Liberal Media Bias - A Blog Post About Losing a Bet With My Wife

This post comes from a challenge given to me by my wife.  We had a discussion about the reputations of certain websites for being too partisan to be taken as serious news sources (Huffington Post), and during the course of our discussion I said that NPR and the New York Times exhibited a sort of liberal bias through the selection and emphasis of stories that would reaffirm a liberal worldview.  She called me on it though, and so now I have to see if what I said was actually true (this look-before-you-leap assertion philosophy of mine is also a primary reason why she usually wins all our arguments).

I took snapshots of news websites' front pages at the same time on Thursday afternoon to see which stories were being emphasized by particular news organizations and which stories were being ignored.  Thursday night was the night of John Boehner's big fail of an attempt to pass a partisan symbolic "fiscal cliff" solution that involved raising taxes on millionaires, the so-called "Plan B".  It was also 6 days after the tragic Newtown elementary school shooting, so lots of stories relate to this.  For scoring purposes, any Newtown policy story critical of guns will be scored as D +1, while any policy story that talks about any other theory will be scored as R +1.

I have decided to analyze the headline (and only the headline) of everything I can see in these snapshots, which only include the top part of the front page of these websites.  This includes both news articles and opinion pieces.  I summed up all the Republican sounding headlines and all the Democrat sounding headlines and came up with a total score of partisanship.  I start with a few right-wing websites just to show what bias really looks like.

Daily Caller

Daily Caller is basically your number one source for trolling.  They show a story right there at the top of the page; the headline is "Teachers Union chief: Teach for America helps kill children in classroom".  It is also repeated in the "Popular Articles" column on the right. As are the words "ANN COULTER", so, you know.

Plan B stories: Obama belittles a GOP plan (Neil Munro) (+1 R); Congressional hypocrisy (Alex Pappas) (a fair both-sides-are-hypocrites headline and sub-headline) (neutral); a Boehner talking point (Nicholas Ballasy) (+1 R). None of these headlines scream "tax hike!"

Newtown/gun stories: Ann Coulter (+1 R), teachers unions kill kids (+1 R), "My AR 15 Is Not An Assault Rifle" (+1 R), "Guns for dummies" (+1 R), Morning Joe says GOP needs to not block gun reform (neutral).  The NRA is not mentioned.

Other: Miss Venezuela (neutral), The 10 Hottest moments from the Miss Universe pageant (not news), a reporter gets paid to check Craigslist for end-of-the-world sex (neutral).

Total: +6 R

Newsmax

Newsmax, which markets to conservative voices, definitely foretold of Boehner's eventual failure due to conservative voices.  They repeatedly emphasize the "tax hike" part of Plan B, which echos a conservative worldview on taxes.

Plan B/fiscal cliff stories: GOP about to vote on "Tax Hikes" (though it's anti-Boehner, it presents Plan B as only a tax hike, so +1 R): AP says the tax averages $100,000 (but doesn't give percentage of income) (+1 R), Rick Scott presented in a good light (+1 R), Boehner says Obama will eat the blame (+1 R), Wall Street Journal hates the Boehner deal (as if we should care what the Wall Street Journal thinks) (+1 R), Boehner "pushes" Plan B "tax hike" (+1 R).

Newtown stories: Hmm, where are the Newtown/gun control stories? Oh, I see one, way down there, just above Newt Gingrich's head! Chris Christie says we should talk about guns (D +1). On the opinion side, just one story about guns from Michael Reagan's perspective (R +1).  The NRA is mentioned nowhere.

Other: Main story #3 is Hillary Clinton being at the "Center of Benghazi Debate", though she wasn't at the hearing, an actual news event (this framing suggests R +1), and a neutral sounding Susan Rice article.  Then there's Gingrich evolving on "marriage equality" (D +1, also the fact that the Newsmax headline says "marriage equality" and not "gay marriage" is a great sign for the movement). Hunger and homelessness are featured in Newsmax only to make Obama look bad (R +1).  On the opinion side, neutral yuletide statements, farewell to Clinton, something something energy policy, and one thing about Chuck Hagel's possible nomination to defense secretary. From the headlines these seem neutral, though I doubt the pieces actually are neutral. 

Total: R +7

Fox News

 
















Fox News was harping on this one story that I hadn't heard anything about apparently on their cable news network as on their website. It involves both a government's legal action against a gun owner and a vehicle in which Mexicans are viewed negatively, so it is a natural fit as a Republican story.  It gets five clickable links, all five are R +1. 

