Liberal Bias

jedmunds at Pandagon comments on some of the apparent oddities in the UCLA study on Media Bias that has been embraced by, amongst others, our friend Jeff Goldstein. This deserves a longer post and a more thorough investigation, which I may or may not get around to at some point. I confess I’m rather skeptical about the basic methodology–inferring ideological positions based on think-tank citation patterns of politicians and media outlets. But even if we go along with that methodological orientation, I want to point to one particular item in the UCLA press release that makes me wonder:

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.

To state the obvious, NAACP and Heritage are apples and oranges. The differences between a standard position-paper publishing, fellowship-granting think tank like Heritage, Brookings, etc and an organization like the NAACP can’t really be stressed enough. Comparative counts of limited, actual think-tank citations generally show a pronounced tilt toward the right, even if we generously grant Brookings “left” status. Including NAACP would obviously change these findings, but at this point I’m left wondering who else is included. The NRA? AARP? Needless to say, all these groups are focused on a particular set of issues. That generally allies them with one party mor often than another, but it’s hardly comparable to think tank citations. Furthermore, what standards are being used to count “referred to”? A negative story about the NAACP could certainly refer to a comment made by an NAACP spokesperson. Actual think-tank citations are generally authoritative or quasi-athoritative in nature, the same simply can’t be said for interest groups. Barring a better explanation, this seems like a pretty serious problem. Of course, I’m not a peer reviewer for the Quarterly Journal of Economics.