About That Liberal Press Thing

Couldn't remember if I'd posted the graphic when it came out, so just in case I missed it, here it is.

And BTW, this isn't some kind of outlier.  The basics that lead to these results don't ever change more than a few percentage points.

I remember Pew doing the same thing after the 2000 election, when the heat was really on - seemed like the nutters couldn't stop howling about how the press was constantly trying to put Gore in the White House.  Well, guess what, boys and girls?  Pew's research in 2001 showed a bias in favor of Bush positives and Gore negatives in every major newspaper - it all worked out to be something like 7-5 against Gore.  And of course it got practically no play outside of Academe.

Guess what else?  The effect this slanted coverage has on our thinking actually has a name: "Media Priming", and while it's news to me, it's been around for a very long time.

Here's a fun little appetizer from Melissa Dahl at msnbc.com:

It's called media priming -- the idea that the things we watch or listen to or read influence our emotions and our behavior, perhaps more than we realize. This particular study may be the first to use fictional characters in a narrative to show an effect on people's cognitive performance, says lead author Markus Appel, a psychologist at Austria's University of Linz.

And from a guy named Scott London, a good breakdown of "Framing":

In his book Is Anyone Responsible?, Shanto Iyengar evaluates the framing effects of television news on political issues. Through a series of laboratory experiments (reports of which constitute the core of the book), he finds that the framing of issues by television news shapes the way the public understands the causes of and the solutions to central political problems.

Since electoral accountability is the foundation of representative democracy, the public must be able to establish who is responsible for social problems, Iyengar argues. Yet the news media systematically filter the issues and deflect blame from the establishment by framing the news as "only a passing parade of specific events, a 'context of no context.'"

--more--

In their 1977 book, The Emergence of American Political Issues, McCombs and Shaw argued that the most important effect of the mass media was "its ability to mentally order and organize our world for us." The news media "may not be successful in telling us what to think," the authors declared, "but they are stunningly successful in telling us what to think about."

There are no accidents when it comes to what goes on in our politics.  It's being carefully scripted for us, and we have to find ways to countervail it.