Homestar Runner Wiki Forum

Number A:

No one said a thing about Bill O'Reilly.

Number B:

If you don't have anything constructive to add, you don't have to reply.

Thank you.

Of course there's going to be bias. It's downright impossible, in my experience, to write a truly unbiased article about anything.

Since the source itself seems to be pretty damn biased, I can safely say this claim can be taken with several grains of salt, spoons of sugar, and some mountain dew to as it down.

BWAHAHAHAAAA, UCLA is definately biased. TO THE OUTERMOST REACHES OF LEFTDOME!!!

Rosalie, you realized that the admins can ban you now, for like the umpteenth time. We all know that the media is biased, and I believe way way way way to the left. Of course, that is excluding Fox. I feel that the major media is a source of checks and balances. CNN is annoyingly left, FOX is annoyingly right, and MSNBC is annoyingly in the middle. There will always be bias in the media, they are only human. Or... at least some of them are .

Well, if there are more liberals than conservatives reporting (which the survey seemed to say), then of course there'll be a liberal bias. If a lot of conservatives decide to become reporters, there will be a conservative bias.

I personally think a lot of this bias talk is exaggerated, though.

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.

Those methods of experimentation leave a lot to be asked.

What does "scouring media coverage" imply? Which media and how is it examined?
What qualifies as a policy group/think tank, and why is that the most valid method of examination?
What is a similar citation pattern?
Why would a citation pattern necessairly imply a similar view?
How do we determine this method of analysis to be the most valid?

It's not that I believe the report to be false or misleading, but the article leaves a lot of questions to be asked about the scientific validity of the report.

You don't just search for evidence that supports your hypothesis, you gather all the data you can. UCLA gathered a bunch of evidence of liberal media, without even paying attention to the possibility evidence against their hypothesis existed.

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.

I don't think that's true.



That seems to show that they were fairly equal in looking left and right bias. But again, as Icebrand and I have gone over...the methods are not well-defined.

My point was that they seemed to take the data and judge from it how liberal the media was, which, in my opinion would naturally lead to a slant towards the conclusion that it was liberal biased. I've always found that when you go out looking for a specific conclusion from data, you will find it more often than if you just look for a conclusion.

Obviously if you're inside it you can't tell...

That's not exactly what I would call a "scientific" study. When you conduct an experiment (and really a study is a type of experiment), you first form a hypothesis. UCLA, apparently, had the hypothesis that the media is left-biased. Everything seems OK up to here. The next thing do to is collect data. So they went out and looked for evidence that the media was left biased. This is where they mess up.

You don't just search for evidence that supports your hypothesis, you gather all the data you can. UCLA gathered a bunch of evidence of liberal media, without even paying attention to the possibility evidence against their hypothesis existed.

Here's a somewhat similar situation: a doctor thinks that a certain drug may have negative side-effects (drowsiness, headaces, etc.). So does he just search for people that have taken the drug and see if they have those syptoms, and if there are cases of it, he decides the drug has those side-effects?

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.

"A media person would have never done this study," said Groseclose, a UCLA political science professo

Since they were only looking for leftism they wouldn't have found any rightism.

Where on earth did you get this idea?

Common sense, instead of actually reading the article... Wow. I wish I had powers like that.