Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't by John Jr. (books that read to you TXT) 📕

Campaign finance records are even more lopsided. Television network employees give overwhelmingly to Democratic candidates, with 98 percent of CBS’s employee donations going to Democrats in 2004. The equivalent figure for NBC is an incredible 100 percent. Even employees of FOX News, which is widely regarded as a conservative channel, donate 81 percent of their contributions to Democrats.95 Journalists vigorously deny that such figures indicate bias, insisting that their reporting is based on their professionalism, not their personal political values.

It is interesting, then, to see that surveys of reporters indicate that they also believe the media is biased—against Democrats.96 What does all this mean? Are journalists biased or aren’t they? Is it possible that reporters are so biased that they don’t even realize it? This last possibility is reminiscent of an e-mail I recently received from a history professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton, who told me, “As you are well aware, the social sciences tilt strongly to the left. I’ve seen so many Far Left presentations that a mere left-leaning presentation strikes me as moderate and objective.”

Like this e-mail, most studies of media bias are anecdotal. It is difficult to determine what purely “unbiased” coverage would even look like. The problem is that bias is often in the eye of the beholder. Media watchdogs such as the Media Research Center regularly report examples of reporters slanting stories in some way. But viewers tend to filter the reports through the prism of their own political views. Democrats might regard a critical story about President Bush as justified and true, while Republicans would view it as biased.

In order to assess media bias, we must first find some objective news item and then analyze how it’s covered in the media. But what kind of news can be identified as “objective?” Economist Kevin Hassett and I studied media bias between 1985 and 2004 by analyzing how the media presented economic data such as the unemployment rate, gross domestic product (GDP), retail sales, and durable goods. Here, there is little ambiguity over what the “objective” news is: it’s the economic number itself and how it has changed over time. We confined our study to the headlines. This was done because headlines not only create the strongest image in readers’ minds, but more importantly, they are easier than is a long text to classify objectively—by conveying that things are getting “better,” “worse,” or that the news is “mixed.”97

Our study found pervasive media bias. Even after accounting for whether the economy was in an upswing or downswing at any given time, the headlines were more positive during Clinton’s presidency than during any of the Republican administrations. This bias—the difference in positive headlines during Democratic and Republican presidencies for the same underlying economic news—meant that headlines were between 10 and 20 percentage points more positive during a Democratic presidency. Headlines about economic news also became relatively more positive when Democrats controlled Congress, but reached their most negative when Republicans controlled both the presidency and the legislature.

Among the top ten individual newspapers, we found strong evidence that the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, and the Washington Post were much more likely to portray economic news positively during a Democratic presidency. The same was true for the Associated Press. However, there was a bit of a “hometown effect” for Republicans. The Houston Chronicle treated both Bushes about the same as Clinton, while the Los Angeles Times covered Reagan slightly more positively than it did Clinton.

Perhaps most importantly, we found that media coverage does indeed affect public opinion. Media coverage better explained whether people thought that the economy was getting better or worse than did the underlying economic data. Comparing our results with public opinion data from the Gallup Poll, we found that media bias resulted in people being 4 percentage points more likely to view the economy positively under President Clinton than they would have been under the same conditions during a Republican presidency.98 This translates into a comparable percentage difference in presidential approval ratings, an important finding in light of the close presidential races of 2000 and 2004.99

Government Control of Information: From Public Schools to Television

The topic of media bias has recently drawn much attention, but public schools may be even more influential in molding the worldview of future voters. A majority of Americans probably assume this is a good thing, as they hold education, as well as the teachers who provide it, in high regard. Anyone who has witnessed school board battles over curriculum or even individual textbooks knows how much is at stake in determining what future generations will be taught. But what most people don’t realize is that public education was actually designed to spread government-approved values.

Before delving into the history of American education, let’s first look at education systems in totalitarian countries. In order to instill the proper adherence to the ruling ideology, totalitarian leaders must attack the most common locus for spreading oppositional values—the family. 100 To weaken parental influence, the Soviet Union during the 1920s and again in the 1950s experimented with raising children in “communal children’s houses, dining halls, and other institutions that would decrease the importance of the individual household.” These efforts were rekindled decades later during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, when the Soviet government forcibly transferred tens of thousands of three- and four-year-old Afghanis to the USSR. By educating the children away from their families, the Soviets hoped to instill Communist ideals and then return their subjects to Afghanistan years later as part of a loyal government administration.101

The danger of the family in passing on the “wrong” values to their children was summed up by a Soviet refugee shortly after World War II: “In many respects, the family is most immune to the pressures of the regime. It thus constitutes the single most significant seedbed for the generation, preservation, and transmission of antiregime attitudes and information which the regime