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News media bias and why its poorly understood
By Kent R. Kroeger (December 21, 2020)
Few conversation starters can ruin an otherwise pleasant dinner party (or prevent you from being invited to future ones) than asking: Is the news media biased?
If you ask a Democrat, they will tell you the Fox News Channel is the problem (“They started it!” as if explaining to an elementary school teacher who threw the first punch during a playground fight). Ask a Republican and they will say Fox News is just the natural reaction to the long-standing, pervasive liberal bias of the mainstream media.
This past presidential election has poured gasoline on the two arguments.
In late October, the Media Research Council (MRC), a conservative media watchdog group, released research showing that, between July 29 and October 20, 92 percent of evaluative statements about President Trump by the Big Three evening newscasts (ABC, CBS, NBC) were negative, compared to only 34 percent for Democratic candidate Joe Biden. Apart from a few conservative-leaning news outlets, such as the Fox News Channel and The Wall Street Journal, the MRC release was ignored.
When I shared the MRC research with my wife, her reaction was probably representative of many Democrats and media members: “Why wasn’t their coverage 100 percent negative towards Trump?”
The MRC doesn’t need me to defend their research methods, except I will point out that how they measure television news tone has a long history within media research, dating back to groundbreaking research by Michael J. Robinson and Margaret A. Sheehan, summarized in their 1981 book, “Over the Wire and on TV: CBS and UPI in Campaign ‘80.”
Here is MRC’s description of their news tone measurement method:
“MRC analysts reviewed every mention of President Trump and former Vice President Biden from July 29 through October 20, 2020, including weekends, on ABC’s World News Tonight, the CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News. To determine the spin of news coverage, our analysts tallied all explicitly evaluative statements about Trump or Biden from either reporters, anchors or non-partisan sources such as experts or voters. Evaluations from partisan sources, as well as neutral statements, were not included.
