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Old 12-19-2005, 04:26 PM
Cyrus Cyrus is offline
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Join Date: Sep 2002
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Default Let\'s look at their method

[ QUOTE ]
They tallied the number of times each media outlet referred to think tanks and policy groups, such as the left-leaning NAACP or the right-leaning Heritage Foundation.

[/ QUOTE ] This is IMHO a deeply flawed criterion.

Suppose I write an article that's starting from a decidedly "leftist" point of view and is extremely critical of the Bush government. Suppose further that the point of the article is to refute, through logic and facts, the arguments of the Bush administration about Iraq. In my article I will use only citations from conservative, pro-Bush sources, the very ones that propagate those arguments, and I will also use "hard" data & facts from neutral sources, such as History.com or the CIAfactbook.com, to refute them.

Well, according to the UCLA criterion, my article would have been classified as ultra-conservative!

Which is why they found Matt Drudge to be ...a lefty! [ QUOTE ]
Our data for the Drudge Report was based almost entirely on the articles that the Drudge Report lists on other Web sites. Very little was based on the stories that Matt Drudge himself wrote.

[/ QUOTE ]

Lastly, the UCLA study found the news pages of The Wall Street Journal to be "a little to the left of the average American Democrat", on the basis of think tanks and news sources that the WSJ is citing. But could it be simply that the Wall Street Journal is using what it considers as being the more reputable and reliable sources - for its news reportage?
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