Faculty Opinions recommendation of Low-status groups as a domain of liberal bias.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bill von Hippel
Keyword(s):  
Liberal Bias

Conservative News Studies

2019 ◽  
pp. 232-250
Author(s):  
Anthony Nadler ◽  
A. J. Bauer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Media Effects ◽  
The United States ◽  
Approaches To Studying ◽  
Modern Conservatism ◽  
Standardized Terminology ◽  
Conservative Media ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
Liberal Bias

This chapter maps several lines of academic inquiry that speak to the yet unrealized field of conservative news studies. The chapter explores how scholars have approached the notion of “liberal bias” and conservative news; three different approaches to studying the influence of conservative media—as propaganda, as media effects, and as “deep stories”; and the place of media in historical accounts of the growth of modern conservatism in the United States. Scholars have been researching various components of conservative news cultures for decades, but disciplinary silos, differing methodological assumptions, and a lack of standardized terminology have precluded the sort of focused scholarly dialogue that typically constitutes a field. This chapter highlights the extant disciplinary and interdisciplinary debates that a field of conservative news studies would ideally weave together and build upon.

“Blogs 1, CBS 0”: 60 Minutes and the Killian Memos Controversy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matt Carlson
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
National Guard ◽  
2004 Election ◽  
President Bush ◽  
Liberal Bias

This chapter begins with 60 Minutes alleging that President Bush shirked National Guard duty in the 1970s in a story based on documents provided by an unnamed source. Immediately after it aired, conservative bloggers charged that the piece was a deliberate attempt to discredit Bush with fake documents two months before the 2004 election. CBS News spent two weeks defending its reporting before Dan Rather apologized and retracted the story. The incident hastened Rather's retirement and led to the firing of senior news producers. Discussions of what happened resulted in conservative claims of widespread liberal bias, concern by journalists over competitive constraints on news work, and a consideration of how the growing influence of new media challenged journalists' use of unnamed sources in their prosecution of controversial subjects.

The Eisenhower Administration and the Desegregation of Washington, D.C.

1991 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael S. Mayer
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Eisenhower Administration ◽  
The Political ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
Political Dynamics ◽  
Liberal Democrats ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Black Equality ◽  
Liberal Bias

Liberal historians have traditionally played down or neglected the achievements of the Eisenhower administration in the area of civil rights. At the same time, they have overstated the contributions of liberal Democrats and understated the role congressional Democrats played in obstructing civil rights in the 1950s. The liberal bias of most historians has led to a distorted picture of the political dynamics affecting the struggle for black equality. The fact is that the Democrats, as a party, were not so liberal in the 1950s as they have often been portrayed, and the Republican party was not so conservative. The positions of the parties in fact were not so clear-cut as they became in the next decade. Neither party forcefully and openly advocated full equality for blacks; both reflected the dominant racism of white society. Granting that, however, the Eisenhower administration was not the obstructionist barrier to civil rights that historians have often portrayed.

scholarly journals The Effects of Mixed Membership in a Deliberative Forum: The Irish Constitutional Convention of 2012–2014

2019 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M Farrell ◽  
Jane Suiter ◽  
Clodagh Harris ◽  
Kevin Cunningham
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Constitutional Reform ◽  
Constitutional Convention ◽  
Mode Of Operation ◽  
Irish Government ◽  
Deliberative Forum ◽  
Liberal Bias

The Constitutional Convention was established by the Irish government in 2012. It was tasked with making recommendations on a number of constitutional reform proposals. As a mini-public, its membership was a mix of 66 citizens (randomly selected) and 33 politicians (self-selected). Its recommendations were debated on the floor of the Irish parliament with three of them leading to constitutional referendums; other recommendations are in the process of being implemented. This article uses data gathered during and after the operation of the Convention to examine this real-world example of a mixed-membership mini-public. The focus is on how the inclusion of politicians may have impacted on the Convention’s mode of operation and/or its outcomes. We find little impact in terms of its operation (e.g. no evidence that politicians dominated the discussions). There is evidence of a slight liberal bias among the politician membership, but this had little effect on the outcomes.

scholarly journals Partisan Bias and Its Discontents

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 304-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter H. Ditto ◽  
Cory J. Clark ◽  
Brittany S. Liu ◽  
Sean P. Wojcik ◽  
Eric E. Chen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Meta Analysis ◽  
Bayesian Updating ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Partisan Bias ◽  
Good Science ◽  
The Core ◽  
Political Differences ◽  
Liberal Bias

Baron and Jost (this issue, p. 292) present three critiques of our meta-analysis demonstrating similar levels of partisan bias in liberals and conservatives: (a) that the studies we examined were biased toward finding symmetrical bias among liberals and conservatives, (b) that the studies we examined do not measure partisan bias but rather rational Bayesian updating, and (c) that social psychology is not biased in favor of liberals but rather toward creating false equivalencies. We respond in turn that (a) the included studies covered a wide variety of issues at the core of contemporary political conflict and fairly compared bias by establishing conditions under which both liberals and conservatives would have similar motivations and opportunities to demonstrate bias; (b) we carefully selected studies that were least vulnerable to Bayesian counterexplanation, and most scientists and laypeople consider these studies demonstrations of bias; and (c) there is reason to be vigilant about liberal bias in social psychology, but this does not preclude concerns about other possible biases, all of which threaten good science. We close with recommendations for future research and urge researchers to move beyond broad generalizations of political differences that are insensitive to time and context.

