Brendan Nyhan

I got my wife a copy of People’s year-end issue for some trashy vacation reading, and it turned out to contain an interesting interview with President Bush.

For one thing, Bush strangely segues to praising the debate over the war in Iraq:

PEOPLE: Mr. President, when historians look back at 2005, how do you want them to remember you?

BUSH: Well, I really want them to be writing about the compassion and courage of the American people. I think about Katrina and Rita, devastating storms that obliterated a significant part of our country. People had to leave their homes, leave their possessions, leave their pets behind. And in their trauma and personal tragedy, they found a compassionate America with open arms. The country understands we’re at war [in Iraq], and there’s a debate, which is good. It’s what we stand for, the ability of people to express their opinions.

Debate about the war is good, Mr. President? Let me refresh your memory with a brief timeline of your administration’s attacks on dissent since 9/11:

December 2001: In response to Democratic plans to question parts of the USA Patriot Act during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, John Ashcroft suggests that people who disagree with the administration’s anti-terrorism policies are on the side of the terrorists. “To those who pit Americans against immigrants, and citizens against non-citizens; to those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America’s enemies, and pause to America’s friends. They encourage people of good will to remain silent in the face of evil.”

May 2002: After the disclosure that President Bush received a general warning about possible Al Qaeda hijackings prior to 9/11, Democrats demand to know what other information the administration had before the attacks. In response, White House communications director Dan Bartlett says that the Democratic statements “are exactly what our opponents, our enemies, want us to do.”

September 2004: As John Kerry steps up his criticism of the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq and the war on terror, Republicans repeatedly suggest that he is emboldening the enemy… President Bush says, “You can embolden an enemy by sending a mixed message. You can dispirit the Iraqi people by sending mixed messages. You send the wrong message to our troops by sending mixed messages…”

November 2005: With Democratic critics of the war in Iraq growing increasingly vocal, President Bush lashes out, claiming that “These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America’s will. As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them to war continue to stand behind them.”

So other than repeatedly suggesting that dissent aids the enemy, the President thinks political debate during wartime is great!

Bush also says something strange about Katrina:

PEOPLE: Do you wish you could have a do-over?

BUSH: Look, obviously there are areas where we can improve. Hurricane Katrina is one. The important thing is to learn from mistakes and not only prepare this presidency, but future presidencies, for how to deal with a category five storm.

The wording is ambiguous, but I have to ask: Does Bush know that Katrina was a category three storm when it hit New Orleans? It’s not clear.

Finally, Bush denies that he “felt let down by Karl Rove and Scooter Libby”:

PEOPLE: Mr. President, back to the White House. There have been reports that you’ve felt let down by Karl Rove and Scooter Libby for their role in the leak controversy. Is that true?

BUSH: No. I expect a high standard of ethics, I expect there to be a full disclosure, and I expect people to be judged innocent until proven guilty. I am a person who gives everybody the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise.

No disapproval whatsoever. Pathetic.

I’m no fan of Robert Novak, but he’s an influential conservative insider, so it’s important that he slams Bill Frist’s nascent presidential candidacy in today’s edition of the Evans-Novak Political Report, which covers the failure of the Republican Congress to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling or pass a long-term extension of the Patriot Act.

Here’s Novak’s bottom line on the implications of the week for Frist:

[I]f there was any doubt before, Frist will not be in serious contention for the presidency in 2008. He needed a victory to cast aside his image as a weak leader, but he failed to get anything through the Senate beyond the absolute minimum.

Frist’s buffoonery over the last year has been amusing, but I’m happy to see that others are realizing he has no business in the presidential race.

Update 12/30: WashingtonPost.com blogger Chris Cillizza slams Frist as having had the worst year of all the major presidential contenders:

Singling out Tennessee Sen. Bill Frist (R) as the presidential hopeful who had the worst 2005 was a no-brainer. Everywhere Frist turned in the past 12 months he found bad news. In March, Frist was roundly criticized by the medical community for alleging that a comatose Florida woman — Terri Schiavo — may have been misdiagnosed by her doctors. Two months later, Frist’s attempt to invoke the so-called nuclear option on judicial nominations — a pet issue for conservatives — was thwarted by a group of moderate senators from both parties, raising doubts about Frist’s ability to lead his own caucus. Then in July, Frist announced his support for legislation that would expand the use of stem cells for medical purposes — a move that drew considerable ire among social conservatives and was seen as at least a partial reversal of Frist’s previous position on this issue.

