First problem with the study: What is the center? If your defined center is actually to the right, then a media outlet that is actually in the center would be defined as to the left. The whole study reports "left" and "right" as if these were in comparison to some objective scale, rather than in comparison to the mean of the US Senate. To establish that this comparison is valid, you'd first have to establish that the mean of the US Senate is the political center, and I see no evidence of that.
Second problem with the study: The person directing it openly criticizes the media outlets being studied:
Quote:
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"A media person would have never done this study," said Groseclose, a UCLA political science professor, whose research and teaching focuses on the U.S. Congress. "It takes a Congress scholar even to think of using ADA scores as a measure. And I don't think many media scholars would have considered comparing news stories to congressional speeches."
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He begins with a bias agains the media and media scholars.
Third problem with the study, and the biggest one:
Quote:
Groseclose and Milyo then directed 21 research assistants — most of them college students — to scour U.S. media coverage of the past 10 years. They tallied the number of times each media outlet referred to think tanks and policy groups, such as the left-leaning NAACP or the right-leaning Heritage Foundation.
Next, they did the same exercise with speeches of U.S. lawmakers. If a media outlet displayed a citation pattern similar to that of a lawmaker, then Groseclose and Milyo's method assigned both a similar ADA score.
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There's so much wrong with this methodology that it boggles the mind.
Congressional speeches are openly political propaganda, opinion pieces, yet they're not compared to opinion pieces, which are actively excluded from the study.
Also, it declares a piece to be similar in political ideology to a speech merely for mentioning the same organizations, without reference to what's being said about them. I'd think that what's being said about something is as important as the fact that it's being talked about.
Problems abound here, to such a degree that I don't see how this study can be considered reliable.
Gilda