Plan B/fiscal cliff stories: Nothing stands out. In the "Latest News" section of the front page, lawmakers are on a "collision course" and Grover Norquist's absolution is mentioned, but nothing notes the plan as a "tax hike" like on Newsmax.  The fact that Plan B news got buried probably means something, but it's not on an obvious partisan axis.

Newtown/gun stories: Story #2 is Newtown, but the stories focus on, in order, mentally ill (rather than guns (R +1), a teacher's memorial (neutral), mental health (rather than guns (R +1)), and the overreaction of police to a piece of wood with "rifle" written on it (R +1).  The NRA is mentioned nowhere.

Other: The weird anti-Mexico story aside, there aren't many other partisan stories, except for the video link that begins "Top government regulations Santa will ..." (R +1)

Total: R +9

Washington Times

Plan B/fiscal cliff stories: The Washington Times was a little bit more trusting of Eric Cantor's statement that the GOP had the votes for Plan B, and so their coverage assumes that the story will be that it passed.  Thus the Cantor talking point (R +1), Jay Carney saying that it's an exercise in futility (neutral), and the fact that their main story characterizes rules for debate as "House Republicans won an early test" (R +1).  The demonic picture of Obama on a fiscal cliff story is hilarious (R +1), and the fact that they are presenting the fiscal cliff through the eyes of "franchise businesses" is a Republican way of looking at things (R +1).      

Newtown/gun stories: Literally none.  This was the NRA's tactic at the time as well.

Other: Not one, not two, but three obits for Robert Bork, two of which sound glowing ("an original" and the one where Scalia remembers Bork) (R +2).  I would say nothing else is partisan, except for maybe the "Christmas skirmishes as old as Puritans", which sounds a little (D +1) if it is debunking the "war on Christmas".

Total: R +5


Overall, conservative news sites took different tacks regarding Plan B: Washington Times and Daily Caller went with an establishment Republican viewpoint, Newsmax went with a conservative tea party viewpoint, and Fox News either didn't know what to do or they saw a defeat and humiliation likely to come for Boehner, so they just buried all fiscal cliff/Plan B stuff.  Most of the conservative news sites ignored guns as part of the Newtown coverage, with the notable exception of the troll-bait articles praising guns by the Daily Caller.

So if conservative sites ignored guns, you can bet Huffington Post took the opposite tack.

Huffington Post

  




















Plan B/fiscal cliff stories:  Plan B gets one sad looking Boehner picture along with the line "appears likely to pass the house", which in retrospect, ha.  I don't understand the gist of that Boehner quote, and since I'm only judging by headlines and what I can see on the front page, I can't assess the partisan slant in showing it.  Overall it seems HuffPo was expecting Plan B to pass too, and they were getting right to the business of ignoring it because it is irrelevant (and because this is what Democrats would have wanted to do).  Robert Reich's blog post (D +1) and story #5 (D +1) appear to attack centrist Democrats from the left, as Newsmax was attacking from the right about "tax hikes!" in Plan B. 

Newtown/gun stories: Unlike the conservative media, HuffPo hits Newtown and guns hard.  Story #1 (D +1) and #4 are about the NRA and victim funerals respectively.  The bottom one includes words about guns, so it is a D +1.  There are also two blog posts about gun control (D +2).

Other: Cory Booker runs for a senate seat two (two!) years from now (neutral). There are some other words under the Cory Booker picture that I guess I have to count as separate links: "Boehner on the Brink" (neutral?), "Stewart Blame" (neutral?), "Coward GOPer" (D +1), "Palin mocks O" (Oprah? Anyways, nobody but partisans talks about Sarah Palin anymore (D +1)), "Coulter Slam" (D +1), "'Bigot' Scalia" (D +1).

Total: D +10

New York Times

Plan B/fiscal cliff news: The Jonathan Weisman-story headline writer provides a very accurate summary of what was going on with Plan B at the time, though one could make the argument that describing it as "a plan to cancel tax increases for all but the wealthiest" is a Democratic way of saying "raising taxes on the wealthiest"  There is nothing else on Plan B.

Newtown/gun news: the op-ed columnists are talking guns: The NRA's Blockade (D +1), On Guns, America Stands Out (D +1), and Looking for Lessons in Newtown (neutral).

Other: NY Times has a wide ranging front page of their website, which is neat, including the first bit of world news seen on front pages so far (Benghazi hearing doesn't count).  Very neutral about the Benghazi hearing.  There doesn't appear to be anything partisan about the non-Opinion Page stuff.  This is what a professional non-partisan news site should look like, I must admit.