Finally, in October, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced it was opening an investigation into a stock sale Frist authorized involving a company his father and older brother founded. Despite that laundry list of political pitfalls, those close to Frist insist he is still planning to run for president. If he has any chance of winning the nomination, he needs his final year in the Senate to be much better than the year just past.

Via Drudge, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has a remarkable story investigating a possible reason for President Bush’s decision to secretly wiretap Americans without a search warrant:

Government records show that the administration was encountering unprecedented second-guessing by the secret federal surveillance court when President Bush decided to bypass the panel and order surveillance of U.S.-based terror suspects without the court’s approval.

A review of Justice Department reports to Congress shows that the 26-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court modified more wiretap requests from the Bush administration than from the four previous presidential administrations combined.

Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, “the government must show ‘probable cause’ that the target of the surveillance is a member of a foreign terrorist organization or foreign power and is engaged in activities that ‘may’ involve a violation of criminal law” — not an unreasonable standard.

Before Bush, the FISC was arguably the most compliant court in the country. It had never rejected a warrant request and, according to the PI, “[t]he judges modified only two search warrant orders out of the 13,102 applications that were approved over the first 22 years of the court’s operation.”

However, the warrant requests that the Bush administration brought before the court were apparently so weak that the court started demanding changes. “[S]ince 2001, the judges have modified 179 of the 5,645 requests for court-ordered surveillance by the Bush administration. A total of 173 of those court-ordered ‘substantive modifications’ took place in 2003 and 2004 — the most recent years for which public records are available.”

Here’s a chart illustrating what a dramatic increase in modification rates this represents:

In addition, the PI reports that “[t]he judges also rejected or deferred at least six requests for warrants during those two years — the first outright rejection in the court’s history.” Again, consider the difference. 0 rejections out of 13,102 before 2001. 6 rejections out of 5,645 from 2001-2004.

If the Bush administration can’t get such a lenient court to sign off on its wiretaps after 9/11, then we have a serious problem. What do those judges know that we don’t?

In the New York Times today, Rep. Deborah Pryce, the fourth highest-ranking member of the House Republican leadership, bemoans the lack of Democratic support for GOP legislation:

Congressional Republican leaders, while acknowledging the unsightliness of the last few days of all-night debate, floor fights and mop-up sessions, expressed satisfaction with what they accomplished if not how it looked.

“When you have a narrow majority with absolutely no help, absolutely no help, from the other side, it is never very pretty,” said Representative Deborah Pryce of Ohio, chairwoman of the House Republican Conference.

Give me a break. As Ron Brownstein (among others) recently pointed out, House Republicans have repeatedly chosen to pass divisive legislation on narrow, party-line votes rather than seeking consensus:

The essence of the modern Republican governing strategy is
self-reliance. The goal is to resolve all issues in a manner
that solidifies their political coalition. The means is to pass
legislation primarily by unifying Republicans, thus shrinking
opportunities for Democrats to exert influence. This approach
represents the political equivalent to what the North Korean
government calls Juche: a strategy of maximizing independence
by minimizing dependence on outside forces.

Indeed, Dennis Hastert has explicitly stated that the House is being run according to the wishes of the Republican caucus:

Hastert’s position, which is drawing fire from Democrats and some outside groups, is the latest step in a decade-long process of limiting Democrats’ influence and running the House virtually as a one-party institution. Republicans earlier barred House Democrats from helping to draft major bills such as the 2003 Medicare revision and this year’s intelligence package. Hastert (R-Ill.) now says such bills will reach the House floor, after negotiations with the Senate, only if “the majority of the majority” supports them.

Running the House this way and then complaining about the lack of “help” from Democrats is beyond absurd.

Last month, I linked to a paper (PDF) by Princeton’s Larry Bartels taking issue with Thomas Frank’s bestselling What’s the Matter with Kansas?

