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Thread: Who Are More Biased: Liberals or Conservatives?

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    Who Are More Biased: Liberals or Conservatives?

    Who Are More Biased: Liberals or Conservatives?

    A psychological study comes to a surprising conclusion. The article is a bit long, but interesting.

    Recently Jane Mayer (2019) of The New Yorker wrote about the very close relationship between Fox News and President Donald Trump, outlining in great detail how the Murdoch family–owned news outlet functions as a tacit communication operation of the Trump White House and its political agenda. There is a revolving door of former Fox News staff working in the White House and former White House staff working at Fox News, and according to many sources quoted in the article, Fox News has erased the lines of journalistic integrity and is now functioning as a Trump propaganda machine. Mayer argued that with respect to programming, it was often unclear whether Trump controlled Fox News or Fox News controlled Trump.
    Meanwhile, the president himself continues to decry the “Fake News Networks,” by which he seems to mean any outlet to the left of Fox News. According to anonymous sources cited in Mayer’s article, President Trump had such animus toward CNN that he attempted to block AT&T’s purchase of Time-Warner, the parent company of CNN. The Trump Administration’s Department of Justice sued to block the merger, but in June a district court judge approved the deal (Ivanova 2018).


    Conservatives who, like the President, believe the mainstream media (MSM) have a liberal bias have been supported by evidence that journalists are more likely to identify as Democrats than Republicans. A 1990 poll of forty-nine editors and writers at The Washington Post found only one person, Tony Kornheiser, a sports columnist, was a registered Republican, and he suggested he was a RINO (Republican in name only): “I don’t think the Republican Party would claim me” (Wemple 2017). A 2014 study conducted by the University of Indiana School of Journalism found that 28 percent of journalists surveyed identified as Democrat and 7 percent as Republicans. Fifty percent said they were Independents (Willnat and Weaver 2014).


    In recent years, Ad Fontes Media has produced a media bias chart for many of the most popular news sources (see below). The horizontal axis of the chart plots the left or right political bias of the source, and the vertical axis plots the factual nature of the reporting, ranging from “Contains inaccurate/fabricated info” at the bottom to “original fact reporting” at the top. The result is an inverted-U–shaped function with the most politically biased sources on both ends of the spectrum rating low on factual material (e.g., Occupy Democrats, Breitbart News), and the most politically neutral sources tending to be the highest in factual material. For example, the Associated Press, Reuters, and Bloomberg were rated both among the highest in original fact reporting and the lowest in political slant. There are a few media sources that occupy the bottom middle of the chart. For example, the National Enquirer is given only a modest right-ward skew but is also very low on factual information.
    See chart at link.

    Biased Information Processing: Conservatives vs. Liberals

    As the foregoing suggests, the media landscape is filled with politically biased information that spans a wide range of viewpoints, but how biased are the people who receive this information? When you ask Republicans or Democrats how biased people of each party are, you get predictable results: Democrats say Republicans are more biased and Republicans say the reverse (see Figure 2). But psychological science cannot rely on the opinions of interested parties for answers. What happens when you put people in an experimental setting where they have a chance to act in a biased or unbiased way?
    Read the rest of the article and its conclusion.
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    I found that quite interesting. Thanks
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    Everybody is biased.

    Only media in that chart that i check daily is Reason.com.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Chris View Post
    Everybody is biased.

    Only media in that chart that i check daily is Reason.com.
    Reason is libertarian old school.
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    It should be obvious to everyone that Fox News is now TRUMP TV, and Hannity is Trump's go to advisor!

    That makes Fox as a State Sponsored TV, like in Russia.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Dr. Strangelove View Post
    It should be obvious to everyone that Fox News is now TRUMP TV, and Hannity is Trump's go to advisor!

    That makes Fox as a State Sponsored TV, like in Russia.
    Read the OP then comment.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Cotton1 View Post
    I found that quite interesting. Thanks
    Who helped you with the big words?
    Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I digress....

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    The conclusion asks the question, "Who Is More Biased"? The answer: "We don't know". Which gives the impression that it's a draw. And who wrote the article? The author of the article is a psychologist. People who work in psychology are much more likely to be Democrats, are they not? And it's to the Democrat's favor to make it look like a draw because then they won't look so bad as they really are - fake news.
    Last edited by Trumpster; 03-27-2019 at 04:38 PM.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Trumpster View Post
    The conclusion asks the question, "Who Is More Biased"? The answer: "We don't know". Which gives the impression that it's a draw. And who wrote the article? The author of the article is a psychologist. People who work in psychology are much more likely to be Democrats, are they not? And it's to the Democrat's favor to make it look like a draw because then they won't look so bad as they really are - fake news.
    Probably saying the studies are all over the place.
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    Conclusions after reading the Jost et al. source:
    1. The IAT inventory is unreliable.
    2. Project Implicit does not use a truly random sample to determine sample statistics and also lacks appropriate controls to account for confounding variables; thus, much of the research methodology related to this project is fundamentally flawed.
    3. There is a joke in psychology about using intro to psych students as your sample - guess who these guys used for part of their research? 2539 intro to psych students at NYU. But I am impressed by the P-value for this analysis assuming the statistics are correct. Totally beats the "standard" level of significance for the null hypothesis.
    4. Using undergraduates at the University of Texas probably does not produce an unbiased sample.
    5. A lot of the correlation coefficients show a linear relationship, but not as linear as is implied; values between 0 and +0.3 may be different when switching between descriptive and inferential methods
    6. The research authors cited 17 of their previous works

    Ditto et al. source, used to discuss bias (that's the chart you see):

    "The mean levels of liberal and conservative bias were very similar in magnitude (rlib = .235, 95% CI = [.192, .276]; rcon = .255, 95% CI = [.205, .304]) and the aggregate rdiff effect size across all 51 studies was extremely small and was not significantly different from zero (rdiff = .009, p = .55, 95% CI = [−.020, .038]; see Table 2), indicating no difference in degree of bias between liberals and conservatives. In other words, whether partisan bias was aggregated separately for liberals and conservatives or compared within each study and then aggregated, our results suggest that liberals and conservatives were both significantly biased in favor of information that supported their ideological beliefs and groups, and the two groups were biased to very similar degrees" (p. 280)

    Interesting, rcon was statistically more biased but it isn't worth much because of the confidence intervals, which are pretty huge (meaning less accuracy at 95% confidence).

    "
    There was no evidence of publication bias for either overall partisan bias (roverallβ = −.12, p = .42) or the relative degree of bias in con-servatives and liberals (rdiffβ = −.01, p = .97)."

    The bar graph used in the article was taken from this research and was actually from an online poll using a convenience sample that does not account for confounding variables; it is unscientific.

    The author of this article can't even use APA formatting properly. I fixed it in my references to what I am talking about.
    Ditto, P. H., Liu, B. S., Cory J. Clark, et al. (2019). At least bias is bipartisan: A meta-analytic comparison of partisan bias in liberals and conservatives. Perspectives on Psychological Science 14(2): 273–291.
    Jost, J. T., Nosek, B. A. and Gosling, S. D. (2008). Ideology: Its resurgence in social, personality, and political psychology. Perspectives on Psychological Science 3(2): 126–136.

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