A recently published research paper has been making the rounds that purports to measure the ideological slant of the Big Three cable news channels. The methodology is to (a) identify all guests who have at least ten hours of screen time over the past decade, (b) add up the amount of time they appear each day, and (c) assign them an ideology score based on how much they contributed to either Democratic or Republican candidates.
I have some issues with this, but let's put that aside. Here are the basic results:
I have helpfully added the dashed red line to indicate the zero level, at which the roster of guests is neutral, and then I've even more helpfully added a red dot for the year 2018 on MSNBC. Other years might have done as well, but 2018 is fine for illustrating my big problem with this paper.
As you can see, the researchers claim that MSNBC had a net conservative guest roster in every single time slot during 2018. That eventually turned around, and by 2021 the roster was enormously liberal.
This doesn't pass the finger test. Does anyone believe that right smack in the middle of Donald Trump's first term, MSNBC was essentially a center-right station? Or that in prime time, with every host blathering nonstop about Mueller and Russia, it was dead center? Help me out here. Does this make any sense at all?
UPDATE: In fairness, I should say that I had a Twitter conversation with one of the authors (Josh McCrain), and he insisted that I gotten the paper wrong. He says the only thing they measure is guest ideology, not the overall slant of the channel or program.
That's true as far as it goes, and they're very clear about exactly what they measured—and I made a few modest changes in the post to make that more explicit. The problem is that the paper mentions "media bias" over and over. For example: "We believe that this measure [i.e., guest ideology] offers a highly scalable method for estimating bias in television outlets and programs."
I don't buy this. It's trivially true that liberal programs tend to have liberal guests and conservative programs tend to have conservative guests, although the authors do almost nothing to demonstrate this empirically. More to the point, though, is whether smallish changes in the lineup of guests indicates whether the overall bias of a program is becoming more liberal or conservative.
This is where things get weird. McCrain apparently agrees that guest ideology is only a small part of overall bias because it doesn't account for the ideology of the host. However, that's not mentioned in the paper itself. Via Twitter, he asserts that overall bias is roughly the sum of host ideology and guest ideology but provides no empirical evidence for this.¹ My guess is that guest ideology is a very small part of overall bias, and therefore modest changes in guest ideology probably have very little effect on overall bias. More likely, it represents what kind of stuff is in the news at any given moment and who's president at the time. It's hard to think of anything internal to a show that would change so synchronously on all three channels. It almost has to be something external.
That's my take, anyway, and it might be wrong. Regardless, this is the question at hand and the paper does almost nothing to address it. It merely measures guest ideology using a dicey (in my opinion) methodology and then tosses up a chart. It tell us nothing empirically about the overall slant of either channels or individual shows.
¹Sorry, no links for this or anything else. Apparently McCrain deleted most of his side of our Twitter conversation. But maybe I'm not looking right.
Kevin -- I'm one of the authors of this research. We never make any of the claims you suggest. We never say above 0 is "center right". The figures show relative balance of time of *guests* based on ideology. As we make extremely clear in the (very short) paper, this omits ideology of anchors.
The media bias of MSNBC did not shift; it shifted its choice of guests whose bias was right-of-center, in order to counter the conservative narratives supporting Trump.
While your intent was to identify dynamic media bias, I'm not so sure that you've accomplished this goal.
In an abstract sense, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but it does not mean that I've moved closer to my enemy's position.
Our intent was exactly what we state in the abstract of the paper.
Kevin being a Kevin again.
This does not surprise me at all, no.
But it also completely missed the point: Fox News is a part of the Republican Party. They have a meeting every day to decide how to spin the day’s news to help Republicans.
There is nothing else like this in the US media landscape, so studies like this are painfully naive and a complete waste of time.
As one possible explanation for why MSNBC would start titling right over the Trump years, I would just give my impression of what happened at CNN. To achieve "balance" guest commentators in the Trump years tended to include standard liberals (typically centrist, with some small exceptions), Never Trump Conservatives, and Trump conservatives. If MSNBC took the same approach, there would be 2 conservatives for everyone 1 liberal.
Yes, this. One of the only things I’ve ever heard Kevin say in 20 years that made me question his sanity was that MSNBC was somehow a liberal equivalent of Fox News.
Um, no. There is not really any “liberal” in the liberal media from what I’ve seen.
Sure, you have folks like Maddow, but their reach is pathetic and they are just nowhere near as good as the propagandists at Fox News, and the have onlu a small slice of the day.
I’m contrast, literally everyone is in on the propaganda part at Fox. Fox News knows what it is: and it is NOT news organization. MSNBC still fancies itself news, and like all American media, it was woefully unprepared for Trump, so of course they sought “balance” that tilted them to the right.
You're a little inconsistent in your comment. On one hand you say there isn't any real "liberal" in the liberal media (presumably referring to the likes of MSNBC), and then say, sure there are folks like Maddow - but they're not nearly as good or popular as the talking heads on Fox. So there IS liberal representation.
I agree, for all intents and purposes, FN is to the Republican party what Pravda was to the Soviet regimes. Pretty unselfconsciously so (despite the laughable "Fair and Balanced" shtick). I don't recall whether Kevin said, precisely, that MSNBC is the equivalent of Fox News for the liberal side, but he would be right if he said MSNBC is a mainstream liberal answer to FN. I'm sure NBC thought, if Fox has had such success appealing to the right, there's a good business reason to produce programming that similarly appeals to the liberal-ish side of the spectrum. Right there is a big difference, of course. But also, MSNBC's lineup of opinion personalities, stuck to standards of accuracy in journalism that Fox discarded out of the gate.
