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GEM Presents: NY Times Liberal Bias Challenge
The Green Eyed Monster
i blame hip hopRegistered User regular
i blame hip hopRegistered User regular
I often hear it repeated, as if it's so obvious as to warrant no further questioning whatsoever, that the NY Times is a hotbed of liberalism and leftist propoganda. Just as turning on Fox News Channel tilts your whole house to the right, carrying a copy of the NY Times should give you a distinct limp in your left leg.
BUT THEN
I actualy started reading the New York Times pretty regularly, and all I see is "journalism." Granted, there are many left-leaning op-ed contributors (Friedman, Krugman come to mind), but there's also William "Stinking" Kristol, and in the end editorials are meant to be biased, can one really lampoon a paper on its editorials alone? Surely, in such a rag of such reputed one-sided reporting, I should, in my daily reading, encounter plenty of howlers in its articles, right?
Well I haven't found it, but maybe I'm just lost so far down the socialist rabbit hole that these things are outside of my reach, so I thought I'd enlist your help.
IF YOU BELIEVE
the NY Times is a left-leaning paper, please, by all means, show me an article and point out where the bias is rearing its ugly, latte-drinking, Prius-driving, yoga-mat-owning head. Shoot, even if you don't believe the NY Times is a left-leaning paper, maybe you could still take a closer look and find the evidence for both of us to be convinced. There should be absolutely no shortage of material to work from if you visit nytimes.com and click on just about any of those propoganda pieces linked on the front page there.
If your argument w/r/t the political leanings of the media simply has to do with what percentage of journalists are registered with what party, well that's just not good enough for this challenge. I want actual articles. I want actual critique of actual content. And if after all your searching, you still can't find any bias ... well ... at least you'll be more informed than when you began.
Maybe if this goes well, we can have a Fox News challenge next, and believe you me that will be shooting fish in a barrel.
BUT THEN
I actualy started reading the New York Times pretty regularly, and all I see is "journalism." Granted, there are many left-leaning op-ed contributors (Friedman, Krugman come to mind), but there's also William "Stinking" Kristol, and in the end editorials are meant to be biased, can one really lampoon a paper on its editorials alone? Surely, in such a rag of such reputed one-sided reporting, I should, in my daily reading, encounter plenty of howlers in its articles, right?
Well I haven't found it, but maybe I'm just lost so far down the socialist rabbit hole that these things are outside of my reach, so I thought I'd enlist your help.
IF YOU BELIEVE
the NY Times is a left-leaning paper, please, by all means, show me an article and point out where the bias is rearing its ugly, latte-drinking, Prius-driving, yoga-mat-owning head. Shoot, even if you don't believe the NY Times is a left-leaning paper, maybe you could still take a closer look and find the evidence for both of us to be convinced. There should be absolutely no shortage of material to work from if you visit nytimes.com and click on just about any of those propoganda pieces linked on the front page there.
If your argument w/r/t the political leanings of the media simply has to do with what percentage of journalists are registered with what party, well that's just not good enough for this challenge. I want actual articles. I want actual critique of actual content. And if after all your searching, you still can't find any bias ... well ... at least you'll be more informed than when you began.
Maybe if this goes well, we can have a Fox News challenge next, and believe you me that will be shooting fish in a barrel.
The Green Eyed Monster on
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Fox has been my main source of news lately, but I say "news" lightly because their prime time lineup is all op-ed commentary.
Remember that whole "Global Warming" thing the republicans were chuckling about several years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Turns out it was true.
Yeah, but McCain is a maverick.
They are editorials. Similarly, the Wall Street Journal's editorials are usually a collection of right-wing hackery. But that doesn't impugn the quality of their actual reporting.
You say loosely "they swing certain ways" and they are "easier on the party in power." Well if that's true, you should be able to follow the link listed above, click around, and find support for your claim. Otherwise you're just repeating an unsupported generalization.
And like I said -- if we want to do this for something like Fox News, I can definitely find articles which betray their bias, but I figured first we'd start with the New York Times, so we can spare ourselves retorts like "every paper has its bias."
Edit:
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2008/918/2
Not so much "easily frightened" as "broadened horizons".
WSJ is owned by News Corp now, so...
Actually the New York times has a national as well as metropolitan edition. They could easily take out anything that seemed like it was aimed towards people who specifically live in New York (which is already true for ads appearing in the paper). Honestly, I don't think they really have a leaning, except for the editorials. For a lot of journalists, The New York Times is a shining example of good journalism.
Well they could but then you would be talking about extra cost from making extra articles as opposed to making extra ads which gives more money. I doubt they are doing it.
