Liberal Media?

I've done a decent amount of research of media and media ownership patterns. Besides intense upper level classes in media analysis techniques I've done research myself. Here's some conclusions and leads to do your own research.
So I searched EBSCO host (the top academic database with tons of scholarly-reviewed articles and it's own database of communications and mass media articles) and here are some results for "liberal media"

Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, writes regularly for Columbia Journalism Review. He concludes in an article entitled Listen Up, Bias Mongers! The Audience Doesn't Agree: "News organizations that hope to appeal to the broad majority would do well to remember that complaints about bias in the media usually mean self-interest, not a tilt to the left."
So media outlets will say what will promote their station the most, and polls show that "73 percent preferred coverage that portrayed all points of view."

W.P. Eveland Jr. and D.V. Shah conclude that "A large percentage of the public believes that the news media are biased, and the majority of these individuals consider the direction of bias to be against their own viewpoints. Past research has examined how individual factors such as strength of partisanship or extent of political involvement heighten bias perceptions, but little attention has been paid to interpersonal factors such as the ideological similarity or dissimilarity of personal communication networks. Results of a national survey show that perceptions of media bias were unrelated to the overall amount of discussion but were positively related to conversations with ideologically like–minded individuals. Moreover, the impact of conversations with similar others was stronger among Republicans than among Democrats, a finding consistent with recent work on news self–coverage of media bias claims."

So basicly people that believe very strongly in what they beleive seem to think other people have a bias in the other direction. Also, people who aren't exposed to many sources are more likely to think the media is biased (and the trend is especially common in republicans.

Another article from the journal of New Political Science from Norman Solomon concludes that mainstream media, especially the shock-value television kind, increasingly reports with a business slant and doesn't report things that affect real people (health care, poverty, child malnutrition, workplace conditions, and racism).

An article in the Public Opinion Quarterly concludes that "partisans on each side of the issue judged news articles to be biased in a disagreeable direction".

An article from the American Journlaism Review tell us that "Even journalists themselves don't rail too hard at the assertion that most newsrooms are heavily populated by liberal Democrats. But that doesn't mean that their stories are slanted." "Still, most newsrooms are acutely attuned to the dangers of having a perceived bias." It mentions that The Washington Times has a right-wing bias but that is commonly known to journalists. "Our newsrooms are heavily middle-class, largely white and still primarily male (although the gender gap is narrowing)". It concludes that reporters work for complete honesty, but always get flak from democrats and republicans who are searching for an elusive bias.

Michael Parenti in the journal Humanism, argues that "Media bias usually does not occur in random fashion; rather, it moves in the same overall direction again and again, favoring management over labor, corporations over corporate critics, affluent whites over low-income minorities, officialdom over protesters, the two-party monopoly over leftist third parties, privatization and free market "reforms" over public sector development, U.S. dominance of the Third World over revolutionary or populist social change, national security policy over critics of that policy, and conservative commentators and columnists like Rush Limbaugh and George Will over progressive or populist ones like Jim Hightower and Ralph Nader (not to mention more radical ones).The built-in biases of the corporate mainstream media faithfully reflect the dominant ideology, seldom straying into territory that might cause discomfort to those who hold political and economic power, including those who own the media or advertise in it." "The job of corporate media is to make the universe of discourse safe for corporate America, telling us what to think about the world before we have a chance to think about it for ourselves. When we understand that news selectivity is likely to favor those who have power, position, and wealth, we move from a liberal complaint about the press' sloppy performance to a radical analysis of how the media serve the ruling circles all too well with much skill and craft."
This last article is consistent with the idea that media operate to make money and not offend people.

ONE article from the American Journalism Review in 1995 indicts the media as liberal (yes, ONLY ONE in my quest for the liberal media). It is be William McGowen and it says that the Democartic party is co-dependent on the liberal media. The article discussed how the liberal media sets the agenda of the democratic party and how that has alienated the democratic party from middle-class voters. It starts off by quoting Rush Limbaugh and has a large photo of him on the first page. He beleives that "Like the democratic party, major US news organizations have made an institutional commitment to diversity... which has encouraged a narrow, multiculturalism orthodoxy." He contends that the "media and the deomocratic party are increasingly dominated by an insular elite". He concludes that this will lead more people to listen to Rush Limbaugh.

Another article explores "the impact of conservative elites' claims of media bias in the 1988, 1992 and 1996 United States presidential elections." It shows how right-wing media outlets scream left wing bias to censor ideas during presidential elections.


So we have four that say it is baised toward the right, and three that since people want objectivity journalists seek it out and that people watching (democrats and republicans) are biased not the media, and only one that can claim a liberal bias to the media.

Furthermore I searched google (described in the next post) for "Liberal Media". Out of the top 10 hits 8 concluded that the "Liberal media" was a horrible myth and two concluded the media is liberal.

So, here's a little tiny bit of research, more to come, make the decision for yourself and I'd apreciate comments.