Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind

by Tim Groseclose

Overview

A leading political science professor provides scientific proof of media bias in this sure-to-be-controversial book

Dr. Tim Groseclose, a professor of political science and economics at UCLA, has spent years constructing precise, quantitative measures of the slant of media outlets. He does this by measuring the political content of news, as a way to measure the PQ, or "political quotient" of voters and politicians.

Among his conclusions are: (i) all mainstream media outlets have a liberal bias; and (ii) while some supposedly conservative outlets—such the Washington Times or Fox News' Special Report—do lean right, their conservative bias is less than the liberal bias of most mainstream outlets.

Groseclose contends that the general leftward bias of the media has shifted the PQ of the average American by about 20 points, on a scale of 100, the difference between the current political views of the average American, and the political views of the average resident of Orange County, California or Salt Lake County, Utah. With Left Turn readers can easily calculate their own PQ—to decide for themselves if the bias exists. This timely, much-needed study brings fact to this often overheated debate.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781429987462
Publisher:	St. Martin's Press
Publication date:	07/19/2011
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	59,641
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

TIM GROSECLOSE is the Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics at UCLA. He has joint appointments in the political science and economics departments. He has held previous faculty appointments at Caltech, Stanford University, Ohio State University, Harvard University, and Carnegie Mellon University

Tim Groseclose is the Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics at UCLA. He has joint appointments in the political science and economics departments. He has held previous faculty appointments at Caltech, Stanford University, Ohio State University, Harvard University, and Carnegie Mellon University. He is the author of Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind.

Read an Excerpt

Left Turn

How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind

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By Tim Groseclose

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2011 Tim Groseclose
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-8746-2

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CHAPTER 1

What Are PQs and How Do They Reveal Media Bias?

"COME ON. POLITICAL science isn't really a science," said my friend Dawson Engler one day, trying to goad me.

Engler, one of the country's premier computer scientists, is currently a professor at Stanford, where his specialty is operating systems. He has constructed his own operating system ... twice.

He is the type of person who succeeds at nearly anything he tries. Born in Yuma, Arizona, during high school he placed second in the "Teenage Mr. Arizona" bodybuilding contest. After graduating from Arizona State University, he enrolled in the highly prestigious computer-science PhD program at MIT. It is unusual for a PhD student to publish a paper in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Yet Engler published eight while a doctoral student. Shortly after Stanford hired him, for a brief period he dated one of the actresses from Baywatch.

When Engler goaded me, both of us held positions at MIT, and he knew that my position was in the political-science department. At MIT, which is filled with "real" scientists and engineers, you often hear quips like Engler's. So when he made it, I was prepared.

"Look," I said. "We can both agree that if you can graph something, then you can describe it mathematically."

"Yeah," said Engler.

"And people, all the time, talk about politicians being left wing or right wing."

"Okay," said Engler.

"And so if a position is left wing or right wing, then you can graph it. ... Which means you can describe it mathematically. ... Which means it's science."

Engler smiled. I don't think I really convinced him, but he didn't goad me any further. At least in my mind, I'd won the day's debate.

* * *

WITHIN POLITICAL SCIENCE a small industry exists to do the "science" that I described to Engler: to calculate precise, numerical measurements that describe the liberalness or conservativeness of politicians. In fact, at the time Engler made his quip, I was working on such a project. Indeed, the political quotients that I describe in this book are based on that research.

A person's PQ is a number, generally between 0 and 100, that describes how liberal he or she is. I have created a Web site, www.timgroseclose.com/calculate-your-pq, which allows you to compute your own PQ. I have computed PQs for members of Congress by observing their record on roll call votes.

By answering the following ten questions, you can get a rough approximation of your PQ. When you answer the questions, try to put yourself in the shoes of the members of Congress and decide how you would have voted at the time that the politicians considered the measure. For instance, some people feel that the "Cash for Clunkers" program was not as successful as they hoped or thought it would be. Accordingly, when you answer the question related to this program — as well as when you answer the other questions — think about your opinion of the issue when it was considered in Congress, not necessarily about how you feel about it now.

