Wow, Some here have claimed theat Fox News is Biased. However, a new UCLA (a very liberal college) study shows the opposite...... (edited for size)
A Measure of Media Bias
Tim Groseclose
Department of Political Science, UCLA, and
Graduate School of Business, Stanford University
Jeff Milyo
Harris School of Public Policy
University of Chicago
September 2003
We are grateful for the research assistance by Aviva Aminova, Jose Bustos, Anya Byers, Evan Davidson, Kristina Doan, Wesley Hussey, David Lee, Pauline Mena, Orges Obeqiri, Byrne Offut, Matt Patterson, David Primo, Darryl Reeves, Susie Rieniets, Tom Rosholt, Michael Uy, Michael Visconti, Margaret Vo, Rachel Ward, and Andrew Wright. Also, we are grateful for comments by Mark Crain, Tim Groeling, Wesley Hussey, Chap Lawson, Jeff Lewis, and Barry Weingast.
A Measure of Media Bias
?The editors in Los Angeles killed the story. They told Witcover that it didn?t ?come off? and that it was an ?opinion? story. ?The solution was simple, they told him. All he had to do was get other people to make the same points and draw the same conclusions and then write the article in their words.? (emphasis in original) Timothy Crouse, Boys on the Bus, 1973, p. 116.
Do the major media outlets in the U.S. have a liberal bias? Few questions evoke stronger opinions, and we cannot think of a more important question to which objective statistical techniques can lend their service. So far, the debate has largely been one of anecdotes (?How can CBS News be balanced when it calls Steve Forbes? tax plan ?wacky???) and untested theories (?if the news industry is a competitive market, then how can media outlets be systematically biased??).
Few studies provide an objective measure of the slant of news, and none has provided a way to link such a measure to ideological measures of other political actors. That is, none of the existing measures can say, for example, whether the New York Times is more liberal than Tom Daschle or whether Fox News is more conservative than Bill Frist. We provide such a measure. Namely, we compute an ADA score for various news outlets, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the Drudge Report, Fox News? Special Report, and all three networks? nightly news shows.
Our results show a very significant liberal bias. All of the news outlets except Fox News? Special Report received a score to the left of the average member of Congress. Moreover, by one of our measures all but three of these media outlets (Special Report, the Drudge Report, and ABC?s World News Tonight) were closer to the average Democrat in Congress than to the median member of the House of Representatives. One of our measures found that the Drudge Report is the most centrist of all media outlets in our sample. Our other measure found that Fox News? Special Report is the most centrist. These findings refer strictly to the news stories of the outlets. That is, we omitted editorials, book reviews, and letters to the editor from our sample.
To compute our measure, we count the times that a media outlet cites various think tanks. We compare this with the times that members of Congress cite the same think tanks in their speeches on the floor of the House and Senate. By comparing the citation patterns we can construct an ADA score for each media outlet.
As a simplified example, imagine that there were only two think tanks, one liberal and one conservative. Suppose that the New York Times cited the liberal think tank twice as often as the conservative one. Our method asks: What is the estimated ADA score of a member of Congress who exhibits the same frequency (2:1) in his or her speeches? This is the score that our method would assign to the New York Times.
A feature of our method is that it does not require us to make a subjective assessment of how liberal or conservative a think tank is. That is, for instance, we do we need to read policy reports of the think tank or analyze its position on various issues to determine its ideology. Instead, we simply observe the ADA scores of the members of Congress who cite the think tank. This feature is important, since an active controversy exists whether, e.g., the Brookings Institution or the RAND Corporation is moderate, left-wing, or right-wing.
The web site, www.wheretodoresearch.com lists 200 of the most prominent think tanks in the U.S. Using the official web site of Congress, http://thomas.loc.gov, we and our research assistants searched the Congressional Record for instances where a member of Congress cited one of these think tanks. We looked for instances where the legislator cited a view or a fact stated by a member of the think tank. We then counted the sentences in the citation. We also recorded the average adjusted ADA score of the member who cited the think tank.3
Along with direct quotes, we sometimes included sentences that were not direct quotes. For instance, many of the citations were cases where a member of Congress noted ?This bill is supported by think tank X.? Also, members of Congress sometimes insert printed material ?into the Record,? such as a letter, a newspaper article, or a report. If a think tank was cited in such material or if a think tank member wrote the material, we counted it just as if the member of Congress had read the material in his or her speech.
