Liberal Media Bias: Another Right Wing Myth

As they sought to cement their dictatorship in 1930's Germany the Nazis routinely sought to create public distrust toward any media outlets critical of the Nazi agenda and tactics.  Ultimately, they sought to shutdown any outlets not disseminating the Nazi propaganda line and, of course, sought to ban and destroy books that ran counter to the Nazi myth of the Aryan race and anti-Jewish rhetoric.  Fast forward to America today and one sees a similar tactics on the political right where anything countering the Christofascist/Republican talking points is labeled as "fake news," book banning is supported and one hears endless shrieks of "liberal media bias."   In reality, studies have confirmed it is Fox News and its imitators that are the true source of bias  in the media as outright lies - think Fox's $787 million defamation with Dominion Voting Systems - and revisionist history and rewriting of events are the norm.  Meanwhile, the mainstream media that the right accuses of bias all too often engages in false equivalency and/or fails to call out lies and untruths of Republican politicians and self-styled right wing "Christian" leaders.   A piece in Salon looks at the myth of liberal media bias.  Here are excerpts:

Allegations of media bias are ubiquitous among Republicans. When Donald Trump was asked in June about the federal prosecution against him for illegally retaining classified government documents, he attacked the "fake news" media for their "continuation of the witch hunt" against him "that's been going on for literally seven years." 

Such attacks are hardly new for Trump, who in May reportedly became angry with questions from NBC News reporter Vaughn Hillyard about Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's criminal investigation, tried to grab Hillyard's phone and then told aides to "get him outta here." 

The assault on press freedom is also nothing new for the Republican Party. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, now a presidential candidate, recently endorsed a legislative effort to curtail press freedom by designating anonymous news sources as "false" for legal purposes in defamation cases and eliminating the "journalist's privilege" protection, which shields reporters from having to identify anonymous sources in defamation lawsuits. 

Not to be outdone, Trump weighed in on the question of how to punish journalists, suggesting that reporters who published the leaked Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade should be prosecuted, incarcerated and then raped in prison.

These developments are part of a larger right-wing assault on media freedom and the right of journalists to critically report the news. These attacks are driven by the assumption that the media has a liberal bias, and is responsible for routinely purveying "fake news" and systematically manipulating the public as a result. 

The response from much of the public, including the GOP base, is what one would expect, with rising distrust of the news media. Recent polling finds a majority of Americans agree that "the news media fuels political division," with 61 percent of Republicans, 36 percent of independents and 23 percent of Democrats agreeing that the media are "hurting democracy." Half of Americans think that national news outlets "intend to mislead, misinform, or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting."

These narratives warning of media manipulation and pernicious liberal bias can create a separate reality for much of the public, independent of whether there is evidence of any such pervasive bias in media content and effects. As a scholar of political communication, I've spent the last 20 years studying the question of media bias in politics. My own scholarly work, looking at decades of reporting on various public policy issues, has uncovered little evidence historically of a pervasive liberal or pro-Democratic bias in the news.

As reporters themselves acknowledge, and as I find in my research, it is more accurate to speak of a pro-official bias in the news, in which reporters privilege whatever party is in power in Washington at a given time. None of this evidence necessarily matters, however, when the prevailing narrative in American political culture — particularly among Republican officials, right-wing pundits and much of the public — is that the media is purveying biased "fake news."

[I]t's worth looking at the facts. For example, in my own research examining more than 160 polling questions between the mid-2000s and the mid-2010s, I found virtually no evidence of liberal media effects for consumption of various outlets such as CNN and MSNBC, which are commonly attacked for their purported bias. 

Consumption of news MSNBC only had a significant association with liberal political attitudes on various questions 15 percent of the time, and this was true just 10 percent of the time for CNN. Rather, the primary culprit when it came to indoctrination effects was Fox News, with consumption of that channel's news significantly associated with holding right-wing beliefs 60 percent of the time, even after controlling for respondents' partisanship and ideology, among other factors.

I updated my polling analysis to include the years of Trump's presidency — and the findings largely reinforce my previous research. Although there is certainly evidence of increasing polarization "on both sides," such polarization is still primarily a right-wing phenomenon, testifying to highly asymmetrical media effects that appear to favor GOP indoctrination efforts. 

[T]here is definitely reason for concern about "both sides" when it comes to the rise of echo chambers in American media. Clearly. liberals and Democrats are gravitating toward certain news sources, and conservatives and Republicans toward others.  . . . . None of these trends are encouraging in a country that considers itself a democracy — at least if democracy requires an informed citizenry willing to consider different sources of information and views contrary to those they already hold.

Beyond the echo-chamber question, there's the matter of whether consuming these venues has an indoctrination effect on viewers. Here, the evidence suggests that Americans should primarily be concerned about the power of right-wing outlets like Fox News.

What we see here, in fact, is dramatic evidence of partisan indoctrination in the news — and it's primarily a right-wing phenomenon. In just four of the 20 survey questions was consumption of CNN associated with forming liberal political attitudes, after statistically taking into account viewers' partisan and ideological predispositions. The findings are stronger for MSNBC, with consumption associated with holding liberal attitudes for nine of the 20 questions. This is certainly evidence of indoctrination in favor of liberal values, significantly more than I found in the previous decade.

But far and away the strongest evidence of indoctrination is observed among consumers of conservative media. Consumption of Fox News was associated with holding conservative opinions an overwhelming 90 percent of the time — in 18 of the 20 questions surveyed. This is a far higher rate than during the decade preceding Trump, when Fox News viewership was correlated with forming conservative attitudes 60 percent of the time. These results tell us that partisan indoctrination has become overwhelmingly asymmetrical in the Trump era.

The evidence explored here calls into question Republican claims that the "liberal media" is the leading indoctrination force in American politics and communication today. That role is reserved for the GOP's primary arm of mass communication, Fox News, which is crucial in mobilizing the party base to support conservative political causes. 

But we shouldn't only be concerned about indoctrination. There's also the question of rising support for authoritarianism, and of public outrage being stoked against specific media outlets seen as overly critical of Trump. That rising anger is what fuels the Republican attack on press freedom, an assault that should be deeply concerning to anyone with a basic commitment to freedom of expression and constitutional democracy.