Equalitarianism: A source of liberal bias

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bo M Winegard ◽  
Cory J Clark ◽  
Connor R Hasty ◽  
Roy Baumeister
Keyword(s):  
Order Effects ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Demographic Groups ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Social ◽  
Liberal Ideology ◽  
Within Subjects ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Do So ◽  
Liberal Bias

Recent scholarship has challenged the long-held assumption in the social sciences that Conservatives are more biased than Liberals, contending that the predominance of Liberals in social science may have caused social scientists to ignore liberal bias. Here, we demonstrate that Liberals are particularly prone to bias about victims’ groups (e.g. Blacks, Muslims, women) andidentify a trait that consistently predicts this bias. This trait, termed Equalitarianism, stems from an aversion to inequality and is comprised of three interrelated assumptions: (1) demographic groups do not differ biologically; (2) prejudice is ubiquitous; (3) society can, and should, make all groups equal in society. This leads to bias against information that portrays a perceived privileged group more favorably than a perceived victims’ group. Eight studies (n=3,274) support this theory. Liberalism was associated with perceiving certain groups as victims (Studies 1a-1b). In Studies 2-7, Liberals evaluated the same study as less credible when the results concluded that a privileged group (men and Whites) had a superior quality relative to a victims’ group (women and Blacks) than vice versa. Ruling out alternative explanations of Bayesian (or other normative) reasoning, significant order effects in within-subjects designs in Studies 6 and 7 suggest that Liberals think that they should not evaluate identical information differently depending on which group is said to have a superior quality, yet do so. In all studies, higher equalitarianism mediated the relationship between more liberal ideology and lower credibility ratings when privileged groups were said to score higher on a socially valuable trait.

scholarly journals Liberal bias and the five-factor model

2015 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evan Charney
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Factor Model ◽  
Five Factor Model ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
Openness To Experience ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Social Psychological Research ◽  
Liberal Bias

AbstractDuarte et al. draw attention to the “embedding of liberal values and methods” in social psychological research. They note how these biases are often invisible to the researchers themselves. The authors themselves fall prey to these “invisible biases” by utilizing the five-factor model of personality and the trait of openness to experience as one possible explanation for the under-representation of political conservatives in social psychology. I show that the manner in which the trait of openness to experience is conceptualized and measured is a particularly blatant example of the very liberal bias the authors decry.

Does the US Media Have a Liberal Bias?

2012 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 767-771 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brendan Nyhan
Keyword(s):  
Media Effects ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Media Bias ◽  
Associate Editor ◽  
American Mind ◽  
Left Turn ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Media ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Liberal Bias

In Left Turn: How Liberal Bias Distorts The American Mind, Tim Groseclose argues that media effects play a crucial role in American politics. His case rests on three arguments: (1) that journalists tend overwhelmingly to be liberal rather than conservative; (2) that their innate political bias slants their views in empirically measurable ways; and (3) that this bias fundamentally shapes American politics, by bringing US citizens further to the left than they would naturally be. According to Groseclose, in a world where media bias did not exist, American citizens would on average hold views close to those of Ben Stein or Bill O'Reilly. In such a world, John McCain would have defeated Barack Obama by a popular vote margin of 56%—42% in the 2008 presidential election.In making these claims, Groseclose draws on his own research, and on recent media scholarship by both political scientists and economists, making the broader claim that peer-reviewed social science—which seeks to deal with problems such as endogeneity and selection bias—should be the starting point for public arguments about the role of the media. His book, then, is clearly an effort to bring social scientific arguments into mainstream debates. Groseclose makes no secret of his conservative political leanings—but recent books from left-leaning political scientists such as Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson are equally unapologetic. It is at least plausible that political scientists' typical unwillingness to engage directly in political arguments has weakened the discipline's capacity for public engagement.In this symposium a diverse group of contributors have been invited to engage with Groseclose's arguments in ways that bring together specific empirical and/or theoretical points and arguments aimed at the broader “political science public sphere” that Perspectives on Politics seeks to nurture. Contributors were asked to consider these five questions: (1): How do we best measure media effects? (2): If media bias exists, what are its plausible sources? (3): Can one use work on media effects to determine what people's views would be in the absence of such bias? (4): Do you agree that American politics is insufficiently representative, and if so what do you consider the primary sources of this problem? (5): What kinds of political and/or media institutions or practices might enhance democratic discourse?—Henry Farrell, Associate Editor

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document