We did the same exercise for stories that media outlets report, except with media outlets we did not record an ADA score. Instead, our method estimates such a score.
Sometimes a legislator or a media outlet noted an action that a think tank had taken?e.g. that it raised a certain amount of money, initiated a boycott, filed a lawsuit, elected new officers, or held its annual convention. We did not record such cases in our data set. However, sometimes in the process of describing such actions, the reporter or member of Congress would quote a member of the think tank, and the quote revealed the think tank?s views on national policy, or the quote stated a fact that is relevant to national policy. If so, we would record that quote in our data set. For instance, suppose a reporter noted ?The NAACP has asked its members to boycott businesses in the state of South Carolina. `We are initiating this boycott, because we believe that it is racist to fly the Confederate Flag on the state capitol,? a leader of the group noted.? In this instance, we would count the second sentence that the reporter wrote, but not the first.
Also, we omitted the instances where the member of Congress or journalist only cited the think tank so he or she could criticize it or explain why it was wrong. About five percent of the congressional citations and about one percent of the media citations fell into this category.
In the same spirit, we omitted cases where a journalist or legislator gave an ideological label to a think tank (e.g. ?Even the left-wing Urban Institute favors this bill.?). The idea is that we only wanted cases were the legislator or journalist cited the think tank as if it were a disinterested expert on the topic at hand. About two percent of the congressional citations and about five percent of the media citations fell into this category.4
For the congressional data, we coded all citations that occurred during the period Jan. 1, 1993 to December 31, 2002. This covered the 103rd thru 107th Congresses. We calculated the average adjusted ADA score for each member of Congress over the period 1993 to 1999.5
As noted earlier, the media data does not include editorials, letters to the editor, or book reviews. That is, all of our results express the bias of news reporting of media outlets and not, e.g., the editorial pages of newspapers and magazines.
In Table 1 we list the 20 think tanks that are most commonly cited in Congress. The third column of the table lists the average adjusted ADA score of the members who cited the think tank, where this average is weighted by the number of sentences that the legislator cited. The fourth column lists the average score weighted by citations. It is an open question whether the proper level of observation is a sentence or a citation. That is, for instance, if a journalist cites five sentences from the Economic Policy Institute in one story, it is unclear whether this demonstrates the same liberal bias as citing one sentence from the Economic Policy Institute in five separate stories. As a consequence, we report all of our analyses for both levels of observation, sentences and citations.
As a comparison, in Table 2 we list the mean and median adjusted ADA scores of members of Congress for the period that we analyze. The average scores for the House and Senate were respectively 44.5 and 40.0. We calculated these by taking the average adjusted score for each year. Then, for the seven-year period for which we recorded adjusted scores (1993-1999), we calculated the average over these years. We did the same calculation for the median of the House and Senate. These were respectively 39.0 and 36.9.
Table 3 lists the average adjusted ADA score of some well-known moderate members of Congress. It includes the scores of the most conservative Democrat in our sample, Nathan Deal (Ga.), and the most liberal Republican in our sample, Constance Morella (Md.). Although Nathan Deal became a Republican in 1995, the score that we list in the table is calculated only from his years as a Democrat.6
The tables shed some light on some much debated topics about the ideological position of various think tanks. First, the table reveals that the position of the Brookings Institution clearly leans left. When we use sentences as our level of observation, the average score of legislators citing Brookings is 50.0, and when we use citations, the average score is 46.2. In contrast, the average score of the House, 44.5, and the average score of the Senate, 40.0, are both more right wing than the average legislator citing Brookings.7
Second, contrary to conventional wisdom, the RAND Corporation is fairly liberal. The adjusted ADA score of the average legislator citing it is 53.6, using sentences as the level of observation, and 52.6, using citations as the level of observation. This is significantly to the left of the center of Congress, although not as far left as, say, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Children?s Defense Fund, or the Economic Policy Institute. We mentioned this finding to some members of RAND, who told us they were not surprised. While RAND strives to be middle-of-the-road ideologically, the more conservative scholars at RAND tend to work on military studies, while the more liberal scholars tend to work on domestic studies. Because the military studies are sometimes classified and often more mundane than the domestic studies, the media and members of Congress tend to cite the domestic studies disproportionately. As a consequence, RAND appears liberal when judged by these citations. It is important to note that this fact?that the scholars at RAND are more conservative than the numbers in Table 1 suggest?will not cause a bias to our results. To see this, think of RAND as two think tanks: RAND I, the left-leaning think tank which produces the research that the media and members of Congress like to cite, and RAND II, the conservative think tank which produces the research that they do not like to cite. Our results exclude RAND II from the analysis. This causes no more bias than excluding any other think tank that is rarely cited in Congress or the media.
