[Vision2020] On Media Bias --

[Andreas Schou]

> I'd be interested in comments about the authors statistical 
> methology...
> http://www.yale.edu/isps/seminars/american_pol/groseclose.pdf

The conclusion that even Matt Drudge is slanted leftward is evidence that, for whatever reason, something has gone seriously cockeyed with this study. I can offer a few explanations off the top of my head:

(1) The American political left is virtually irrelevant, whereas the American right wing is ascendant.  The Congress is to the right -- and recently, /far/ to the right -- of the American electorate. It's not surprising, therefore, that comparisons between the media and the Congress come out slanted leftward. 

To produce a truly tepresentative number, one would have to calculate the ADA score of the average voter. While I'm reasonably certain that the ADA score of the average Republican is close to the ADA score of a Republican House member, I'm reasonably certain that the ADA score of the average Democrat is leftward of their representatives. 

For instance: 45% of Americans are in favor of gay marriage. Nowhere near that number of senators and representatives are.

(2) Liberals are fundamentally rationalists. Conservatives are fundamentally traditionalists.

In argument, conservatives rely largely on historical precedent, ideological rules that are simple to enforced, and the Bible. Governance by conservatives is arguably easier than that by liberals: by and large, they believe that complicating government simply makes it worse, and that innovations are more dangerous than useful.

Statistical evidence, the sort produced by think tanks, is more useful in the operation of complex and novel social programs than in, for instance, justifying tax cuts. Tax cuts, to conservatives, constitute a moral good on their own, and need no further justification. They always "work", in that they always return money to the pockets of taxpayers. Not so with social programs.

So, I'd like to see a graph which correlates number of citations to ADA score. My intuition is that the results are skewed by an overall greater overall number of liberal citations, but that may just be my leftish chauvanism.

-- ACS