As you suggest, Fox had a mission: to bolster the GOP by tearing down the Democrats as "extreme" and trigger every government/progressive-change greivance they could think of. MSNBC, by contrast had a business plan: to make money countering the propaganda of Fox with the naturally-liberally-biased facts. That may be milk-toast liberalism, but, frankly I - and most liberal-minded people I know wouldn't turn on a station with the aggressive disregard for facts that Fox has, just because they spout something vaguely on my "side." And I think the programming executives wisely sensed that, which is why they played it straight. And why they are not "equivalent" but are similarly advocating for the other side.
+1!
As one of the authors pointed out in the comments, while the title of the paper makes no nod to the specific metric, the abstract of the paper is pretty clear what they are measuring:
“ Using one instantiation of media bias—the mean ideology of political actors on a channel, i.e., visibility bias—we examine weekly, within-day, and program-level estimates of media bias.”
Whether that is a good enough proxy for them or the editors to extrapolate to the overall dynamic bias is waaay beyond me to adjudicate.
A lot of MSNBC guests during the Trump administration were "convervative Republicans" but who are also Never Trumpers -- Rick Wilson, Tom Nichols, Steve Schmidt, et al. and they probaby donate to Republicans, but ones like Liz Cheney. Meanwhile, Fox having Pete Buttigeig on to humiliate whoever's interviewing him pulls Fox to the left? WTF?
Lets not forget during the run up to the 2016 election. Morning Joe had Trump calling in almost every day... they couldn't get enough.
If anything the morning and afternoon segments of MSNBC on this chart don't look conservative enough to me.
It seems to me that you're describing Morning Joe as of and during 2015. By early 2016, Joe and Mika had flipped and had gone anti-Trump.
It seemed to me that they flipped when Trump claimed, in maybe 2/16, that he didn't know who David Duke was. I've recently heard Joe saying, on the air, that they flipped sooner than that. These things are hard to research because the show only produced vert occasional transcripts.
It seems to me that the result of this study is a consequence of the nature of the Trump government: News channels tend to invite guests to cover both sides, i.e. during Trump there would be Trumpists on MSNBC who would not be there if the government were moderate right; sane GOPers would suffice (pre-Trump they were not extinct yet).
Political leaning of guests is a lousy measure of the political attitude of an outlet. It says something about its approregularach to journalism.
Extreme example: The PBS newshour has had a segment with two regular guests, one left, one right, to debate issues of the day. For years and years this has been Shields and Gigot, Mark Shields having been a moderate Democrat, Paul Gigot the editor of the effing Wallstreet Journal editorial page. With this measure the Newshour would be considered strongly right leaning...
Trump toilet photos,
https://mobile.twitter.com/maggieNYT/status/1556581489059536896
Enjoy.
Axios calls them document dumps,
https://www.axios.com/2022/08/08/trump-toilet-photos-maggie-haberman?stream=top
Dumps like a Trump.
The fact that kahner’s comment below yours, yet not responding to you, starts off with “Doesn’t pass the smell test…” cracks me up.
"Doesn't pass the smell test" is the epitome of lazy commentary. And you're a numbers and charts guy, so this is even more egregiously lazy. If you don't think the methodolgy is great, tell us why. If you think the data is wrong, show how. And finally, i noticed the comment above from someone claiming to be an author of the paper where they state they never even claim anything about msnbc being center right in the paper. It's simply an analysis of "balance of time of *guests* based on ideology". And I certainly don't see any reason to automatically disbelieve that MSNBC would have a large number of hours with republicans during the trump years, because they often put on the anti-trump, not insane republicans who, yes, are exactly what would traditionally be called "center right".
You're being ridiculous: it's a blog post, not a peer reviewed article.
If you like, instead of "smell test," Kevin could have said that the results "do not seem facially valid." Would that help?
As to the author, what other conclusion should we draw than that they are saying that the average hour of MSNBC in 2018 was populated by center-right guests? Or, for short, that it was a center-right network?
No need to reach for a conclusion. Just what the paper says. The balance of guests for MSNBC was slightly waited in favor of Republicans in that time period.
"Waited"?
I'm pretty sure that's a typo for weighted.
as jmccrain said, maybe accept the conclusion that the paper itself purports to instead of making one up they the paper never claimed, then saying without any valid argument that made up conclusion is wrong.
So you've given up on the entirety of your criticism except "Kevin Drum didn't interpret the article the way I wanted to, waah, waah, waah"?
Good to know.
(And yes, I know the authors are now handwaving past the obvious implications of their study, but hey, authorial intent, right?)
Kevin's problem really is making up stuff in this case. The campaign financing scale used on the paper is based on donations to either political party. It has nothing to do with how leftwing or rightwing they are. That's just Kevin's wrong assumption which he then used to make up a bogus conclusion that is really not possible to get with the type of data used by the study.
dude, you're just babbling nonsense at this point and frankly, embarrassing yourself. but, hey, you do you i guess.
Well Nicole Wallace's show is essentially a reputation scrubber for a whole cadre of Bush-era conservatives, including her.
While if Joe Scarbourough's name were Gary Condit, he never would have gotten a job on teevee.
As many have said, lots of Never Trumpers started showing up and since they were R their past contributions were to R candidates.
Some may not think that is fair, but most (not all) are still "old school" R in their hearts. A few have "seen the light" but if Liz Cheney were to miraculously become the R nominee for President they would mostly flock to work for her and contribute to her.
I bet if you factored out the Never Trump Rs you would see a better indication of orientation -- they are noise distorting the signal...
Apparently McCrain deleted most of his side of our Twitter conversation.
Pretty good take-down on Drum's part, I think.