Perhaps the biggest surprise of Table 1 is the average score for the ACLU. Weighted by citations, the average score, is 42.66, which is near the center of congressional scores. Weighted by sentences, the average score is 34.99, which is to the right of the average member of Congress. The primary reason that the ACLU appears so conservative is that it opposed the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance bill. Consequently, conservatives tended to cite this fact often. Indeed, slightly more than half of the ACLU sentences cited in Congress were due to one person, Mitch McConnell (R.-Kt.), who strongly opposed the McCain-Feingold bill. If we omit ACLU citations that are due to McConnell, then the average score, weighted by sentences, increases to 70.12. Because of this anomaly, in the Appendix we report the results when repeat all of our analyses but omit the ACLU data. This causes the average score of the media outlets to become approximately one ?? point more liberal.
Because, at times, there is some subjectivity in coding our data, when we hired our research assistants we asked for whom they had voted in the last presidential election (or for whom they would have voted if they did not vote or if they voted for a candidate besides Bush or Gore). We chose research assistants so that approximately half our data was coded by Gore supporters and half by Bush supporters. We, the authors, did very little of the congressional coding, and we did none of the media coding. For each media outlet we assigned research assistants so that approximately half of the data was coded by a Gore supporter and half by a Bush supporter.
Finally, for each media outlet we selected an observation period for the data that we estimated would yield at least 1200 sentences of data. Because there is less data to collect for magazines and television shows (e.g. a transcript for a 30-minute show contains only a small fraction of the sentences that are contained in a daily newspaper), we collected all the dates that were available in Lexis-Nexis for these two forms of media.
Descriptive Statistics
We use a fairly complex method to estimate ADA scores for media outlets?it involves maximizing a likelihood function that is similar to a multinomial logit. However, some simple descriptive statistics generate the same general conclusions.
Like we did in Table 1, for the remaining think tanks in our sample we computed the average adjusted ADA score of the legislators who cited them. Next, we split the think tanks into a liberal group and a conservative group, based upon whether the average score of legislators citing the think tank was above or below 42.2, the midpoint of the House and Senate averages.8
In Table 4 we list how frequently members of Congress cite the conservative and liberal groups, based upon total sentences. The entire Congress cited the two groups of think tanks approximately evenly. Specifically, of the total sentences that members of Congress cited, 43.1% were from the liberal group. As expected, if we confine our analysis only to Republican members of Congress, then we find that they cite the liberal think tanks less frequently than the entire Congress. Specifically, they cited think tanks from the liberal group, 16.6% of the time. Finally, of the total sentences that the Democrats cited, 81.5% were from the liberal group.
We do a similar analysis with media outlets and list the results in Table 5. Specifically, for each media outlet we list the percentage of sentences that it cited from the liberal group of think tanks. From this percentage, we can compute a back-of-the-envelope estimate of the media outlet?s adjusted ADA score. For instance, note that of the total sentences that the L.A. Times cited from the two groups, 63.5% were from the liberal group. Note that this percentage is approximately halfway between the percentage for the Democrats (81.5) and the percentage for the entire Congress (43.1). Consequently, the back-of-the-envelope estimate for USA Today should be about halfway between the adjusted ADA scores of the average Democrat and the average of Congress. This procedure is illustrated in Figure 1. More specific, the L.A. Times? percentage was 53.1% of the distance between the percentages for the average of Congress and the average Democrat. Accordingly, we assign an adjusted ADA score which is 53.1% of the distance between 42.2 and 74.1, the scores of the average of Congress and the average Democrat. As Figure 1 illustrates, this analysis assumes that there is a linear relationship between the citation pattern of a media outlet and its adjusted ADA score. However, the analysis allows the slope to differ according to whether the media outlet is to the left or right of the center of Congress. Table 5 lists the back-of-the-envelope scores for the other media outlets. Figure 2 illustrates how these scores compare to various members of Congress.
