In my book, Left Turn, I compute Slant Quotients, or “SQs” for several media outlets.
An SQ of “0” means that the outlet sounds approximately as conservative as a speech by Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) or Jim DeMint (R-S.C.). An SQ of “100” means that the outlet sounds approximately as liberal as a speech by Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) or Barney Frank (D-Mass.)
If the outlet is perfectly centrist, then it has an SQ is 50.4, which, according to my estimates, is the Political Quotient, or PQ, of the average U.S. voter. (Click here to learn more about PQs and, if you desire, to compute your own PQ.)
For more details about how I estimate SQs, click here.
Here I list the Slant Quotients, or SQs, of several media outlets, as well as the SQs of several local newspapers. To compute these SQs, I use the results of a research project by Gentzkow and Shapiro. The latter researchers use “loaded political phrases” to compute the slants of newspapers. (See Chapter 15 of my book, Left Turn, for a summary of their method.) I translate their slant estimates into SQs.
(Specifically, here’s how I translate their slant estimates into SQs. Gentzkow and Shapiro’s estimates answer the following thought experiment: Given the distribution of loaded political phrases that a media outlet reports, if that outlet were a member of Congress, what is the most likely conservativeness of his district — where “conservativeness” means the district’s two-party vote percentage for George W. Bush in 2004? Through a regression analysis, I translate this measure into a Slant Quotient. That is, I alter the thought experiment to ask, “What is the most likely Political Quotient, or PQ, of that would-be member of Congress?”. I define that PQ as the SQ of the outlet.)
Meanwhile, in the upper part of the site (where I report SQs), I list the SQs of several national media outlets. I base these SQs on the method that Professor Jeff Milyo and I developed for our article published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. (Here is a link to the article. I summarize the article, as well as respond to some critiques of the article, in Chapter 13 of Left Turn.) That method uses as its basic data the think tanks that media outlets cited.
In Left Turn I use the above method, plus two other methods to compute SQs. One of the latter two methods is the loaded-phrase method, developed by Gentzkow and Shapiro. The final method notes facts about the Bush tax cuts, and it records whether the news outlet did or did not report the facts.
In general, the media outlets that I examine appear less liberal when judged by the think-tank method than when judged by the other two methods. For instance, as I discuss on pages 175-77 of Left Turn, if you believe that the loaded-phrase method is the most proper of the three methods, then the true SQs of the media outlets are approximately two points higher (i.e. more liberal) than the SQs I report. If you believe that the fact-based method (i.e. the one that examines facts about the Bush tax cuts) is the most proper method, then, as I discuss on pages 185-6 and 197 of Left Turn, the true SQs of the media outlets are approximately 16 points higher than I report.
If you believe that the three methods are equally valid (or equally invalid), then the most accurate SQs are represented by an average of the three methods. This means that the true SQs are approximately six points ( = (2+16)/3 ) higher than I report.
The good folks at Andrew Breitbart’s “Big” web sites (BigGovernment.com, BigJournalism.com, etc.) have asked me to expand my list of SQs—that is, to compute SQs for more news outlets than I computed during the research for my book. Unfortunately, this is a very arduous task, and I do not have the time and resources to do this for more than a few outlets.
Instead, I have created subjective estimates for several additional outlets. The latter estimates follow the basic thought experiment that I adopt when computing the objective, statistical estimates. That is, I note the content of the particular outlet. Next I ask: What if that content were instead a speech by a member of Congress? What is my best guess of the PQ of the would-be member of Congress?
For each subjective estimate, I list the SQ in italics. (Thus, all non-italicized SQs were computed by one of my objective, statistical methods.) Below I give details about how I derive some of the subjective estimates.