Is TV Political Analysis Biased? Cast your vote now!
Filed under: Media
If you turn on your TV this Sunday morning in New York City, the nation's leading media marketplace, you'll be offered a range of choices in political analysis from the four major networks. You'll get (1) "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos from ABC, (2) "News Sunday" with Chris Wallace from FOX, the eponymous pair (3) "Chris Matthews" and (4) "McLauglhin Group" as well as (5) "Meet the Press" with Tim Russert from NBC and finally (6) "Face the Nation" with Bob Shieffer on CBS. Matthews and McLaughlin each have half-hour programs, the others have a full hour.
Three of the six hosts -- Matthews, Stephanopoulos and Russert -- are former operatives of the Democratic Party. Matthews was a speech writer for Jimmy Carter, Stephanopoulos was a campaign manager and adviser to Bill Clinton and Russert was a lawyer for the Democrats in the Senate as well as an advisor to Mario Cuomo. John McLaughlin, the only counterpart with Republican credentials, was a speechwriter for Richard Nixon and a writer for the conservative National Review magazine. Schieffer and Wallace are career journalists with no prior service for a party in their backgrounds. So only one of the six hosts is Republican functionary whilst three are Democrats (and those three control 2.5 of the 5 total hours of programming, fully half the time available, whilst the Republicans own just 0.5 hours of that time -- five times less than the Democrats have). Conservative viewers might find that disturbing. What's more, in a wider study of journalists, MSNBC reported that it had "identified 143 journalists who made political contributions from 2004 through the start of the 2008 campaign, according to the public records of the Federal Election Commission. Most of the newsroom checkbooks leaned to the left: 125 journalists gave to Democrats and liberal causes. Only 16 gave to Republicans. Two gave to both parties." Those are overwhelming numbers, and very disturbing to conservative viewers.
On the other hand, the Media Matters think tank studied the guests hosted by major network Sunday shows and found that they tended to over-represent conservatism compared to liberalism. So it could be that crafty conservative networks are using left-wing hosts to conceal a conservative agenda, or it might be that devious left-wing networks are using right-wing guests to conceal a liberal agenda. Then again, maybe the idea of bias is all in our imagination.
Whether TV news analysis is biased or not is a question of interest to Publius Pundit, since it determines the quality of information about emerging democracies and dictatorships that the public will receive. What do you think? We'd like to know! (Your thoughts in the comment section are also most welcome).
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