I focus on four specific questions inspired by [author Thomas] Frank’s account: Has the white working class abandoned the Democratic party? Has the white working class become more conservative? Do working class “moral values” trump economics? Are religious voters distracted from economic issues? My answer to each of these questions is “no.”

Via Eric Alterman, I see that Frank has issued a rejoinder (PDF). Frank makes an especially strong case against Bartels’ definition of the white working class:

Arming
himself with a fact that is well-known to poll-readers everywhere—that society’s very
poorest members tend to vote Democratic— [Bartels] simply switches the labels, claims that
those poorest Americans are “the working class,” and—hey presto!—declares the
problem solved. Nothing to worry about, go back to sleep.

Bartels performs this spectacular feat of reassurance by defining “working class” as
“people with family incomes in the bottom third of the income distribution,” (11)3 which
is to say, people with household incomes below $35,000. To justify this definition, he
brushes off other ways of determining working-classness. First, subjective self-
identification: You can’t trust people to give their own class accurately, Bartels writes,
because that might be an effect as well as a cause of their political views. (page 11.
Remember this: it will resurface later on.) Second, Bartels argues that educational levels
can’t be used to determine “socio-economic status” because more people get college
degrees now than in the old days.

And that’s it. Bartels’ own definition—household income below $35,000—is simply
supposed to be beyond controversy, as he implies in a double-negative passage so
windingly indirect that I had to read it over three times to get it:

Nevertheless, as a general matter, it does not seem implausible to suppose that
people’s relative positions in the current income distribution provide a
meaningful, historically consistent indication of their socio-economic status.

Well, I can think of half a dozen reasons why it is implausible, and I’m not even a
political scientist. Maybe those people are students or recent college graduates or just
starting out in the workforce or not married yet: They will promptly cease to be “working
class” by Bartels’ estimation as soon as they get a promotion or get married. Maybe those
people are professionals who just don’t make very much money, like, say, a newly
minted poli-sci PhD who is an instructor or an adjunct somewhere: They may be
struggling but they are not “working class” by anyone’s definition. Or maybe those
people are retirees, living on pensions or Social Security—a large and growing segment
of the population, but not necessarily “working class.”

In fact, according to a pair of professors who have also analyzed the NES data for 2004,
over a third of Bartels’ “working class” demographic are, in fact, retirees. Eight percent
are disabled. Only a third of his chosen cohort are actually employed, and only half of
these are over the age of thirty. This is not a profile of “the working class” as anyone
uses the term. This is “the poor,” “the young,” and “the retired.”

Matthew Yglesias writes up something I noticed this morning:

[T]here’s something a bit odd about this David Brooks column, which seems to concede that the President’s wiretap scheme was illegal, but then slides glossily past the point to discuss other issues. Now, obviously, a columnist has a right to focus on whatever he wants to focus on, but this is sort of a big deal. Note that the lawbreaking is ongoing. It’s not as if Bush was caught, apologized, changed things up, and wants the country to move on. He denies that he’s done anything wrong and insists he’s going to keep on doing it.

The key phrase from the article is that the path Bush has chosen is “legally dubious.”

Just for the sake of contrast, here’s what Brooks and William Kristol wrote in 2000 about the Bush/Gore presidential race:

There are many ways to elevate the race, but three obvious themes suggest themselves: the rule of law, America’s mission in the world, and the renewal of American citizenship.

Begin with the rule of law. The Bush campaign hasn’t been sure how or whether to raise the issue of the Clinton-Gore scandals. The low point so far was the sarcastic Bush commercial about whether Al Gore had invented the Internet…

But the issue isn’t whether Al Gore exaggerates. It’s whether the executive branch is going to uphold the law or subvert it. It is an eight-year pattern of abuse of power — starting with the prosecution of the head of the White House travel office (acquitted by a jury in less than two hours), through the coverup and subversion of the White-water investigation, the serial bungling of Janet Reno’s Justice Department, the 1996 fund-raising scandals, and Bill Clinton’s perjury in the Lewinsky matter. This is an administration that has corroded the legal framework of American society and corrupted the legal process for its own petty and political advantage.

