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From: matthews@harvard.ARPA (Jim Matthews)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: To tim sevener re media bias
Message-ID: <407@harvard.ARPA>
Date: Wed, 27-Feb-85 23:48:20 EST
Article-I.D.: harvard.407
Posted: Wed Feb 27 23:48:20 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 2-Mar-85 03:35:47 EST
References: <700@decwrl.UUCP> <498@whuxl.UUCP>
Organization: Aiken Computation Laboratory, Harvard
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> It is one thing to have an opinion that the press has a "liberal bias".
> (I think it would be easier to prove a status quo / conservative bias).
> It is another thing to prove it or present evidence of it.
> I have presented very concrete evidence: the actual political endorsements of
> the nation's newspapers.  Those endorsements are *overwhelmingly* conservative!
> I would like to see you refute the hypothesis that the media has a
> *conservative* bias.
>        tim sevener   whuxl!orb

	You have presented your endorsements=bias argument before, but it
doesn't wash.  Any survey of the country's vast number of newspapers will
find that they generally reflect the citizens they serve -- i.e. they vote
Republican in presidential elections.  Look at the Eastern news elite, 
however, and you find un-alloyed leftism that doesn't just give endorsements,
but even twists news.  In the seventies, when 3 million died at the hand
of socialists in Cambodia, the New York Times ran ten times as many articles
about the human's rights situation in Chile.  And while the election 
endorsement of some small-town paper doesn't reach anyone but it's readers,
the news stories from the Times, the Post, and the Globe are relayed from
coast to coast.  And let's not forget our friends at the networks -- Dan
Rather, whose opposition to the administration is a matter of public record,
and the rest.  The surveys done after the 1972 election found that over
80% of this group were for McGovern, while only this misguided state would
vote for him.
	Your assertions of a conservative bias are humorous to a point. I loved 
how you pointed to the posted Good Housekeeping list of admired men (which
included Reagan, Falwell, Nixon) as evidence of conservative bias -- but it
was a poll of readers!!  And that's the point -- the people of this country
are far more conservative than you give them credit, so conservative that I
can't think of a mainstream newspaper or magazine that isn't to the left of
them.  So Murdoch's papers and the USA Today will fare well, but that isn't
bias -- it's catering to the masses.

Jim Matthews
matthews@harvard