Media Bias - Experimenter's Bias

Experimenter's Bias

A major problem in studies is experimenter's bias. Research into studies of media bias in the United States shows that liberal experimenters tend to get results that say the media has a conservative bias, while conservatives experimenters tend to get results that say the media has a liberal bias, and those who do not identify themselves as either liberal or conservative get results indicating little bias, or mixed bias.

The study "A Measure of Media Bias" by political scientist Timothy J. Groseclose of UCLA and economist Jeffrey D. Milyo of the University of Missouri-Columbia, purports to rank news organizations in terms of identifying with liberal or conservative values relative to each other. They used the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) scores as a quantitative proxy for political leanings of the referential organizations. Thus their definition of "liberal" includes the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization with strong ties to the Defense Department. Their work claims to detect a bias towards liberalism in the American media. Both authors are staunch conservatives: on his website, Groseclose cites Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, Bob Dole, Chris Christie, Newt Gingrich, Phil Gramm, Dick Armey, and Dick Cheney as his political heroes, and states that he usually sides with conservatives on controversial issues. Milyo was made a national fellow of the Hoover Institute, a conservative think tank, in 2010.