Total: D +2

NPR

Plan B/fiscal cliff pieces: Plan B barely gets a mention, making it only to the "More News" section, where we get an extension of a dumb metaphor ("a push over fiscal cliff") that I don't even understand. 

Newtown/gun pieces: Story #1 is about an opinion poll on gun control (not mental health or 12-year-old husky boys, D +1).  Other stories on the site center around Newtown-inspired acts of kindness.

Other: The phrase "Big Food" is definitely D +1.  This is a much more diverse bunch of stories than one would find on other news websites, including NYT.  The malaria-fighting "French aperitif" story, the Mount Everest thing, the Mayan apocalypse thing, the Black Arts thing, the photo blog, the existence of something called a "cosmos and culture blog".  Though no other piece is overtly partisan, I would suggest that a panoply of ideas is associated with liberal values.

Total: D+2

Like the NY Times page, NPR seems to be mostly non partisan (except for "Big Food And The Big, Silent Salt Experiment" - making it sound like a big nefarious conspiracy from agribusiness).

So, once again, I'm forced to concede that my wife was right and I was wrong.  NPR and NY Times don't seem at first blush to be partisan towards Democrats, only that they lack a Republican bias. 

PolitiFact Truth Index, Part 5: That Other PolitiFact Truth Index

This week PolitiFact announced a new feature on their mobile phone app. They developed a chart of general truthiness against time so that trends could be seen more easily. In order to do this, they had to create some way of quantifying their own Truth-o-meter® ratings, so they assigned values to their ratings with positive numbers representing truths and negative numbers representing lies. Then they took the average of the last seven days and charted the results.

The feature is almost exactly like my PolitiFact Truth Index.

What did PolitiFact call this new feature? The PolitiFact Truth Index.

Coincidence? Who knows.

So now when you search for "politifact truth index" in Google, PolitiFact's site comes up first rather than mine. On the other hand, now that the PolitiFact Truth Index is actually a thing, maybe auxiliary search traffic to this site will increase.

Not that any of that actually matters.

There are differences between our methods, PolitiFact and me, but most of them are arcane, with one big exception: PolitiFact's PolitiFact Truth Index doesn't break it down by political party. This is probably in an attempt to avoid any overt semblance of partisanship, because otherwise PolitiFact would have to defend the reason why Democrats have a higher Truth Index value than Republicans, and then they get into the whole debate about selection bias versus actual lying, and then they lose their non-partisan aura which is essential to their reputation as a source for the mainstream media.

I obviously don't have any of those qualms. I just charts 'em as I sees 'em, and I see Republicans lying (although recently the numbers have been evening out, as shown below).




Other differences between the Quibbling Potatoes PolitiFact Truth Index and the PolitiFact PolitiFact Truth Index have more to do with the calculation of points. My points for the six categories of statements in descending truth order are as follows: 1, 1, 0, 0, -1, -1. PolitiFact's are essentially as follows: 1, 0.5, 0, -0.5, -1, -1.5. They also multiply the result by 100 because it just looks cooler that way. And their average is calculated by date that they analyzed the statement, not by the date that the statement was made. So even though PolitiFact claims to be tracking the "ups and downs of political discourse" with its Truth Index, they are really tracking the ups and downs of PolitiFact's choice of statements for the week. There are differences between those two methods as you can see by comparing the chart below to the one above.



PolitiFact's method is so similar to mine that it was really easy to calculate and make a chart based on one of the other methods of quantification that I tried which was based on a 5-4-3-2-1-0 point system. So the chart below represents what PolitiFact's PolitiFact Truth Index would be if they broke their numbers down by political party.



For the week ending July 1, 2011, Republicans had an Index value of -30.43 and Democrats had an Index value of -25.00.

PolitiFact's method makes everyone look a little worse, which is to be expected when three out of the six categories essentially are downgraded by half a point so that Pants-on-fire ratings are 50% worse on the bad side than True ratings are on the good side. But it still shows that, but for the week ending on May 20, 2011, Democrats have scored better than Republicans in every week I've looked at so far.

PolitiFact Truth Index, Part 3: Breakdown by State. Selection Bias?

My attempt with the PolitiFact Truth Index is to sort out some objective measure of the truthiness of statements made by politicians, journalists, activists and advocacy groups. I have shown that the statements made by Republicans tend to be rated false by PolitiFact and the statements made by Democrats tend to be rated true by PolitiFact. I have jumped to the conclusion that this is because Republicans lie more than Democrats do. But the whole process of rating statements on a six-point truth scale necessarily involves a selection bias, a subjective process that picks which statements to select for analysis and which to ignore.

