A report from UCLA has the amazing news:
“Media Bias Is Real”! Who would have thought it? A press
release from the university summarizes the painstaking
research of
Tim Groseclose, a political scientist at UCLA, and
Jeffrey Milyo, an economist from the University of Missouri.
These two scholars, aided by twenty-one research assistants,
spent ten years combing through U.S. media coverage.
Their findings, due out momentarily in the Quarterly
Journal of Economics, reveal the extraordinary scoop: there
is “a systematic liberal bias” in U.S. media!
“I suspected that many media outlets would tilt to
the left because surveys have shown that reporters tend to
vote more Democrat than Republican,” Mr. Groseclose said.
“But I was surprised at just how pronounced the distinctions
are.” Compared to members of Congress, Mr. Milyo added,
major media outlets are “quite moderate, … but even so,
there is a quantifiable and significant bias in that nearly
all of them lean to the left.” Extraordinary! We never would
have guessed.

There were a few surprises in Messrs. Groseclose and Milyo’s
findings. For example, out of twenty “major media outlets”
they studied, the news pages—as distinct from the editorial
columns—of The Wall Street Journal ranked number one as the
most liberal, beating out even CBS’s Evening News
(remember Dan Rather?) and The New York Times, which took
second and third place respectively in this dubious
sweepstakes. It is unclear how Messrs. Groseclose and Milyo
managed to distinguish between the news and the opinion
columns of The New York Times. It’s become a specialized
talent. We can’t do it, nor do we know anyone who can,
though perhaps with twenty-one research assistants we could
make a creditable try. In any event, although the results of
this study were hardly earthshaking, we are glad to see them
published under the aegis of a university—hitherto an
institution unremarkable for acknowledging liberal bias.
Perhaps Messrs. Groseclose and Milyo will now turn their
attention to the university itself. U.S. media revealed a
liberal bias by a factor of eighteen to twenty;
what do you suppose the numbers would be if the subject were
the university?