Media Bias Study Is...Biased!
Well, at the very least, it's pretty ham-handed. Felix Gillette at CJR writes (a day after Andrew Gumbel kicked my ass about this):
...Their methodology still falls short of the ideal bias-detecting machine. To date, their method involves hiring a bunch of college students to comb through some (but not all) of the archives for some (but not all) American news outlets and then counting up some (but not all) references to some (but not all) think tanks and then comparing some (but not all) of these references to the amount of times certain members of the U.S. Congress refer to some (but not all) think tanks. Suffice to say, it's a bulky bit of bias-detection and quite primitive. But with a few tweaks, this new quantitative approach to media criticism will undoubtedly soon replace all the old tools of the industry -- from analogy and analysis, to insight and wit.
Leave a comment