Imagine there’s no media bias

[Valin]

Power Line:

Scott Johnson

Nov 2 2016

I originally posted this in February 2015. A reader reminded me of it yesterday. I thought some readers might find it of interest in the event you missed it the first time around. Here it is in slightly revised form:

 

It is impossible to imagine what our political landscape would look like in a world where the mainstream media were fair and impartial. Unlike the utopia conjured by John Lennon, it’s “not easy if you try.” It would take someone of Ray Bradbury’s capacious imagination to formulate this particular alternative universe.

 

In his important 2011 book Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind, Professor Tim Groseclose brings the tools of quantitative social science to bear not only to establish the existence and measure the extent of left-wing media bias, but also to evaluate its effects. For some reason (ahem) the book dropped without a trace in 2011, though it is now available in a paperback edition and I highly recommend it.

 

About the only review of the book that I am aware of is the one by the late James Q. Wilson in the Winter 2011/2012 Claremont Review of Books. Wilson’s review is “Measuring the Slant.” Professor Wilson was probably the most prominent living social scientist when he wrote the review. He died in March 2012. The review must be one of the last pieces that he published.

 

If you look around on the Internet you can find a few academic critiques of the book. I think they fall into two categories: (a) quibbling and ( nitpicking.

 

(Snip)