There’s an interesting new blog called The Monkey Cage written by three political scientists at the George Washington University. Any blog that takes its motto from H.L. Mencken deserves a look from libertarians, even if the authors are not libertarians (I have no idea whether they are or not).
The blog has only been up for a few days, but it already has some interesting posts on voter ID, campaign finance, and negative advertising in campaigns. The authors don’t follow the conventional wisdom on those issues. For example, they praise the work of Cato visiting research fellow John Mueller on the bias in threat assessments of terrorism. (You can find the short version of Mueller’s work here).
One of the group, John Sides, has a concise and interesting post on media bias.
His claim that newspapers are in the business of confirming the prior beliefs of their readers seems accurate, and yet it confirms the original concern (or, at least, a legitimate concern) about liberal bias: responding to readers or viewers leads to a biased or distorted account of reality.
Is there a market for unbiased reporting? You would think so, but perhaps not. Maybe it doesn’t matter. We may just dump media messages, bias and all, into the marketplace of ideas and trust that something like an unbiased political result will come out the other end.
Reading Sides, some might wonder: Why not relieve the media of market pressure as a way of dealing with bias? That prompts another question: Are NPR and the CPB free of political bias in their reporting and analysis?
The post also prompted the following thought: I have worked on the campaign finance issue for many years now and I have never talked to a reporter from major media who doubted any part, much less the whole, of the reform case. Political scientists have not found that campaign contributions have much effect on members of Congress (see the earlier link). But that has not affected the prior beliefs of reporters . One raw assertion of corruption by Fred Wertheimer outweighes a hundred careful studies of the influence of money on politics. That might suggest that how monolithic liberalism is in the media depends on the issue. But still, do reporters favor reform because they are liberal or because they get to write “Look, corruption!” a couple times a week? Or do they favor reform because it tends to suppress accounts of reality and messages that compete with the product offered by their employers? In other words, do they support regulations that confer directly nonproductive deadweight rents on their employers?
Finally, Sides does not discuss the Milyo-Groseclose study of media bias. Maybe he will in future posts.