We repeat this analysis in Tables 6 and 7. However, here the level of observation that we use is the citation, not the sentence.
The Estimation Method
The back-of-the-envelope estimates are less than optimal for at least three reasons: (i) they do not give confidence intervals of their estimates; (ii) they do not utilize the extent to which a think tank is liberal or conservative (they only record the dichotomy, whether the think tank is left or right of center); and (iii) they are not embedded in an explicit choice model. We now describe a method that overcomes each of these three deficiencies.
Define yi as the average adjusted ADA score of the ith member of Congress. Given that the member cites a think tank, we assume that the utility that he or she receives from citing the jth think tank is
aj + bj yi + eij .
We assume that eij is distributed according to a Weibull distribution. As shown by McFadden (1974; also see Judge, et. al, 1985, pp. 770-2), this implies that the probability that member i selects the jth think tank is
exp(aj + bj yi ) / ∑k=1J exp(ak + bk yi ) , (1)
where J is the total number of think tanks in our sample. Note that this probability term is no different from the one we see in a multinomial logit (where the only independent variable is yi ).
Define cm as the estimated adjusted ADA score of the mth media outlet. Similar to the members of Congress, we assume that the utility that it receives from citing the the jth think tank is
aj + bj cm + emj .
We assume that emj is distributed according to a Weibull distribution. This implies that the probability that media outlet m selects the jth think tank is
exp(aj + bj cm ) / ∑k=1J exp(ak + bk cm ). (2)
Although this term is similar to the term that appears in a multinomial logit, we cannot use multinomial logit to estimate the parameters. The problem is that cm, a parameter that we estimate, appears where normally we would have an independent variable. Instead, we construct a likelihood function from (1) and (2), and we use the ?ml maximize? command in Stata to obtain estimates of each aj , bj, and cm.
Results: How Close are Media Outlets to the Center?
We now compute the difference of a media outlet?s score from 39.0 to judge how centrist it is. Based on sentences as the level of observation (the results of which are listed in Table 8), the Drudge Report is the most centrist, Fox News? Special Report is second, ABC World News Tonight is third, and CBS Evening is last.
Given that the conventional wisdom is that the Drudge Report and Fox News are conservative news outlets, this ordering might be surprising. Perhaps more surprising is the degree to which the ?mainstream? press is liberal. The results of Table 8 show that the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, USA Today, and CBS Evening News are not only liberal, they are closer to the average Democrat in Congress (who has a score of 74.1) than they are to the median of the whole House (who has a score of 39.0).
Another interesting fact concerns the following claim: ?Although the New York Times and other media are liberal, they are balanced by conservative media outlets such as Fox News. Consequently, if one spent an equal amount of time watching Fox News and reading the New York Times, he or she would receive a fairly balanced view of the news.? However, Table 8 shows that this is not quite true. Since the New York Times is twice as far from the center as Fox News? Special Report, to gain a balanced perspective, one would need to spend twice as much time watching Special Report as he or she spends reading the New York Times. (Further as we shall see in Table 9, when one uses citations as the level of observation, one would need to spend an even greater amount of time watching Special Report to gain a balanced perspective.)
A natural question is whether the differences in these rankings are statistically significant. We do not report the variance-covariance matrix of the parameters, however for any two estimated ADA scores of the media outlets, the covariance of the parameters was approximately .07. (The covariance between any two parameters varied between .055 and .079.) Given this, one can compute t-statistics to test the statistical significance of the difference in scores between any two media outlets. For instance, the variance of the difference between the scores of the Drudge Report and ABC World News Tonight is
(1.98)^2 + (.99)^2 ? 2 x .07 = 5.04
The difference in their scores is 7.9. Thus, the t-statistic, testing whether the scores are significantly different is 7.9/sqrt(5.04) = 3.52, which is significant at the 1% confidence level. Similar calculations show that the Drudge Report is significantly closer to the center than all other media outlets; ABC World News Tonight and NBC Nightly News do not significantly differ; however, these two network news shows do significantly differ from all the newspapers in our sample and CBS Evening News.