1. On January 29, 2009, the Senate passed the SCHIP bill (State Children's Health Insurance Program). The bill would provide matching funds to states for health insurance to families with children. The funds would be limited to families with incomes less than three times the federal poverty level. The cost would be offset by increasing the federal tax on cigarettes from $0.61 to $1.00 a pack. Democrats voted 58–0 in favor of the bill; Republicans voted 8–32 against the bill.

a. I would have favored the bill.

b. I can't decide.

c. I would have opposed the bill.

2. On February 26, 2009, the Senate passed the District of Columbia House Voting Rights Act. The act would create a House district for D.C., and simultaneously create an additional House district in Utah. The Utah district would be subject to change or elimination by future censuses. The act would give D.C. one vote in the Electoral College, however it would not give D.C. representation in the Senate. Democrats favored the bill 56–2; Republicans opposed it 5–35.

a. I would have favored the bill.

b. I can't decide.

c. I would have opposed the bill.

3. On April 1, 2009, the House passed a bill that would limit the bonuses of executives if their company received TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) funds. It granted authority to the secretary of the treasury to set standards for such executive compensation, including determining what is "excessive compensation." Democrats favored the bill 236–8; Republicans opposed it 11–163.

a. I would have favored the bill.

b. I can't decide.

c. I would have opposed the bill.

4. On April 30, 2009, Senator Richard Durbin proposed an amendment to the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act. His amendment, titled "Prevention of Mortgage Foreclosures," was sometimes called the "cramdown" provision. According to the provision, if a homeowner's income was low enough (less than 80 percent of the median income), then a bankruptcy judge could reduce the level of the interest and principle that the home owner owed on a mortgage. Democrats favored the amendment 45–12; Republicans opposed it 0–39.

a. I would have favored the amendment.

b. I can't decide.

c. I would have opposed the amendment.

5. On June 18, 2009, the House considered a major appropriations bill. Jerry Lewis, a Republican from California, introduced an amendment to the bill that would bar funds from being used to shut down the Guantánamo Bay prison. The amendment would have acted against an executive order that President Obama had issued to close the facility. Democrats opposed the amendment 39–213; Republicans favored the amendment 173–3.

a. I would have opposed the amendment (that is, I would have favored shutting down Guantánamo).

b. I can't decide.

c. I would have favored the amendment.

6. On June 26, 2009, the House passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act, the main provision of which was to create a "cap and trade system." Under the system, energy producers would be allotted a cap on the pollutants they could emit, but they could buy credits from other energy producers if they wanted to emit more pollutants. Or, if they emitted less pollutants than their cap, they could sell some of their credits to other producers. The bill set a target of reducing emissions to 83 percent of the 2005 level by the year 2050. The act also included several billions of dollars for incentives for businesses to invest in green technologies. Democrats favored the bill 210–43; Republicans opposed it 8–169.

a. I would have favored the bill.

b. I can't decide.

c. I would have opposed the bill.

7. On July 31, 2009, the House passed the "Cash for Clunkers" bill (officially named "The Consumer Assistance to Recycle and Save Program). It provided $2 billion in vouchers to people who traded in an older, less fuel-efficient car and bought a newer, more fuel-efficient car. Democrats favored the bill 238–14; Republicans opposed it 78–95.

a. I would have favored the bill.

b. I can't decide.

c. I would have opposed the bill.

8. On August 26, 2009, the Senate voted on the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor to be a justice on the Supreme Court. Democrats favored her confirmation 58–0; Republicans opposed it 9–31.

a. I would have favored her confirmation.

b. I can't decide.

c. I would have opposed her confirmation.

9. On November 8, 2009, the Senate considered an amendment proposed by Senator Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) to the "Obamacare" health bill. His amendment would have barred federal money to be used to pay for an abortion. Further, federal money could not help pay for any health plan that covered abortions. The Democrats opposed the amendment 7–52; Republicans favored it 38–2. (Technically, the vote was on a motion by Barbara Boxer to table the Nelson amendment.)

a. I would have opposed the amendment.

b. I can't decide.

c. I would have favored the amendment.

10. On December 15, 2009, the Senate voted on a provision to allow U.S. citizens to import prescription drugs. Most important, it would have allowed citizens to order prescription drugs from Canadian pharmacies, which often sold the drugs at lower prices than U.S. pharmacies did. (The provision was the Dorgan amendment to the Reid amendment to the Pharmaceutical Market Access and Drug Safety Act.) Democrats opposed the measure 28–31; Republicans favored it 23–17.

a. I would have favored the provision.

b. I can't decide.

c. I would have opposed the provision.

