Media Bias? A Comparative Study of Time, Newsweek, the National Review, and the Progressive Coverage of Domestic Social Issues, 1975-2000. Tawnya J. Adkins Covert and Philo C. Wasburn. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009. 182 pp.
Sociologists Philo Wasburn (Purdue University) and Tawnya Covert (Western Illinois University) have selected four long-standing domestic issues about which opinion ranges between positions commonly thought of as “conservative” and “liberal”—crime, the environment, gender, and poverty. In this study, media coverage that tends towards either one of these positions constitutes “bias.” More specifically, bias is defined as “a consistent tendency to provide more support to one of the contending parties, policies, or points of view in a sustained conflict over a social issue.” The authors examine the extent to which coverage over time is “biased” in Time and Newsweek, which they hold to represent the “mainstream media,” and in two overtly partisan publications, The National Review and The Progressive.
Bias is measured in terms of sources of information and opinion; the costs that the publications maintain are incurred by any given social problem, the causes cited for it, and the solutions proposed. The authors examined every article between 1975 and 2000 of at least one page in length that dealt with the selected issues. Scores for conservative or liberal bias were computed on the basis of the four indicators (sources, costs, causes, and solutions); stories that contained fewer than three of the four indicators were excluded from the analysis. Sources were coded as conservative or liberal only if their cited statements or their affiliated organization’s official position “explicitly reflected a partisan stance.”
There were several surprises. Overall, poverty received least coverage by the four magazines, and environment was covered the most. The National Review devoted a higher proportion of its articles to the issue of poverty than any of the other magazines. The authors found that Time and Newsweek were significantly more “balanced” than their partisan counterparts (although “balance” could be achieved by rough parity between liberal and conservative positions). Nearly all articles published in the partisan publications contained some measure of bias, and these two magazines demonstrated a nearly identical level of bias.
All four magazines were remarkably consistent over the twenty-five years studied. The greatest variation was found in the case of The National Review in the category of crime; the magazine’s 1990s espousal of drug decriminalization produced a bifurcation along this measure. Newsweek was found to have been biased in a conservative direction in its crime coverage; Time’s coverage of gender was the only instance where its bias score, in a liberal direction, lay far outside its predominantly “balanced” range. Of all stories examined, more than one-third failed to discuss potential solutions. Overall, Time and Newsweek were “centrist.” Official sources accounted for a relatively modest one-quarter of all stories cited by the partisan magazines. Such sources were frequently not the “primary definers” of social issues in these magazines, which cited them much less extensively than mainstream publications. Official sources were used more often by The Progressive than by The National Review.
The authors consider that Time and Newsweek consistently informed the public by providing relatively unbiased accounts of important social issues and, in this way, supporting democracy. Of its “biased” articles, Time was more likely to express liberal than conservative bias, while one-third of Newsweek articles were classified as conservative. Bias in The National Review and The Progressive was strong, and moved in the anticipated ideological directions. Each partisan publication “consistently provided information supporting one side of the public debates…thereby turning these concerns into political issues to be resolved by the public and their representative political elites through democratic processes.”
The authors identify a number of functions of bias (without as full a consideration of potential dysfunctions): “balanced” coverage may not be in the public interest if one side to the debate is based on fallacious argument and evidence; bias may lead some readers to reconsider their previous positions; bias may produce greater clarity and certainty of existing beliefs when these are exposed to the alternatives; bias can represent the views of those who lack the social resources and ability to define social issues for the mass public; bias can promote social unity by presenting definitions of social issues that, as a result of their bias, correspond to the perspectives on those uses that are widely held by the public. In other words, if the general public is itself biased, then biased reporting may help to create social unity—a problematic argument, particularly if the general public is very poorly informed, malicious, or stupid. The authors find little evidence to support the “Liberal Media” thesis.
As the authors themselves anticipate, there is scope for objection to choice of Time and Newsweek as representative of “mainstream media,” not just because of falling circulations, but because they are weekly, printed publications. Their character and methods are significantly different from nationally distributed daily newspapers and, of course, from broadcast and online media. But their use as points of comparison with journals of political opinion is original and insightful.
The choice of issues unfortunately leaves out war, foreign policy, and health, which have been among the most controversial areas of imputed media bias. As the authors acknowledge, the study does not attempt to include arguments that have been excluded. Since a great deal of bias is achieved through marginalization and exclusion of evidence and perspectives (as was seen in the run-up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003) this is a significant problem. Such limitations notwithstanding, this study of media bias is a thorough, transparent analysis based on rigorous methodology and it yields useful findings.
Oliver Boyd-Barrett
Bowling Green State University