{"id":943,"date":"2009-11-02T12:02:34","date_gmt":"2009-11-02T17:02:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/?p=943"},"modified":"2009-11-02T12:10:54","modified_gmt":"2009-11-02T17:10:54","slug":"public-perceptions-of-media-bias-%e2%80%93-wtf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/public-perceptions-of-media-bias-%e2%80%93-wtf\/","title":{"rendered":"Public Perceptions of Media Bias \u00e2\u20ac\u201c WTF?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Pew Research Center just released a survey about the public perception of media bias.\u00c2\u00a0 Before reading the rest of this article, check out the results and rate your own reaction.\u00c2\u00a0 How many times did you say “What The Fuck?”<\/p>\n

\"Pew<\/a><\/p>\n

First we have to ask if the survey itself is biased.\u00c2\u00a0 If it had been done by Media Matters, FAIR or Accuracy in Media, taking their biases into account would mean we’d have to discard the results, which would make this a very short article.\u00c2\u00a0 But Pew has been around for a long time and has earned a great reputation.\u00c2\u00a0 We can be confident the numbers accurate.<\/p>\n

This is a survey of people’s perception <\/em>of bias, not actual bias.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s fine, because bias can’t be accurately measured.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s often subtle, coming down to the choice of adverbs or adjectives or the prominence given to specific stories.\u00c2\u00a0 Like pornography, I may not be able to define it, but I know it when I watch it.<\/p>\n

Here are the WTFs I found in the survey:<\/p>\n

The first one is minor and expected \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the green band in the middle.\u00c2\u00a0 Every news organization is biased, but when that bias is the same as a viewer’s, the viewer mistakenly views the outlet as unbiased<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s disappointing that a third of the people suffer from this blindness, but not surprising.<\/p>\n

Next comes the rating for MSNBC.\u00c2\u00a0 I find it amazing that anyone could think MSNBC bias is tied with CNN and NBC.\u00c2\u00a0 While the latter are obviously lefty, MSNBC is as far to the left as Fox is to the right.\u00c2\u00a0 I can only conclude that people with this opinion have TVs with very poor audio.\u00c2\u00a0 With better sound systems they’d have noticed that every time a lefty is interviewed on MSNBC you can hear faint slurping sounds coming from under the desk.<\/p>\n

14% think Fox is mostly liberal, and ABC and CBS are mostly conservative, and 11% think the rest of the lefties are mostly conservative?\u00c2\u00a0 WTF!<\/p>\n

The biggest WTF, though, comes from the preponderance of liberalism in the news.\u00c2\u00a0 While we can argue about the precision of these perceptions, the general results are bang on \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Fox is right wing and all the others are left wing.\u00c2\u00a0 Half the US population calls themselves conservative, but only one <\/em>out of six organizations is smart enough to take advantage of that.\u00c2\u00a0 The rest cling to their liberalism and wonder why they’re losing viewers faster than fundamentalist teenagers are losing their virginity.\u00c2\u00a0 All of them, except MSNBC, have been in business longer than Fox, so they have far more experience and should have more business acumen, but instead they keep to their lefty ways and wonder where all their viewers went.\u00c2\u00a0 What The Fuck?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Pew Research Center just released a survey about the public perception of media bias.\u00c2\u00a0 Before reading the rest of this article, check out the results and rate your own reaction.\u00c2\u00a0 How many times did you say “What The Fuck?” First we have to ask if the survey itself is biased.\u00c2\u00a0 If it had been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[15,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=943"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":946,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943\/revisions\/946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}