Instead of dancing around this topic with generalized comments about restoring integrity to the White House, instead of making a few pointed remarks to a gaggle of reporters on the tarmac, Bush could deliver a serious speech explaining how the Clinton-Gore administration has undermined the rule of law. He could remind voters why the rule of law is sacred; he could argue that to elect Gore is to turn a blind eye to the depredations of the administration in which the vice president has played so prominent a part; and he could point out that, under a Gore administration, there is every reason to believe the pattern of the past eight years would continue.

I guess Brooks was for the rule of law before he was against it.

The Washington Post’s Mark Leibovich highlights the disturbing and robotic message discipline of White House spokesman Scott McClellan (via Mark Dubois, a fellow grad student here at Duke):

On the Thursday morning after his reelection in November 2004, President Bush bounded unexpectedly into the Roosevelt Room of the White House, where about 15 members of his communications team were celebrating. He just wanted to thank everyone for their hard work on the campaign, he said, before singling someone out.
“Is Scotty here? Where’s Scotty?” Bush asked, half-grinning, according to two people who were in the meeting but asked not to be quoted by name because they were discussing a private event. Bush scanned the room for Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary.

“I want to especially thank Scotty,” the president said, looking at his aide. “I want to thank Scotty for saying” — and he paused for effect. . . .

“Nothing.”

At which point everyone laughed and the president left the room.This is one of those quips that distill a certain essence of the game. In this era of on-message orthodoxy, the republic has evolved to where the leader of the free world can praise his most visible spokesman for saying nothing.

…Last Friday reporters battered McClellan over a New York Times report that the president had authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop without warrants on people in the United States. Over several minutes, McClellan emphasized that:

The president is doing all he can to protect the American people from terrorists (10 times);

The administration is committed to protecting civil liberties and upholding the Constitution (seven times);

Congress has an important oversight role, and the administration is committed to working with it on these difficult matters (five times); and

He would not discuss ongoing intelligence activities (five times).

For more on the message strategy of the White House, see All the President’s Spin, especially Chapters 1 and 2.

Today’s New York Times reports the National Security Agency was following President Bush’s lead by dissembling about the need for a court order to wiretap Americans:

Testifying before a Senate committee last April, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then head of the National Security Agency, emphasized how scrupulously the agency was protecting Americans from its electronic snooping.
“We are, I would offer, the most aggressive agency in the intelligence community when it comes to protecting U.S. privacy,” General Hayden said. “We just have to be that way.”

It was one of General Hayden’s favorite themes in public speeches and interviews: the agency’s mammoth eavesdropping network was directed at foreigners, not Americans. As a PowerPoint presentation posted on the agency’s Web site puts it, for an American to be a target, “Court Order Required in the United States.”

In fact, since 2002, authorized by a secret order from President Bush, the agency has intercepted the international phone calls and e-mail messages of hundreds, possibly thousands, of American citizens and others in the United States without obtaining court orders. The discrepancy between the public claims and the secret domestic eavesdropping disclosed last week have put the N.S.A., the nation’s largest intelligence agency, and General Hayden, now principal deputy director of national intelligence, in an awkward position.

UCLA political scientist Tim Groseclose and Missouri economist Jeff Milyo have published a study (PDF) alleging liberal media bias that is receiving a lot of attention, including a link on Drudge. But you should be wary of trusting its conclusions for reasons that I tried to explain to Groseclose after he presented the paper at Duke in fall 2003.

First, here’s a summary of the study’s methodology from the UCLA press release:

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.

In short, the underlying assumption is that, if the press is unbiased, then media outlets
will cite think tanks in news reporting in a fashion that is “balanced” with respect to the scores assigned to the groups based on Congressional citations. Any deviation from the mean ADA score of Congress is defined as “bias.” But is that a fair assumption?

In particular, the paper’s methodology doesn’t allow for two important potential differences between the processes generating news citations and floor speech citations:

(1) Technocratic centrist to liberal organizations like Brookings and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities tend to have more credentialed experts with peer-reviewed publications than their conservative counterparts. This may result in a greater number of
citations by the press, which seeks out expert perspectives on the news, but not more citations by members of Congress, who generally seek out views that reinforce their own.

