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LEFT WING LOONS Title: Left Turn: An Introduction (Moonbats 101) Tomorrow is the official publication date of Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind, by Tim Groseclose. Groseclose is the Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics at UCLA. He holds joint appointments in the political science and economics departments. The publication of Professor Groseclose's book -- previewed here by Paul Bedard at USNews and here by Professor Groseclose himself -- is a signal event. To the vexed question of media bias, Professor Groselose brings the methodology of the social sciences. Professor Groseclose and his publisher have kindly granted us permission to publish the preface (here) yesterday, introduction and eighth chapter of his book (Tuesday through Friday), starring our friend Katherine Kersten, over the course of this week. When Professor Groseclose published his findings with Professor Jeff Milyo in 2002, all hell broke loose. It is a revealing story with few twists and turns as well as a happy ending. He tells the story in the introduction to the book. Here it is: In the Spring of 2002, I began a research project with Jeff Milyo, who at the time was a public policy professor at the University of Chicago. Our goal was to create a method that would objectively measure the bias of the media. The motivation was simple. In social science we have lots of precise, numerical devices that measure how liberal or conservative politicians are. There ought to be something similar for the media. Three and half years later, after thousands of hours of gathering and analyzing data, we achieved that goal. For 20 major news outlets, we estimated a score, between 0 and 100, that described how liberal the outlet was. The beauty of the scores--which I now call Slant Quotients--is that they are directly comparable to Political Quotients. This means that they can answer questions such as: (i) "Is the New York Times to the left or right of Hillary Clinton?" or (ii) "Is Fox News to the left or right of John McCain?". The results generally agreed with the claims of conservatives. For instance, our method found that 18 of the 20 outlets were left of center. The only two that were not were the Washington Times and Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume. Our findings, however, contradicted a few claims of conservatives. For instance, they showed that some mainstream news outlets are nearly perfectly centrist, albeit still left-leaning. Two were ABC's Good Morning America and [PBS's] The Newshour with Jim Lehrer. Also, we found that many supposedly far-left news outlets were not that far left. For instance, we found that National Public Radio was no more liberal than the Washington Post, Time, or Newsweek. And we found that it was less liberal than the average speech by Senator Joe Lieberman. We thought that, maybe, people on both sides of the political spectrum would appreciate the study, that each side would say something like "finally, an answer to the age-old debate." We now realize how naïve that thought was. We posted the results on my website. The public relations office at UCLA, where I work as a professor of political science and economics, wrote a press release that summarized the results. Then came the firestorm. Our study was denounced by hundreds, and maybe thousands, of left-wing blogs, including Media Matters, the Daily Kos, and the Huffington Post. At one point if you googled "crap UCLA study," most of the first ten listings would refer to our study. On January 5, 2006, I appeared on CSPAN's Washington Journal to discuss the study. That morning, the Daily Kos, made me the focus of an "action alert," which encouraged readers to call CSPAN and force me to "answer some tough questions" about my and Milyo's "highly flawed study." Many of the blogs attacked us personally and tried to insinuate that right wing groups had paid us to fudge our results. The emails were even more vicious. "I've been in media relations for twelve years, and I've never seen anything like this," said Meg Sullivan, the UCLA publicist who wrote the press release and who was listed as the contact person. "Every other study that I've been involved with will get maybe a few emails. This one has gotten hundreds. And some are scary. I hope your home address is not public." A few people emailed the UCLA chancellor, insisting that I be fired. One of them noted on the subject line "Groseclose must be fired IMMEDIATELY," as if simply firing me next week would a grave injustice. Of the many emails that leftwing strangers sent me, the first one was representative of the anger and viciousness: Sounds like that cockamamie load of bulls**t study of yours started with the results you wanted (i.e., that Fox News is "fair and balanced") and then concocted the most ridiculous, asinine set of parameters you could think of to ensure the results you were after. You've obviously never watched Fox News, [otherwise you'd realize how many people] will be laughing at your "study". ... Sorry man, sounds like a bunch of BS to me, and that's from an independent. ... Xxxx Xxxx One of my colleagues at UCLA, whom I'll call Byron B. Bright, may be the smartest political scientist on the planet. He knows seemingly everything about politics, economics, math, and computers. And he's the best person to ask if you need your car, refrigerator, or anything else fixed. Once, a statistical software package wouldn't do what he wanted. So, to solve his problem, he wrote a computer program that would write a series of other computer programs, which would successively execute the statistical package--that's right, he wrote a computer program that would write other computer programs. At the same time, he's a staunch liberal, approximately as staunch, maybe more staunch, than I am a conservative. Our first debate occurred only a few weeks after meeting each other, almost twenty years ago. He casually mentioned how the only people who listen to Rush Limbaugh are ignorant extremists. I quickly explained why he was wrong, and told him, in fact, that I had been listening to Limbaugh that day. In a more recent debate, I told him, "No, it's not true that liberals and conservatives are equally decent. Liberals have worse manners, they go to church less, they more often live in aggressive, urban environments, they shout people down at public speeches, and they use more vulgarity when they talk." At first he didn't respond. I think he decided that the best response was just to give me a look as if I had just claimed that the earth was flat. But then, just for good measure, he said "Funny how all of those well-mannered conservatives favor pre-emptive strikes against innocent Iraqis." So after I received the above email, I gleefully showed it to Byron. I responded to the email even more gleefully: Dear Mr. Xxxx, Thank you for your thoughtful comments. Please keep in mind, however, that in creating the statistical estimation method and in designing the set of parameters for it, I have benefited greatly from the help and comments of Byron Bright, a colleague at UCLA. An argument could be made that he deserves to be a coauthor. His email address is byronbright@ucla.edu. Tim Soon after the posting, the chairs of the humanities and social-science departments held a regular meeting with the dean. Although it was not supposed to be a topic for the meeting, our study soon became the focus of a heated discussion. The chairs of the departments of sociology, religion, and German and Russian languages were especially angry, and they called it "offensive" and "scandalous." One said "The study isn't research. It's agitprop for the conservative blogosphere." Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 4.
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To the vexed question of media bias, Professor Groselose brings the methodology of the social sciences. When Professor Groseclose published his findings with Professor Jeff Milyo in 2002, all hell broke loose. Discussions about media bias can really inflame people's passions. In the Spring of 2002 ... Three and half years later, after thousands of hours of gathering and analyzing data, we achieved that goal. For 20 major news outlets, we estimated a score, between 0 and 100, that described how liberal the outlet was. The beauty of the scores--which I now call Slant Quotients--is that they are directly comparable to Political Quotients. This means that they can answer questions such as: (i) "Is the New York Times to the left or right of Hillary Clinton?" or (ii) "Is Fox News to the left or right of John McCain?". Then came the firestorm. Our study was denounced by hundreds, and maybe thousands, of left-wing blogs, including Media Matters, the Daily Kos, and the Huffington Post. At one point if you googled "crap UCLA study," most of the first ten listings would refer to our study.
There are no replies to Comment # 4. End Trace Mode for Comment # 4.
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