Using citations as the level of observation, Table 9 shows that Fox News? Special Report is the most centrist news outlet in our sample, the Drudge Report is second, ABC World News Tonight is Third, and CBS Evening News is last.
For these results, the covariance of the estimate between any two media outlets is approximately 1.0. Thus, for instance, to test if the Drudge Report?s score is significantly different from the score of ABC World News Tonight, one uses the formula
(58.7-54.7)/sqrt( 5.21^2 + 2.28^2 ? 2 x 1) = 0.73.
Thus, at standard levels of statistical significance, in this case, the scores of the Drudge Report and ABC World News Tonight are not significantly different. Similar calculations show that Fox News? Special Report is significantly closer to the center than all media outlets except the Drudge Report. Other calculations show that NBC Nightly News does not significantly differs from CBS Evening News at a 5% confidence level, but it does at a 10% confidence level.
Although we expected to find that most media lean left, we were astounded by the degree. A norm among journalists is to present ?both sides of the issue.? Consequently, while we expected members of Congress to cite primarily think tanks that are on the same side of the ideological spectrum as they are, we expected journalists to practice a much more balanced citation practice, even if the journalist?s own ideology opposed the think tanks that he or she is sometimes citing. This was not always the case. Most of the mainstream media outlets that we examined (ie all those besides Drudge Report and Fox News? Special Report) were closer to the average Democrat in Congress than they were to the median member of the House.
Our results contrast strongly with the prior expectations of many others. It is easy to find quotes from prominent journalists and academics who claim that there is no systematic bias among media outlets in the U.S. The following are some examples:
?Our greatest accomplishment as a profession is the development since World War II of a news reporting craft that is truly non-partisan, and non-ideological, and that strives to be independent of undue commercial or governmental influence....It is that legacy we must protect with our diligent stewardship. To do so means we must be aware of the energetic effort that is now underway to convince our readers that we are ideologues. It is an exercise of, in disinformation, of alarming proportions. This attempt to convince the audience of the world?s most ideology-free newspapers that they?re being subjected to agenda-driven news reflecting a liberal bias. I don?t believe our viewers and readers will be, in the long-run, misled by those who advocate biased journalism.?
? New York Times Executive Editor Howell Raines accepting the ?George Beveridge Editor of the Year Award? at a National Press Foundation dinner shown live on C-SPAN2 February 20, 2003.
??when it comes to free publicity, some of the major broadcast media are simply biased in favor of the Republicans, while the rest tend to blur differences between the parties. But that?s the way it is. Democrats should complain as loudly about the real conservative bias of the media as the Republicans complain about its entirely mythical bias??
--Paul Krugman, ?Into the Wilderness,? New York Times, November 8, 2002.
"The mainstream media does not have a liberal bias. . . . ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, the New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and the rest -- at least try to be fair."
--Al Franken. (2003, xx) Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.
The main conclusion of our paper is that our results simply reject such claims.
References
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Crouse, Timothy. 1973. Boys on the Bus. New York: Ballantine Books.
Groseclose, Tim, Steven D. Levitt, and James M. Snyder, Jr. 1999. ?Comparing Interest
Group Scores across Time and Chambers: Adjusted ADA Scores for the U.S.
Congress,? American Political Science Review. 93 (March): 33-50.
Jamieson, Kathleen Hall. 2000. Everything You Think You Know About Politics ? and
Why You?re Wrong. New York: Basic Books.
Judge, George G., W. E. Griffiths, R. Carter Hill, Helmut Lutkepohl, and Tsoung-Chao
Lee. 1985. The Theory and Practice of Econometrics. New York: John Wiley and
Sons.
Lichter, S.R., S. Rothman, and L.S. Lichter. 1986. The Media Elite. Bethesda, MD: Adler
and Adler.
McFadden, Daniel. 1974. ?Conditional Logit Analysis of Qualitative Choice Behavior,?
in P. Zarembka, ed. Frontiers in Econometrics, pp. 105-42. New York: Academic
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Povich, Elaine. 1996. Partners and Adversaries: The Contentious Connection Between
Congress and the Media. Arlington, VI: Freedom Forum.
Sutter, Daniel. 2001. ?Can the Media Be So Liberal? The Economics of Media Bias.?
The Cato Journal. 20 (Winter): 431-51.
Weaver, D.H. and G.C. Wilhoit. 1996. American Journalist in the 1990s. Mahwah, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum.