To illustrate, assume that there are two kinds of political stories. In the first, the press interviews think tank
experts about policy debates in a “he said, she said” framework. We’ll stipulate that these stories have
an identical distribution of citations to that of Congress. But let’s also assume the press is expected to consult technical experts or
scholarship about trends or recent developments they are
reporting on according to the norms of journalism, and that under such norms
these experts, when they are cited, are not always “balanced” by an opposing expert. As a result, “expert” think tank citations are less
frequently set off with a balancing quote or argument from the other side.

It follows from these premises that if there are more generally recognized
technical experts on left-to-center side of the spectrum, then a study using
the Groseclose/Milyo methodology would place the media on the Democratic side of the Congressional
mean even if members of the press randomly chose technical experts to cite.

(2) The Groseclose/Milyo methodology doesn’t allow for differential rates of productivity in
producing work of interest to the media or Congress between organizations. To the extent that a think tank is better at marketing itself to the press than Congress (or vice versa), it could skew the results. For instance,
the Heritage Foundation is extremely close
to conservative members of Congress and has an elaborate operation designed to put
material into their hands. But the fact that these members end up citing Heritage more than the press does is not ipso facto proof that the media is liberal.

In fact, there are a number of stories you can tell about why a media/Congress discrepancy in think tank
citation would not necessarily imply ideological bias on the part of members
of the elite media (including those listed above) and if any of them are true,
the argument as stated does not hold.

Here is Groseclose/Milyo’s response to the above criticisms:

More problematic is a concern that congressional citations and media citations do
not follow the same data generating process. For instance, suppose that a factor besides
ideology affects the probability that a legislator or reporter will cite a think tank, and
suppose that this factor affects reporters and legislators differently. Indeed, John Lott and
Kevin Hassett have invoked a form of this claim to argue that our results are biased
toward making the media appear more conservative than they really are. They note:

For example, Lott [2003, Chapter 2] shows that the New York Times’
stories on gun regulations consistently interview academics who favor
gun control, but uses gun dealers or the National Rifle Association to
provide the other side … In this case, this bias makes [Groseclose and
Milyo’s measure of] the New York Times look more conservative than
is likely accurate. [2004, p. 8]”

However, it is possible, and perhaps likely, that members of Congress practice the
same tendency that Lott and Hassett have identified with reporters—that is, to cite
academics when they make an anti-gun argument and to cite, say, the NRA when they
make a pro-gun argument. If so, then our method will have no bias. On the other hand,
if members of Congress do not practice the same tendency as journalists, then this can
cause a bias to our method. But even here, it is not clear in which direction it will occur.
For instance, it is possible that members of Congress have a greater (lesser) tendency
than journalists to cite such academics. If so, then this will cause our method to make
media outlets appear more liberal (conservative) than they really are.

In fact, the criticism we have heard most frequently is a form of this concern, but
it is usually stated in a way that suggests the bias is in the opposite direction. Here is a
typical variant: “It is possible that (i) journalists care about the ‘quality’ of a think tank
more than legislators do (e.g. suppose journalists prefer to cite a think tank with a
reputation for serious scholarship instead of another group that is known more for its
activism); and (ii) the liberal think tanks in the sample tend to be of higher quality than
the conservative think tanks.” If statements (i) and (ii) are true, then our method will
indeed make media outlets appear more liberal than they really are. That is, the media
will cite liberal think tanks more, not because they prefer to cite liberal think tanks, but
because they prefer to cite high-quality think tanks. On the other hand, if one statement
is true and the other is false, then our method will make media outlets appear more
conservative than they really are. (E.g. suppose journalists care about quality more than
legislators, but suppose that the conservative groups in our sample tend to be of higher
quality than the liberal groups. Then the media will tend to cite the conservative groups
disproportionately, but not because the media are conservative, rather because they have
a taste for quality.) Finally, if neither statement is true, then our method will make media
outlets appear more liberal than they really are. Note that there are four possibilities by
which statements (i) and (ii) can be true or false. Two lead to a liberal bias and two lead
to a conservative bias.

