The liberal media bias canard has been powerfully played in the hands of conservatives, providing cover for biased journalism and perversion of politics by the corporations that own the media.
Now a comprehensive multi-year study has been released by Oxford University Press, Image Bite Politics the data have been compiled. And the result is that reporters use visuals, order of speaking, focus of stories, and framing of candidates in a manner that is consistently biased towards republicans.
The study looks deeply at the number of stories, the framing of stories and the framing of candidates. Excepts from the description of the book follow.
From the reviews, an acknowledgment that what makes this stdy unique is its focus on the visual, and data about the visual.
"This smoothly-written, data-rich book is a powerful reminder of the importance of visual images in politics. The authors' research taps into multiple literatures including communication, psychology, political science and biology to present an extraordinarily well-rounded analysis of visual framing of elections. This unique study is essential reading for anyone who wants to know how political communication actually works during major electoral contests."--Doris Graber, Professor of Political Science, University of Illinois at Chicago
They dissect the practices of the media in America
Grabe and Bucy found the volume of news coverage focusing exclusively on each party -- one measure of media bias -- favored Republicans. Their research found there were more single-party stories about Republicans overall and in each election year except 1992. When they studied the time duration of these stories, no pattern of favoritism was evident.
But when they studied the visuals, the bias was remarkably consistent.
"Republicans were seen least through the scrutinizing and unflattering perspective of an extreme close-up. This was the case overall and for all election years except 1996," they said. "Long shots . . . were move evident in coverage of Democrats than Republicans overall, but not at statistically significant levels."
The low angle camera shot, simulating looking up at a candidate, has been demonstrated to attribute power and dominance to candidates in experimental studies. The high angle shot does the opposite. It makes a candidate look weak and powerless.
Findings for camera angle clearly illustrate the Republican advantage. Overall, Republican candidates were covered in more low-angle and fewer high-angle shots than Democrats. .... There is evidence that the pattern favoring Republicans is stable across networks, because there are no statistically significant differences between them.
And then they are honest about the results. The media are corrupt. Even by the easy standards of journalism, by the pathetic he said/she said that has come to be consider ethical, the media fails. The found significant, consistent differences in the visuals. The reporters are the problem.
Grabe, who was a news producer at the South African Broadcasting Corp. and in American public television before going into academe, said, "Journalists are trained in journalism schools and in the industry not to use low and high camera angles. It is professional code, and we found violations of this in favor of Republicans on network news.