BOOK REVIEW: ‘Left Turn: How Media Bias Distorts The American Mind’ --Media bias gives dems an 8 to 10 pt advantage

By Brent Bozel III, Sep. 12, 2011, Special to The Washington Times

I lost my television debate virginity to Tom Braden, the old curmudgeon liberal counterpart to Pat Buchanan, on the original CNN“Crossfire” series. His first question was a haymaker: “Who the hell do you think you are passing judgment on journalists?” he snarled. Little did I know this was the official Denial Excuse No. 12 in an endless litany of media denials of what everyone knows, but only they continue to deny: The “news” media are drowning in a liberal political bias. Enter into the fray UCLA professor Tim Groseclose with “Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind,” with a new methodology to measure that bias.

I confess that at the outset I wasn’t too keen about doing this review. The Media Research Center, which I head, has conducted more studies on this subject than any other institution on the planet over the past quarter-century, so I turned to the “Left Turn” index out of curiosity to see which ones were chosen for citation. (Clear throat here: Ahem.) Not a one. Worse, where the index cites the MRC, in one instance it misidentifies the group; and in the other, allegedly over three pages, it’s a phantom citation - the MRC isn’t there at all. But I had agreed to review this book, so I read it. On the whole, I liked it.

Mr. Groseclose argues that one can measure liberal media bias through objective and quantitative statistical analysis, that “every [emphasis his] mainstream national news outlet in the United States has a liberal bias,” that out of more than 100 major news outlets studied, only a handful lean to the right and none of the supposedly conservative news outlets is far right.

There is a whole lot of math going on here, and some of the statistical jargon is pure mumbo-jumbo that the layman just must accept, (“To find the pseudo intercept rendezvous parameters b, k and the radial distance d between circular orbits,” “endogeneity problems” and the like), so out of necessity, I will simplify (and the author might well accuse me of oversimplifying). Mr. Groseclose first introduces us to the “PQ” analysis, the “political quotient” that measures the degree to which a person is liberal.

Mr. Groseclose measures the PQs of members of Congress by studying their roll-call votes; for others, he offers a self-testing series of questions. Rep. Michele Bachmann (minus 4.1) and Sen. Jim DeMint (4.8) are on one end and Rep. Barney Frank (103.8) and Ronald V. Dellums (107.4) fall on the other. Next, the author conducts the “SQ” analysis, measuring the “slant quotient” of media outlets based on their source material, i.e., which policy think tanks they turn to for their citations. Thus, the author concludes that the New York Times has a 74 SQ, on par with the 74 PQ of Sen. Joe Lieberman, Connecticut independent.

Later in the book, Mr. Groseclose introduces another measuring device, estimating the bias based on an analysis of the facts reported about certain issues, when there are facts supporting both the liberal and conservative position

Read the full review:  www.washingtontimes.com

"Left Turn" is available on Amazon.com

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