MD Understanding Quality And Power

From: Ant McWatt (antmcwatt@hotmail.co.uk)
Date: Wed Jan 19 2005 - 15:32:12 GMT

  • Next message: Matt Kundert: "RE: MD Further comments to Matt"

    Platt Holden stated January 19th 2005:

    >Hi Anthony,
    >
    > > Is there a Guidebook on Goldberg’s work or even a University thesis that
    > > treats it in a positive light? If so, let’s have the references so we
    >can
    > > check them out!
    >
    >No problem. Check out the Media Research Center website for supporting
    >material to Goldberg's books. Plenty of "university" studies there,
    >although you know as well as anyone that those who wrap themselves in the
    >cloak of a university are not free of bias. :-)

    Ant McWatt replies:

    Many thanks for that Platt. I'll look into Media Research Center in some
    detail though "I've got a Dynamic feeling" you're going to have do to do
    better than this organization as evidence of credible supporting material
    for Goldberg. One of the first entries on the Google search engine for
    "Media Research Center" + Goldberg brought up the following article by
    Geoffrey Nunberg (BA, Columbia; MA, Penn; PhD, CUNY) who is a senior
    researcher at the Center for the Study of Language and Information at
    Stanford University and a Consulting Full Professor of Linguistics at
    Stanford University:

    "Another Party Heard From"

    (Posted 6/28/02)

    http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~nunberg/MRC.html

    Yet another study of partisan labeling, this one from the conservative Media
    Research Center , in an effort to redeem Bernard Goldberg's claim that the
    media label conservatives more often than liberals.

    The MRC looked at the use of the words liberal and conservative in five
    years' worth of network news, culling out nonpolitical uses of the terms
    (e.g., "a conservative estimate"), references to foreign politics, and
    duplicate records. They then determined that the word conservative is used
    about four times as frequently as liberal, a result they trumpet as showing
    that "reporters are actually four times more likely to label conservatives
    than liberals."

    Not so fast -- the study actually proves nothing of the sort. Iindeed, it
    proves nothing at all -- the MRC has cooked the books in a way that even an
    Arthur Andersen accountant would blush to own up to...

    Added 6/30/02:

    In an email to the Washington Times in response to my criticisms, an MRC
    spokeman says: " Only someone with absolutely no first-hand knowledge of the
    ABC, CBS and NBC newscasts could suggest that conservatives were discussed
    four times more often than liberals." In other words: "Um, well, we didn't
    actually count the disparities in mention between liberals and
    conservatives."

    Well, let's see if we can help. In one of the few claims that does in fact
    give enough information to be checked proportionately, the MRC study reports
    that the conservative label is applied to Supreme Court justices 49 times
    while the liberal label is used only 24 times, a two-to-one discrepancy. But
    now consider how often the names of justices on both sides have been
    mentioned on NBC news broadcasts over the past five years, using figures
    from the same Nexis database that the MRC claims to have used:

    Mentions of liberal justices: Breyer (8), Stevens (16), Ginsburg (7), Souter
    (7): Total mentions: 40

    Mentions of conservative justices: Rehnquist (104), Thomas (40), Scalia
    (50), Kennedy(14), O'Connor (40). Total mentions: 248.

    Ratio of mentions of conservative to mentions of liberal justices: 6.2 to 1.

    Ratio of total number of conservative labels to total number of liberal
    labels applied to justices: 2 to 1.

    In other words, if we take the NBC figures as roughly representative of the
    networks as a whole, the MRC study shows that liberal justices are
    proportionately labeled three times more frequently than conservatives are.
    Bias indeed.

    (With a six-million dollar budget, can't these guys hire a statistician?)

    ---------------end---------------

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