degsme:

And what exactly did the UCLA study find? It compared the media to the "average congressional opinion" on the same subject. At a time when Congress was overrun in a misrepresentational proportion by ultra-conservative right wingers. And it further normalized this against the average floor speech - since in the House the majority party gets to set the rules for debate, this FURTHER distorts the amount of centrist Dem viewpoints being normalized against.

So ALL the 2005 UCLA study finds is that the Media is to the left of right wing.

Well if the media were simply centrist, you would get EXACTLY THAT result.

Learn to THINK

Degs that study is too flawed to be useful -- for one thing, the idea that Congress is further right than the voters is just silly. The voters ELECTED the Congress and it reflects their views. It can't be "misrepresentational" as that would invalidate its existence and the very nature of representative democracy.

The media was to the left of the Congress, and Congress represented the voters -- the media was to the left of the voters.

The Associated Press, as you well know, polled its member editors and found that 95 percent of them were Democrats, and 5 percent were "left wing" Democrats. There can be no lack of bias when this is the case, because the newsrooms universally suffer from spectrum bias, they look at the spectrum of the people they know, find they are in the center of it, and feel that is the center -- when they don't know anyone from elsewere on the spectrum (I'm aware that you know about this phenomena, as we have discussed it before).

Having worked in and with the media for nearly two decades now, and having been the one "right winger" in more than one newsroom, I can categorically state both from the statistics and my personal experiences that the bias in favor of the Dems and the left exists.

Perhaps your opponent up the thread cannot think, and needs to learn to do so. I CAN think, however, and observe -- and report what I've observed.