Media Bias Project Still Awaiting Report from Challenger
Two weeks have now passed since my favourite reader, “rory,” announced that he was drawing up a list that would prove that my Media Bias project is full of holes. The Media Bias project looks at the op-ed pages of major English newspapers across the country. It started up last year, and it has consistently found that Conservatives and business groups get far more privileged access to the papers than progressives, liberals, or, for that matter, even social and neo-conservatives.
Rory still hasn’t supplied his report to me, but in the meantime, the Media Bias project continues to gather data. Here’s how April 2012 looked, from the perspective of the op-ed pages of 20 leading newspapers:
Business groups include actual trade associations as well as free market think tanks like the Fraser Institute. Social conservatives include other conservative groups, ranging from Civitas to Cardus. I draw the “progressive” category as widely as possible, to include everything from unions to environmentalists, mainly because I don’t expect it to come out on top even with such a broad definition. And, it seems, I was correct in that expectation.
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Jymn
I’m actually surprised that Progressive came out so high. Surely The Star and Chronicle-Herald don’t hold that much sway. Then I remembered that April featured McMaher and a media suddenly less than enamoured with Harper’s secrecy.
I guess we’ll have to wait for rory to set us all straight.
Sixth Estate
The Progressive count is buoyed by the fact that it includes a number of international development groups.
Bruce
I’d also suggest that the Progressive count is high because of the ‘s/he said – s/he said journalism’ tripe that passes for fair & balanced reporting. Instead of being able to rely on logical argumentation to show the folly of something, there seems a requirement to make passing reference, at least, to the ‘other side.’ I suspect that this is a reason for your April results.
Great work!
Sixth Estate
Not in this case. This is simply a count of who gets on the editorial pages, and there is relatively little of what you describe there.
That is the standard method of journalism for news writing these days, though, yes.
jen
I’m not surprised that Business and Conservative came out the highest. The Vancouver Sun will rarely print opinions that are critical of the BC Liberal Party (which is neo-liberal in their actions…more like the federal Conservatives) and will actually print opinions that are blatantly biased in their favour.
For example, in the current BC Teacher’s dispute, voices that are against the teachers are frequently printed while the teachers and other supporters are not. The BC Liberals are leaning towards privatizing the public education system with their underfunding and policies that undermine the public education system; yet voices to try to prevent this are silenced.
I know because I have written to them several times, to no avail. I know of others who have written to them as well.
Thank you for doing this project. Now the issue is, how do we get the general public to realize that the mass media in Canada is controlling the message (i.e. propaganda) that everyone sees, as a result of only a few huge media conglomerates owning most of the newspapers, TV and radio stations?
This is extremely frustrating. We are fighting a losing battle to get messages heard.
In our case, the rich will get richer, and the poor get poorer, since a decent education will only be for those who can afford it. (The BC Liberal policies are similar to what happened in the USA, Australia, and the UK…whose public education systems are now decimated as a result. If this could be highlighted through some real investigative reporting, people would realize what we are trying to protect…a decent public education system for all.)
What will you do with your results after you are finished your project? I hope there is a way to shine the spotlight on the media conglomerates so people can start to question their bias. Otherwise, I think Canadians as a whole lose out.
Sixth Estate
Jen — Several people have asked that question, and I’m not sure yet. To be honest this IS what I want to do with the results: put them out there, where people can see them.
The professional media is in a double bind: they need to kowtow to political and economic elites to maintain advertising, and steadily dwindling advertising streams mean they have less resources to devote to competent investigative reporting even when they want to. (For an example of incompetent journalism, see the recent headlines created by the CP’s bogus numbers on Parliamentary secrecy… media fact-checking at its absolute worst).
With sufficient effort, bloggers could provide a credible alternative to media. It will never be as good as the media would be, but if the newspapers are going to ditch investigative reporting in favour of endless republishing of the CP/AP/Reuters newswires plus a few pages of tedious editorial garbage, well, we can provide that too. People can access this blog as easily as they can access the Vancouver Sun website. The problem is coordination. There are too many disconnected bloggers all writing one or two stories a day.
Sixth Estate
Oh — one further thing. The project doesn’t really have an end date as yet… so, not really a question of what to do once I’m “finished.” I’ll have another major update in a few days, at the beginning of June.
jen
Thanks for your response, and all of your hard work! Let me know how we can spread the word. In the meantime, I will let others know about your blog. We need to get more Canadians out there questioning the mass media message.
Next, we need a way of getting the right information out there…the other point of view that the mass media ignores. I agree with you…there needs to be a more centralized medium for this, as separate blogs are definitely too disjointed. However, my day job keeps me busy enough…we need someone (perhaps a smaller media outlet?) to take this on!
Do you have any ideas how all the various voices could be represented?
Sixth Estate
Not really sure. Bloggers are pretty fiercely independent.
There are some blog aggregators out there, but they really don’t serve much purpose for people outside of a particular online community, they don’t have enough editorial control to present a few headline stories for people who really want quick-to-digest news, and they tend to have explicit political stances (for instance, I am listed on the progressive blog aggregator, and not on the conservative one. I’m contemplating submitting myself for a listing on the conservative one, just to see what happens, because I’m not really a progressive in terms of my politics but that’s the only place I fit at the moment.)
It’s not hard to imagine the general process that would be needed in order to get bloggers from a variety of perspectives, plus some people who just like reading and organizing content, that would put together a pretty decent news site that brought together content from a diverse assortment of blogs, plus traditional newswires, etc. A site called iPolitics is putting together a decent online news source as we speak, although unfortunately it looks like they’re going to move to a pay-for-access model.
The paywall scheme which all the papers are moving towards is a problem. On the one hand, I get that they need the revenue. On the other hand, people are now accustomed not to paying for information online, and there will always be more than enough news online that they won’t HAVE to pay for it. But then you get trapped into what sort of content is made available for free or for very cheap by well-paid professionals: opinion pieces rather than the hard work of investigative journalism, and hack jobs from groups like the Fraser Institute, which pay their own salaries.
The fact that we still have a large political blogging community is an indication that we could put together something pretty decent at very low cost, if people were willing to work together on it. How to inspire people to do that, and how to organize people so that everyone would be comfortable with the inevitable editorial decisions that would have to be made in terms of organizing and privileging content, I really have no idea.
I’m as open to being part of a solution as anyone, but so far I have to say I haven’t really been part of a solution.
jen
What about making your results available to an independent paper, such as The Georgia Straight (in Vancouver…there must be others in the other cities) that do some investigative reporting? Maybe they would print your results, with a story around it.
Perhaps they would not mind shedding some light on the big conglomerates that are controlling their market…
Just an idea…although I know there could be other factors that I am not aware of…so whether it would actually work or not, I don’t know. This is not my area of expertise.