Say Anything Blog

In a previous comment thread, some discussion came up over whether the New York Times is liberally biased.  One reader (cough *Mike Adamson* cough) went so far as to suggest that

If you look at liberal blogs such as firedoglake or Eschaton you will find post after post detailing examples of the media supposedly showing anti-liberal bias.

To clarify my original comments, I am singling out the New York TImes for criticism, not the media in general.  And this is why the title to this commentary is “Is the New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?” and not “Are the media liberally biased?”

I felt my response was off-topic enough to deserve a new comment thread.  And really there are two issues here:  Is the paper biased liberally?  And what exactly does “liberal bias” (or another other type of bias) really mean?

To answer the first half of the question, let’s see what the New York Times itself has to say about the topic.

The first New York Times Public Editor, Daniel Okrent, wrote a commentary on this very question, appropriately labeled “Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?” To which his immediate answer is “OF course it is.” He goes on to say:

I’ll get to the politics-and-policy issues this fall...for now my concern is the flammable stuff that ignites the right. These are the social issues: gay rights, gun control, abortion and environmental regulation, among others. And if you think The Times plays it down the middle on any of them, you’ve been reading the paper with your eyes closed.

Then there are media studies such as this one, A Measure of Media Bias. On a scale of 0 to 100, with 15 being a Republican, 50 a Centrist and 85 being Democrat, the New York Times was given a score of 73.7, making it the second most liberal newspaper considered.

In interpreting this study, it’s important to note that what was being studied were news articles and not editorials.  Thus, some newspapers like the Wall Street Journal, may appear somewhat conservative when viewed strictly from the content of editorials, may end up being much more liberal when only the content of newspaper articles are considered.

So yes, I think it’s fair to appropriately label the New York Times as one of the most liberal papers out there.

The second part of the question is what does it mean to be biased, liberally or otherwise?

To answer this, I start with the observation that no organization is strictly monolithic.  Not everybody on in the organization has exactly the same political leanings, so some stories will come out more conservative and others more liberal, and the bias of the article usually tracks with the author(s) of a given article regardless of the mean tendency of the paper.  [There are times, like with the Bush Sr - Clinton campaign, where it is documented that some editors clamped down and refused to run further negative articles about Clinton.  I would argue that these are more the exception than the norm.]

What bias means in practice is that not all articles will have the same bias.  Thus, by selecting for a particular reporter, you can find articles that will be more liberal or more conservative, depending on how that person’s personal views fit in with the organization’s in general.

Finally, you need to factor in that the bias of a paper shifts depending on the current public consensus and other factors such, that is it is just the same thing that affects our individual biases on almost any topic that will from time to time affect a given newspapers net bias.

All of this can be put together probabilistically.  For example, we might say “for a given article in the New York Times, three out of four times one might expect that article to be biased liberally”.

But the bottom line is yes, the New York Times is liberally biased, and what that means in practice is that for the most part the articles you will find in it favor liberals and therefore the Democratic Party in general.

I don’t have any beef with it being a liberal newspaper.  It’s their business how they want to run their paper.  However, there’s a difference between bias and dishonesty. 

When a news article deliberately mischaracterizes the contents of a memo in order to shape public opinion (as I feel they have done on a number of times in the past), they are doing a disservice to their readers.  And when this mischaracterization affects national policy, then it is a disservice to the nation as a whole.