Left Turn
How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind
Tim Groseclose
St. Martin’s Press, 7/9/2011 ISBN: 978-0-312-55593-1,
ISBN10: 0-312-55593-8, 5 1/2 x 8-1/4 inches, 304 pages
You’ve heard the accusations from both the Left and the Right. The lamestream media is in the tank for the Progressives! Fox News is a propaganda tool for the GOP! MSNBC is a cheerleader for the Radical Left! But wouldn’t you like to be able to tell the difference between bias and the truth? Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to use accepted, scientific techniques to determine, once and for all, who leans left and who leans right – and by how much? Well now you can.
Dr. Tim Groseclose, a professor of political science and economics at UCLA, has spent years constructing precise, quantitative measures of the slants of media outlets. He does this by measuring the political content of news and converting that content into an SQ, or “slant quotient,” of the outlet. To determine bias, he compares SQs of news outlets to the PQs, or “political quotients,” of voters and politicians.
Among his conclusions are (i) all mainstream media outlets have a liberal bias, and (ii) while some supposedly conservative outlets—such as the Washington Times or Fox News Special Report—do lean right, their conservative bias is less than the liberal bias of most mainstream outlets. Agree or disagree with his findings, it’s a lively and fascinating read into the world of fact versus opinion, and reality versus spin.