This criticism, in fact, is similar to an omitted-variable bias that can plague any
regression. Like the regression case, however, if the omitted variable (e.g., the quality of the think tank) is not correlated with the independent variable of interest (e.g., the
ideology of the think tank), then this will not cause a bias. In the Appendix we examine
this criticism further by introducing three variables that measure the extent to which a
think tank’s main goals are scholarly ones, as opposed to activist ones. That is, these
variables are possible measures of the “quality” of a think tank. When we include these
measures as controls in our likelihood function, our estimated ADA ratings do not change
significantly. E.g., when we include the measures, the average score of the 20 news
outlets that we examine shifts less than three points. Further, we cannot reject the
hypothesis that the new estimates are identical to the estimates that we obtain when we
do not include the controls.

Here is the portion of the appendix they refer to:

Columns 5-9 of Table A2 address the concern that our main analysis does not
control for the “quality” of a think tank or policy group. To account for this possibility,
we constructed three variables that indicate whether a think tank or policy group is more
likely to produce quality scholarship. The first variable, closed membership, is coded as
a 0 if the web site of the group asks visitors to join the group. For instance, more activist
groups–such as the NAACP, NRA, and ACLU–have links on their web site that give
instructions for a visitor to join the group; while the more scholarly groups—such as the
Brookings Institution, the RAND Corporation, the Urban Institute, and the Hoover
Institution—do not. Another variable, staff called fellows, is coded as 1 if any staff
members on the group’s website are given one of the following titles: fellow (including
research fellow or senior fellow), researcher, economist, or analyst.

Both variables seem to capture the conventional wisdom about which think tanks
are known for quality scholarship. For instance, of the top-25 most-cited groups in Table
I, the following had both closed membership and staff called fellows: Brookings, Center
for Strategic and International Studies, Council on Foreign Relations, AEI, RAND,
Carnegie Endowment for Intl. Peace, Cato, Institute for International Economics, Urban
Institute, Family Research Council, and Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Meanwhile, the following groups, which most would agree are more commonly known
for activism than high-quality scholarship, had neither closed membership nor staff called
fellows: ACLU, NAACP, Sierra Club, NRA, AARP, Common Cause, Christian
Coalition, NOW, and Federation of American Scientists.

The third variable that we constructed is off K street. It is coded as a 1 if and only
if the headquarters of the think tank or policy group is not located on Washington D.C.’s
K Street, the famous street for lobbying firms.

The problem, however, is that conservative think tanks have consciously aped the tropes of the center-left establishment (such as fellows and closed memberships) while discarding their commitment to technocratic scholarship. Thus, the fact that the American Enterprise Institute and the Family Research Council are included in these categories means that the variables do not adequately address the criticism. Similarly, the Heritage Foundation, the prototypical faux-technocratic think tank (see here and here), has fellows as well. Counts of scholarly citations or staff with Ph.D.’s would have been far better metrics. (As for the K Street variable, it is simply bizarre — many lobbying shops are a block or two away, as Media Matters points out.)

Others have also objected to the study’s methodology. Here are the strongest portions of two critiques that have appeared in the last several days:

Dow Jones & Co. in a letter to Romenesko responding to the study’s classification of the Wall Street Journal news pages as liberal:

“[T]he reader of this report has to travel all the way Table III on page 57 to discover that the researchers’ “study” of the content of The Wall Street Journal covers exactly FOUR MONTHS in 2002, while the period examined for CBS News covers more than 12 years, and National Public Radio’s content is examined for more than 11 years. This huge analytical flaw results in an assessment based on comparative citings during vastly differing time periods, when the relative newsworthiness of various institutions could vary widely. Thus, Time magazine is “studied” for about two years, while U.S. News and World Report is examined for eight years. Indeed, the periods of time covered for the Journal, the Washington Post and the Washington Times are so brief that as to suggest that they were simply thrown into the mix as an afterthought. Yet the researchers provide those findings the same weight as all the others, without bothering to explain that in any meaningful way to the study’s readers.”