There is a universe of statements out there composed of verifiable facts that are significant to some swath of Americans, newsworthy in some way, and likely to be repeated by others. PolitiFact sees its Truth-o-Meter™ as a somewhat-objective measure of this universe of statements, like dunking a test tube into a lake and analyzing the contents under a microscope back at the lab. This would be highly useful to settle political debates with scientific evidence about the relative truthiness of each party’s statements. But fact-checking isn’t like sampling a lake: each individual would probably have a different definition about what constitutes a newsworthy or significant statement. Even if one assumes that PolitiFact can objectively pass judgment on the truthiness of any given statement, it’s hard to make the case that their statements are fully representative of all political discourse. The lake could be as big as an ocean, and your test tube may not be a representative sample of the water in it.

This is a point made over and over again on the many sites that criticize PolitiFact, sites that are written mostly from a conservative perspective. One of the most thorough smackdowns of PolitiFact since the beginning of this year is the blog PolitiFact Bias whose writers have a beef not only with the selection bias, but also with the rating process, the final rating itself, and the selection of the “lie of the year”. In one post, blogger Bryan White tries to make an objective case for partisan bias (“bolstered by methods of science”) by compiling a list of errors in PolitiFact ratings going back to 2008 and pointing out that the overwhelming majority of them are unfavorable to Republicans or favorable to Democrats. But how does he determine which PolitiFact ratings are errors? He used his own (conservative-leaning) judgment, fraught with even more partisan bias than PolitiFact.

The fact is that it’s pretty easy to claim that PolitiFact has a partisan bias based on anecdotal evidence, but it’s pretty much impossible to prove such a claim unless PolitiFact and a bunch of other fact checking websites analyze a given control set of statements that we the public could use to determine who is more biased, who is more nitpicky, etc. (actually, this would be a great idea).

But until that happens, one can only compare PolitiFact with itself. Specifically with the affiliated state sites that are run by different newspaper editorial boards and may exhibit a degree of independence from the national PolitiFact site. I was interested in knowing which newspapers’ editors exhibited the most political bias towards or against one party or the other. So I averaged the PolitiFact Truth Index across each state by political party and came up with the following results.



PolitiFact Texas and PolitiFact Ohio both exhibited an average Truth Index value above one standard deviation for Democrats, while PolitiFact Wisconsin showed a negative value for its Democrats (the only state with more Democratic lies than truths since the end of February). It could mean that local and state Democratic politicians in Texas and Ohio really do tell the truth more often than their counterparts in other states, but it could also be a measure of partisan bias towards Democrats by the editorial board of the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Austin American Statesman.



PolitiFact Georgia and PolitiFact Virginia both exhibited an average Truth Index value above one standard deviation for Republicans, (the only states where Republicans have made more true statements than false ones) while Oregon and Wisconsin’s averages are lower than one standard deviation. Again, this could mean that Georgia’s and Virginia’s Republicans are more honest than everywhere else in the nation. But it could also mean that the Atlanta Journal Constitution and the Richmond Times-Dispatch employ fact-checkers with a Republican bias.

I thought it was interesting that both Wisconsin’s Democratic statements and Republican statements averaged below one standard deviation compared to statements made by fellow Democrats and Republicans in other states. I think this is at least partially due to the heated rhetoric due to the labor fight in that state, and specifically to the local and judicial elections that followed. As I published in Part 2, statements about elections (workings of government) and personal attacks tend to be rated false across the board, no matter which party makes the statement.

How does the national version of PolitiFact rank against the states in terms of the Truth Index?



For Democrats, PolitiFact National averages very close to the state average. For Republicans, PolitiFact National scores much lower than the state average. Since the National branch of PolitiFact tends to analyze statements with a national policy scope more than the state branches do, one can look at this fact a couple of different ways. One is that Republicans with a national scope lie more often than their state and local counterparts do. Or, PolitiFact National has an anti-Republican partisan bias. Or perhaps it could be due to some other factor. Maybe Republican pants-on-fire ratings drive more traffic to the website through links on Facebook and liberal blogs, and PolitiFact’s editors could be motivated to sample more of these statements than other types.

The debate about PolitiFact won’t subside, but I do think that the website is a useful mythbusting tool even if it does have a selection bias.

Next: Politicians versus political commentators