The fact that you are unlikely to see an article about say the benefits of predator control in western states (unlikely, not impossible) in the times is the only bias you will see.
Wait, are you talking about adding in articles for the National edition? Because they are already printing two different daily editions of the NYT, but I don't think they add anything to the National edition. They take out a lot of the NYC-centric stuff from the Metro Edition to make the National Edition, including ads for local delis and other such things.
yeah but they put in ads to take their place. In order to change the articles they would need to basically say here are some articles that we made which are going to cost us more money that aren't applicable to the "people of NYC but are applicable to everyone else." I don't read the Times but i cant see the business sense in doing that.
subtly
Yeah, they definitely change the ads around in the different editions.
But what exactly do you mean by your second statement? That they don't take out articles, or that they don't add them in? Because they take out the entire Metro section for the National paper. But I think everything else is untouched (Living in Indiana, I haven't actually seen a Metro NYT paper, so I don't know).
I dont think they add anything in, I think the metro section is just an additional section for NYers and you are getting a slightly smaller version of the paper. The thinking there being "they arent going to read this anyway so lets just not add it in their edition"
I don't read the Times so i'm just assuming.
I can't imagine the sports section mentions the greatness of the Red Socks all that much for example.
Yeah. That is basically the difference between the Metro and National editions. Most people outside of NYC don't really care about the Mayor cracking down on illegal parking, or whatever is going on in the city.
Cherry-picking articles and going, "See? Bias!" is not a good way to demonstrate bias. That's exactly what the MRC and AIM conservative media watchdogs do, and why their claims are basically unsupported. The way to go about this in a serious fashion is to choose a sample of sources, first, preferably based on some criteria other than "I heard somebody thinks it's biased." Then work out a coding scheme, where [X] language gets 1 bias point, [Y] language gets 1 bias point, [Z] language gets 1 bias point, etc... and then have a panel of people all read the same articles - preferably a couple hundred of them or more - photocopied out of the original sources with by-lines removed (to make the study blind) and pick out instances of X, Y, and Z. This is more or less what FAIR and the studies they cite do, which is why I trust their studies a whole hell of a lot more.
I know we're not doing a scientific study here. I know this is just an Internet forum. I know that we don't have remotely the same standards of digilence here as a professional researcher or a serious watchdog organization.
But it still kind of bothers me, just a little, that this thread wants us to do exactly what conservative hack-tanks like AIM and MRC do, which is exactly the wrong way to go about looking at media bias.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
only problem would be that the bylines could also add to bias so you might want to do a separate analysis of those based on initial reaction (interested/noninterested) from a panel of staunch republicans and democrats and middle of the road controls.
Thread over
The media are all pussies, obviously
So, are you always misogynist, or is it just a sometimes thing for you?
In other news, testosterone is negatively associated with forethought, which explains a lot if your claim is true.
Uh, he's just kidding dude. Chill.
One might argue that people who are smarter adapt to change better than people who are stupider. Lord knows the mentally retarded have problems with any sort of variation in their daily schedule.
There is one article about a study that found liberal bias. Of note is the debate moderator point. You'll have to search yourself for the quarterly journal to read the study.
I don't think the NYT is the worst. It certainly is not as obvious as the WSJ now.
But what does bias in a news outlet mean for you anyway and why do you care? There is no "left" in this country, thank God. The longer we can stave off it's encroachment, the stronger our nation will be.
You know - I was just thinking about that last sentence and things are so centrist in this country that we've even taken the words liberal and conservative and halved them to create our perceived camps. American media, people, and politicians are incredibly centrist. To say that NYT or Fox News are bias doesn't really mean anything.
Also, Jack Daniels is disgusting. Stop drinking it.
It's not "science," it's simply completing a task.
If this thread dies, and not a single member of the forum finds and article and demonstrates its liberal bias, well ... I guess I'm going to assume this forum wasn't up to the challenge (and everyone should shut the fuck up about bias in reputable news sources).
If the bias exists, follow the link in the first post and demonstrate it to me, please. If you want to do the same thing for the Wall Street Journal, make your own Wall Street Journal thread. This thread is for the NY Times.
You're repeating the same generalizations but offering no support. I'm not asking for science or in-depth studies, I'm asking for one article to help support your claim. I even bolded and increased the size on the link lest you have a hard time finding the NY Times website on your own.
You started out well.
Here is one.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/04/business/economy/04bailout.html?hp
Now let's see if you can put the posts by Thanatos, Feral, and myself together and figure out how dumb your exercise seems.
Seems a lot easier to call my exercise "dumb" than to actually do it.