when they attempt to explain away some curious anomalies that their method produces. (The National Rifle Association comes out as a centrist group; the Rand Corporation turns out to be left-leaning.)

Moreover, FAIR conducted a think tank study of their own, tracking the number of media references to major think tanks by political perspective. In 2004, they found that half of the 30,000 media mentions of think tanks were references to conservative or center-right groups, a third referred to centrist groups, and 16 percent referred to progressive or center-left groups. Clearly, there is a discrepancy between their data and the results of the UCLA study.

In discussing this in class, it seemed evident that the UCLA study was flawed in its methodology, and its publication sparked a good deal of debate. In an effort to use the results to his advantage (in order to support his main point), Tierney takes this questionable study at face value, instead of with a grain of salt.