Table 1. The twenty think tanks most cited by members of Congress
Ave. Score,
Ave. Score,
weighted by
weighted by
Think Tank
sentences
citations
1
Heritage Foundation
6.17
13.75
2
American Civil Liberties Union
34.99
42.66
3
Brookings Institution
50.00
46.17
4
Cent. on Budget & Policy Priorities
80.09
80.04
5
Amnesty International
55.28
50.01
6
National Taxpayers Union
21.02
27.54
7
Citizens Against Govt. Waste
18.40
29.47
8
American Enterprise Institute
24.89
29.76
9
RAND Corporation
53.62
52.59
10
National Right to Life Committee
7.17
15.23
11
AARP
60.39
58.34
12
Cato Institute
25.60
28.50
13
Alexis de Tocqueville Institute
14.17
12.96
14
Nat. Fed. of Ind. Businesses
12.53
20.32
15
Common Cause
54.52
61.28
16
Family Research Council
5.71
13.95
17
Center for Security Policy
8.66
17.69
18
Council on Hemispheric Affairs
84.17
76.83
19
Economic Policy Institute
71.68
70.68
20
Children's Defense Fund
76.87
73.92
Note: Think tanks are listed in order of the number of sentences that members of Congress cite them.
Table 2. Mean and Median Adjusted ADA Scores, by Chamber and Party, Averaged over the Period 1993-1999 | ||||||
Ave. of House | ||||||
House | Senate | and Senate | ||||
Republican Mean | 11.4 | 11 | 11.2 | |||
Democrat Mean | 76.5 | 71.7 | 74.1 | |||
Chamber Mean | 44.5 | 40.0 | 42.2 | |||
Chamber Median | 39.0 | 36.9 | 38.0 | |||
| Table 3. Average Adjusted Scores of Some Well-known Moderates | ||||
| Joe Lieberman (D. - Ct.) | 66.3 | |||
| Constance Morella (R.-Md.) | 60.5 | |||
| Ernest Hollings (D. - S.C.) | 56.1 | |||
| Arlen Specter (R. - Pa.) | 44.0 | |||
| Tom Campbell (R. - Ca.) | 41.5 | |||
| Sam Nunn (D. - Ga.) | 40.9 | |||
| Dave McCurdy (D.- Ok.) | 39.8 | |||
| Olympia Snowe (R.- Me.) | 36.0 | |||
| Charlie Stenholm (D. - Tex.) | 29.3 | |||
| Nathan Deal (D - Ga.) | 15.1 | |||
| Table 4. Citation Patterns of Members of Congress, Calculated by Sentences | ||||
| Sentences | Sentences | |||
| From Liberal | From Conservative | Fraction | ||
| Think Tanks | Think Tanks | Liberal | ||
| Republicans | 5,368 | 26,925 | 0.166 | |
| Democrats | 18,196 | 4,126 | 0.815 | |
| All | 23,564 | 31,051 | 0.431 | |
| Table 5. Citation Patterns of Media Outlets, by Sentences | |||||
| Sentences | Sentences from | Back-of-the- | |||
| from Liberal | Conservative | Fraction | Envelope | ||
| Think Tanks | Think Tanks | Liberal | ADA Estimate | ||
| Fox News? Special Report | 2111 | 4991 | 0.296 | 26.4 | |
| (6/1/98 to 6/26/03) | |||||
| Drudge Report | 163 | 196 | 0.454 | 44.1 | |
| (2/8/03 to 8/15/03) | |||||
| ABC World News Tonight | 1058 | 758 | 0.583 | 54.8 | |
| (1/1/94 to 6/26/03) | |||||
| Los Angeles Times | 1002 | 576 | 0..635 | 58.4 | |
| (6/28/02 to 12/29/02) | |||||
| NBC Nightly News | 1037 | 499 | 0.675 | 62.5 | |
| (1/1/97 to 6/26/03) | |||||
| USA Today | 780 | 374 | 0.676 | 62.6 | |
| (1/1/02 to 9/1/02) | |||||
| CBS Evening News | 1596 | 698 | 0.697 | 64.5 | |