Give yourself ten points for each time that you answered "a," five points for each "b," and zero points for each "c." Next, add up the points. That is approximately your PQ.

One feature of the PQ is that it is constructed from roll call votes in Congress. This means that simply by noting how members of Congress voted on those roll calls, I can calculate their PQs, and you can compare your PQ to theirs. The following are the PQs of some well-known politicians.

PQs and Media Bias

Perhaps the main contribution of the book is that it uses PQs to judge media bias. To do this, I conduct the following thought experiment. Suppose you were given a set of stories that a media outlet reported. But suppose, instead of knowing that they were news stories, you were told that they were speeches by a politician. After reading the would-be speeches, what would you guess to be the PQ of the would-be politician?

I define the slant quotient, or SQ, of an outlet as the solution to that thought experiment. In the article that Milyo and I wrote for the Quarterly Journal of Economics, we developed a statistical technique that calculates a precise, numerical SQ for the twenty news outlets that we examined. We found, for instance, that The New York Times has an SQ of 74, which is approximately the PQ of Sen. Joseph Lieberman.

The primary data that we used were citations to think tanks. This means that The New York Times's citation patterns to left-wing, centrist, and right-wing think tanks were very similar to the patterns that Joe Lieberman adopted when he made speeches on the Senate floor.

The following figure illustrates the main results of that article. For now, the details behind the figure are unimportant. (But I will explain them in a later chapter). What is important is that, as the figure shows, we can describe numerically (i) the political views of politicians and (ii) the slants of various media outlets. Further, we can map these two sets of numbers to the same scale.

Despite what my hard-science friends might say, it is possible to analyze politics, including media bias, objectively, numerically, and, yes, scientifically.

CHAPTER 2

Caught in a Trap

PROBLEMS IN JUDGING MEDIA BIAS

IN AN OLD joke a man tells his friend about the fine qualities of his girlfriend:

MAN: Not only that, she's a virgin.

FRIEND: How do you know she's a virgin?

MAN: She told me.

FRIEND: How do you know she's not lying?

MAN: Virgins don't lie.

This book makes a bold proposition: The joke not only reflects the way many people form their views on media bias, it also reflects the way many people form their political views in general. All of us base our political views, to a large degree, on information we learn from the media. Of course, we trust some media sources more than others. So we are careful to filter out the untrustworthy sources from the trustworthy ones. The problem is that our political views often determine which media outlets we consider trustworthy or untrustworthy. Thus, our thinking is circular: our political views influence where we go for news, which influences our political views, which further influences where we go for news, and so on.

The circularity makes our political views flimsy. That is, for instance, a little bit of liberal media bias can make us more liberal, which causes us to seek more liberal media outlets, which causes us to become more liberal, and so on.

The circularity also makes us bad at judging and detecting media bias, and often we don't realize how bad at it we are. As an example, consider the following hypothetical conversation, which is only a slight caricature of perhaps dozens that I have had with fellow political-science professors.

ME: The evidence is clear that the mainstream media cite left-wing think tanks more than they cite right-wing ones.

COLLEAGUE: Yes, but that's because experts at left-wing think tanks tend to be more respected and scholarly, while the experts at right-wing think tanks tend to be hired guns for corporations. The media are not showing a left-wing bias, only a bias for respected and scholarly experts.

ME: But how do you know that left-wing experts are more respected and scholarly than right-wing experts?

COLLEAGUE: Just read or watch any reputable news source. It's well documented.

If pressed, such a colleague would say that "reputable news source" means an outlet such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Public Radio, CNN, or possibly the evening news shows of ABC, CBS, or NBC.

Like the virgin-girlfriend joke, however, the argument is circular. To bolster his claim that the mainstream media is not biased, my colleague cites evidence from ... the mainstream media.

It is not just liberal political-science professors who are guilty of such circular arguments. The following is a typical claim of a conservative: "The only place you can get the real truth is from sources like Fox or conservative talk radio. All the rest are a bunch of Godless, baby-killing America haters." "But, how do you know all the others are a bunch of Godless, baby-killing America haters?" a skeptic might ask. "Just watch Fox or listen to conservative talk radio, and you'll see."

