[jyl]

Funny, the conservatives here usually have no use for academic studies by political science professor types. But when we see an academic study that supports your own view, and suddenly its credible and important, eh?

Seriously, this is an interesting study, but the methodology is - well, you could call it subject to doubt.

Read the article carefully. They counted the number of times that each media piece referenced think tanks and policy groups. The more references to liberal think tanks, the more liberal the article was "scored", and vice-versa for references to conservative think tanks. Regardless of what was actually said about the think tanks or policy groups.

For example, a story on FOX News could be devoted to criticizing liberal think tanks or bashing liberal policy groups (NAACP, etc), and that story would be scored as "liberal". Or the a Wall Street Journal article on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge could contrast the views of environmental policy groups (Sierra Club, etc) with the views of oil companies, and that story would be scored as "liberal".

I think that is a pretty artificial way of categorizing media articles as liberal or conservative, and it makes me think skeptical of this study. I will admit that I have a bias, which is that I don't have a high opinion of political science and sociology "research". An issue on which I may agree with the conservative OT members.

Groseclose and Milyo based their research on a standard gauge of a lawmaker's support for liberal causes. Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) tracks the percentage of times that each lawmaker votes on the liberal side of an issue. Based on these votes, the ADA assigns a numerical score to each lawmaker, where "100" is the most liberal and "0" is the most conservative. After adjustments to compensate for disproportionate representation that the Senate gives to low?population states and the lack of representation for the District of Columbia, the average ADA score in Congress (50.1) was assumed to represent the political position of the average U.S. voter.

Groseclose and Milyo then directed 21 research assistants — most of them college students — to scour U.S. media coverage of the past 10 years. They tallied the number of times each media outlet referred to think tanks and policy groups, such as the left-leaning NAACP or the right-leaning Heritage Foundation.

Next, they did the same exercise with speeches of U.S. lawmakers. If a media outlet displayed a citation pattern similar to that of a lawmaker, then Groseclose and Milyo's method assigned both a similar ADA score.