Just In Case...

There's a new UCLA study, peer reviewed and published in the "Quarterly Journal of Economics" which purports to demonstrate clear liberal bias in the main stream news media of this country, and my guess is that we're going to be hearing a lot more about this from the conservative pundits and bloggers.

But before you take the study too seriously, a few things you should note:

• The study's methodology ranks Matt Drudge as liberal.
• The study considers the ACLU conservative.

The methodology of this particular study is badly flawed, and seems to rely strongly on the invoking of "liberal" or "conservative" listed topics and sources in order to justify it's conclusions.

Matt Drudge, clearly conservative, discusses (in order to refute) a lot of liberal issues and talking points, but because he mentions them, the study's count lists him as left-of-center.

I don't recall any allegations of RIGHT WING bias when it came out that the New York Times had sat for over a year (and through a Presidential election) on a story of illegal circumventing of judicial oversight in wire tapping by the NSA, but as soon as the media reports on any Republican's wrong doing, immediately the pundits come out yelling about the media witch hunt against everything to the right of center.

You can have your opinion and I can have mine. Mine is that the media of late have become toadies to whoever is in power, not left or right wing but cowtowing to whoever will give them access or can benefit them. Certainly in my view there is more "news" with an overt skew to the right (Fox News) than there is to the left.

But regardless, the debate will go on. I just wanted to point out that this "study", which is bound to be cited regularly, proves absolutely nothing, with a methodology and conclusions so laughably wrong as to be completely invalid.

Liam.