The Fundamental Trap and Why It Makes Us Bad at Judging Media Bias

The circularities in such arguments are examples of what I call the Fundamental Trap of judging media bias. To determine if the media are biased, we need an accurate and unbiased source of information. But almost all of us, on almost any political topic, must rely on the media as our main source of information. We rarely have other sources.

As Walter Lippmann famously observed:

Each of us lives and works on a small part of the earth's surface, moves in a small circle, and of these acquaintances knows only a few intimately. Of any public event that has wide effects we see at best only a phase and an aspect ... Inevitably our opinions cover a bigger space, a longer reach of time, a greater number of things, than we can directly observe. They have, therefore, to be pieced together out of what others have reported and what we can imagine.

As a concrete example, consider the question "To what extent do guns deter burglars from entering our homes?" Almost none of us has any direct knowledge about this question. That is, few of us have ever interviewed a burglar, much less peered inside his head to see if his burglary decisions were influenced by whether his next victim might own a gun. Instead, almost all our knowledge on this topic comes from what we read, watch, or hear from the media.

Now consider the question "How many stories should the media report about guns doing good, say, thwarting a burglary, versus stories about guns doing harm, say, causing an accidental death?"

First, we can all agree that the media cannot report all the stories where a gun has done harm or good. There are simply not enough minutes in a newscast, nor pages in a newspaper. We can also agree that the number of stories should reflect the truth — that is, the stories should reflect the proportion of the two types of cases that actually occur in the world. For example, if, in the universe of all cases, a gun does good 30 percent of the time and harm 70 percent of the time, then, in an ideal journalistic world, 30 percent of the media's gun stories would be about a gun doing good and 70 percent about a gun doing harm.

Of course, no one knows the actual percentage of cases in which guns do good or harm. The best we can do is form opinions and educated guesses about the true percentage. The problem is that our opinions and educated guesses are based almost entirely upon information we learn from the media. Accordingly, how can we know how accurate are our educated guesses and opinions? And if we cannot know this, how can we judge how biased or unbiased the media are?

To take the argument to the extreme, suppose that the media were your only source of knowledge. Then they could be extremely biased, and you would never know it. It would be as if your only information about the world came from watching professional basketball games. If so, then you would think that six foot eight was a normal height, and six-three was short. Further, you would have no idea that your primary source of information about the world, televised basketball games, was giving you a distorted picture of the true distribution of people's heights.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Left Turn by Tim Groseclose. Copyright © 2011 Tim Groseclose. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

TITLE PAGE,
PREFACE,
Introduction,
PART I: Political Quotients and the Science of Politics,
1. What Are PQs and How Do They Reveal Media Bias?,
2. Caught in a Trap: Problems in Judging Media Bias,
3. But I've Been to Oklahoma,
4. Ps and Qs of PQs,
5. Defining the "Center",
PART II: A Distortion Theory of Media Bias,
6. Lies, Damned Lies, and Omitted Statistics : A Case Study in Distortion Theory,
7. Hidden Under a Bushel,
8. An "Alien" Conservative Injected into a Liberal Newsroom and the Topics She Might Cover,
PART III: Evidence of Liberal Media Bias,
9. Political Views in the Newsroom: Viva Homogeneity,
10. The Second-Order Problem of an Unbalanced Newsroom,
11. The Anti-Newsroom, Washington County, Utah,
12. Walk a Mile in the Shoes of a Centrist,
13. "Wise Men from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities Say ...",
14. The Language of Journalists and the Special Case of Partial-Birth Abortion,
15. The Language of Journalists and the Gentzkow-Shapiro Measure of Media Bias,
16. Facts About the Bush Tax Cuts: Another Way to Measure Media Bias Objectively and Quantitatively,
17. The Media Mu,
PART IV: Effects of Media Bias,
18. Measuring the Influence of the Media I: Many Methods False and Spent, and One That's Not,
19. Measuring the Influence of the Media II: Two More Groundbreaking Experiments,
20. The Media Lambda,
21. Rendezvous with Clarity,
22. Walk a Mile in the Shoes of a Centrist ... Whose Mind Has Not Been Distorted by Media Bias,
Epilogue: Small Steps Toward a Better Media,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
NOTES,
INDEX,
COPYRIGHT,