Media Matters:

We leave to the reader the judgment on whether anyone could take seriously a coding scheme in which RAND is considered substantially more “liberal” than the ACLU. But this is not the only problem with Groseclose and Milyo’s study; they lump together advocacy groups and think tanks that perform dramatically different functions. For instance, according to their data, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is the third most-quoted group on the list. But stories about race relations that include a quote from an NAACP representative are unlikely to be “balanced” with quotes from another group on their list. Their quotes will often be balanced by quotes from an individual, depending on the nature of the story; however, because there are no pro-racism groups of any legitimacy (or on Groseclose and Milyo’s list), such stories will be coded as having a “liberal bias.” On the other hand, a quote from an NRA spokesperson can and often will be balanced with one from another organization on Groseclose and Milyo’s list, Handgun Control, Inc…

It is not hard to imagine perfectly balanced news stories that Groseclose and Milyo would score as biased in one direction or the other, given the study’s methodology. For instance, an article that quoted a member of Congress taking one side of an issue, and then quoted a think tank scholar taking the other side, would be coded as “biased” in the direction of whichever side was represented by the think tank scholar. Since Groseclose and Milyo’s measure of “bias” is restricted to citations of think tank and advocacy groups, this kind of miscategorization is inevitable.

Groseclose and Milyo’s discussion of the idea of bias assumes that if a reporter quotes a source, then the opinion expressed by that source is an accurate measure of the reporter’s beliefs — an assumption that most, if not all, reporters across the ideological spectrum would find utterly ridiculous. A Pentagon reporter must often quote Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld; however, the reporter’s inclusion of a Rumsfeld quotation does not indicate that Rumsfeld’s opinion mirrors the personal opinion of the reporter.

…The authors also display a remarkable ignorance of previous work on the subject of media bias. In their section titled “Some Previous Studies of Media Bias,” they name only three studies that address the issue at more than a theoretical level. All three studies are, to put it kindly, questionable…

Although the authors seem completely unaware of it, in reality there have been dozens of rigorous quantitative studies on media bias and hundreds of studies that address the issue in some way. One place the authors might have looked had they chosen to conduct an actual literature review would have been a 2000 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Communication (the flagship journal of the International Communication Association, the premier association of media scholars). The abstract of the study, titled “Media bias in presidential elections: a meta-analysis,” reads as follows:

A meta-analysis considered 59 quantitative studies containing data concerned with partisan media bias in presidential election campaigns since 1948. Types of bias considered were gatekeeping bias, which is the preference for selecting stories from one party or the other; coverage bias, which considers the relative amounts of coverage each party receives; and statement bias, which focuses on the favorability of coverage toward one party or the other. On the whole, no significant biases were found for the newspaper industry. Biases in newsmagazines were virtually zero as well. However, meta-analysis of studies of television network news showed small, measurable, but probably insubstantial coverage and statement biases.

Standard scholarly practice dictates the assembly of a literature review as part of any published study, and meta-analyses, as they gather together the findings of multiple studies, are particularly critical to literature reviews. That Groseclose and Milyo overlooked not only the Journal of Communication meta-analysis, but also the 59 studies it surveyed, raises questions about the seriousness with which they conducted this study.

Indeed, they seem to be unaware that an academic discipline of media studies even exists. Their bibliography includes works by right-wing media critics such as Media Research Center founder and president L. Brent Bozell III and Accuracy in Media founder Reed Irvine (now deceased), as well as an article from the right-wing website WorldNetDaily. But Groseclose and Milyo failed to cite a single entry from any of the dozens of respected scholarly journals of communication and media studies in which media bias is a relatively frequent topic of inquiry — nothing from Journal of Communication, Communication Research, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Political Communication, or any other media studies journal.

With leadership like this, we might as well give up now (via the Progress Report):

“None of your civil liberties matter much after you’re dead,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a former judge and close ally of the president who sits on the Judiciary Committee.

Russ Feingold’s response was more than appropriate:

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), who has led a bipartisan filibuster against a reauthorization of the Patriot Act, quoted Patrick Henry, an icon of the American Revolution, in response: “Give me liberty or give me death.”

He called Cornyn’s comments “a retreat from who we are and who we should be.”