| (1/1/90 to 6/26/03) | |||||
| New York Times | 2708 | 1163 | 0.700 | 64.6 | |
| (7/1/01 to 5/1/02) | |||||
| Table 6. Citation Patterns of Members of Congress, Calculated by Citations | ||||
| Citations | Citations Of | |||
| Of Liberal | Conservative | Fraction | ||
| Think Tanks | Think Tanks | Liberal | ||
| Republicans | 1633 | 3415 | .323 | |
| Democrats | 3829 | 879 | .813 | |
| All | 5462 | 4294 | .560 | |
| Table 7. Citation Patterns of Media Outlets, by Citations | |||||
| Citations Of | Citations of | Back-of-the- | |||
| Liberal | Conservative | Fraction | Envelope | ||
| Think Tanks | Think Tanks | Liberal | ADA Estimate | ||
| Fox News? Special Report | 372 | 367 | 0.503 | 34.7 | |
| (6/1/98 to 6/26/03) | |||||
| ABC World News Tonight | 586 | 318 | 0.648 | 53.3 | |
| (1/1/94 to 6/26/03) | |||||
| USA Today | 271 | 133 | .670 | 56.1 | |
| (1/1/02 to 9/1/02) | |||||
| Drudge Report | 109 | 46 | 0.705 | 60.5 | |
| (2/8/03 to 8/15/03) | |||||
| NBC Nightly News | 563 | 233 | 0.707 | 60.9 | |
| (1/1/97 to 6/26/03) | |||||
| Los Angeles Times | 456 | 169 | 0.730 | 63.5 | |
| (6/28/02 to 12/29/02) | |||||
| CBS Evening News | 815 | 283 | 0.742 | 65.1 | |
| (1/1/90 to 6/26/03) | |||||
| New York Times | 984 | 262 | 0.790 | 71.2 | |
| (7/1/01 to 5/1/02) | |||||
| Table 8. Maximum Likelihood Results?Sentences as Observations | |||||
| Back-of-the- | Maximum | ||||
| Envelope | Likelihood | ||||
| ADA Estimate | ADA Estimate | ||||
| Fox News? Special Report | 26.4 | 29.0 | |||
| (6/1/98 to 6/26/03) | (.51) | ||||
| Drudge Report | 44.1 | 44.9 | |||
| (2/8/03 to 8/15/03) | (1.98) | ||||
| ABC World News Tonight | 54.8 | 52.8 | |||
| (1/1/94 to 6/26/03) | (.99) | ||||
| NBC Nightly News | 62.5 | 53.8 | |||
| (1/1/97 to 6/26/03) | (1.07) | ||||
| Los Angeles Times | 58.4 | 57.1 | |||
| (6/28/02 to 12/29/02) | (1.03) | ||||
| New York Times | 64.6 | 59.0 | |||
| (7/1/01 to 5/1/02) | (.69) | ||||
| USA Today | 62.6 | 59.9 | |||
| (1/1/02 to 9/1/02) | (1.23) | ||||
| CBS Evening News | 64.5 | 60.8 | |||
| (1/1/90 to 6/26/03) | (.88) | ||||
| Note: Standard errors in parentheses. | |||||
| Table 9. Maximum Likelihood Results?Citations as Observations | |||||
| Back-of-the- | Maximum | ||||
| Envelope | Likelihood | ||||
| ADA Estimate | ADA Estimate | ||||
| Fox News? Special Report | 34.7 | 35.6 | |||
| (6/1/98 to 6/26/03) | (2.38) | ||||
| Drudge Report | 60.5 | 54.7 | |||
| (2/8/03 to 8/15/03) | (5.21) | ||||
| ABC World News Tonight | 53.3 | 58.7 | |||
| (1/1/94 to 6/26/03) | (2.28) | ||||
| NBC Nightly News | 60.9 | 58.7 | |||
| (1/1/97 to 6/26/03) | (2.44) | ||||
| USA Today | 56.1 | 61.7 | |||
| (1/1/02 to 9/1/02) | (3.24) | ||||
| Los Angeles Times | 63.5 | 66.4 | |||
| (6/28/02 to 12/29/02) | (2.65) | ||||
| New York Times | 71.2 | 67.6 | |||
| (7/1/01 to 5/1/02) | (1.99) | ||||
| CBS Evening News | 65.1 | 70.0 | |||
| (1/1/90 to 6/26/03) | (2.11) | ||||