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Thus, at standard levels of statistical significance, in this case, the scores of the Drudge

Report and ABC World News Tonight are not significantly different. Similar

calculations show that Fox News’ Special Report is significantly closer to the center than

all media outlets except the Drudge Report. Other calculations show that NBC Nightly

News does not significantly differs from CBS Evening News at a 5% confidence level,

but it does at a 10% confidence level.

Discussion

We believe that the most innovative and important aspect of our method is our

idea to compare news stories with congressional speeches. First, this allows one to

provide a baseline for how liberal or conservative a media outlet is. Some previous

studies have only tried to determine if a news outlet gave equal coverage to each side of

an issue or gave equal treatment to two opposing politicians running for the same office.

However, depending on the issue, a media outlet could give equal treatment to both sides,

yet still be biased because of the issues it selects. For instance, suppose the issue is

whether to make “day-after” abortion pills, like RU-486, illegal. Only the most ardent

conservatives favor this position. Equal treatment would mean that the story had a

conservative slant. Likewise, if a reporter gave equal treatment to the question of

allowing partial-birth abortions, he or she would slant the story in the conservative

direction. Further, depending on the candidates, equal coverage of the candidates could

imply a bias. To see this, imagine David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan,

were running against a moderate Democrat. If news story gave equal coverage to the two

candidates, this would be a right-wing bias. In contrast, if a researcher applies his or her

method to congressional speeches, as well as news stories, this gives a baseline for

determining how liberal or conservative is the news story. Namely, he or she can report

how the media outlet compared to the center of Congress, the average Democrat, the

average Republican, etc.

Second, our idea helps researchers to discover when they have found a false

negative result. For example, several researchers have conducted tests which conclude

that there is no bias in the U.S. news media. (Xx, xx, xx.) Some of these tests strike us

as extremely weak—tests which could lead one to conclude no bias when a bias really

exists. It is similar to a doctor saying “Your hair looks fine, therefore you must be well,”

without examining the patient’s nose, throat, blood pressure, etc. One could expose the

doctor’s faulty treatment if he or she asked the doctor to perform the same examination

on a patient who is known to be ill. We can apply a similar example to media research.

Suppose that a researcher applied his or her method to the speeches of Ted Kennedy and

concluded that Ted Kennedy does not have a liberal bias. This, we believe, would reveal

a problem with that method.

We think it is important for researchers of media bias to apply their method to

speeches of members of Congress. Further, if a researcher uses a method that cannot be

applied to congressional speeches, we caution that this is a weakness of the method. It