Page 517 - How to Make Money in Stocks Trilogy

386 INVESTING LIKE A PROFESSIONAL

opinion. Another book on the subject is The Coming Battle for the Media,
written in 1988 by William Rusher.
One of the most outstanding studies on the subject is The Media Elite,
written by Stanley Rothman and Robert Lichter in 1986. Rothman and
Lichter interviewed 240 journalists and top staffers at three major newspa-
pers (the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington
Post), three news magazines (Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World
Report), and the news departments of four TV networks (ABC, CBS, NBC,
and PBS). On average, 85% of these top national journalists were found to
be liberal and to have voted the Democratic ticket in national elections in
1964, 1968, 1972 and 1976. Another survey showed only 6% of national
journalists to have voted Republican.
A Freedom Forum poll reinforced The Media Elite when it documented
that 89%—9 out of 10—of Washington reporters and bureau chiefs voted
for Clinton in 1992 and 7% voted for the first George Bush.
More recently, Tim Groseclose of UCLA and Stanford and Jeff Milyo of
the University of Chicago published “A Measure of Media Bias.” They
counted the number of times a news outlet quoted certain think tanks and
compared this with the number of times members of Congress cited the
same think tanks when speaking from the floor.
Comparing the citation patterns enabled them to construct an ADA
(Americans for Democratic Action) score for each media outlet. They found
that Fox News Special Report was the only right-of-center news outlet in
their sample. The most liberal was CBS Evening News followed by the New
York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, NBC Nightly News, and
ABC’s World News Tonight.
More surprising was the astonishing degree that your mainstream media
in these surveys are far more liberal than the general voting public.
In the 1984 presidential election, Mondale vs. Reagan, the ABC, CBS, and
NBC prime-time news programs from Labor Day to Election Day were taped
and dissected by Maura Clancy and Michael Robinson. They focused only on
reports in which spin for or against each candidate was definite. Public Opinion
magazine found Reagan got 7,230 seconds of bad press and only 730 of good,
while Mondale enjoyed 1,330 seconds of good press and 1,050 seconds of bad.
Leading up to Reagan’s reelection run, the Institute for Applied Eco-
nomics surveyed how the network news treated economic news during the
strong recovery in the last half of 1983. It discovered that nearly 95% of the
economic statistics were positive, yet 86% of the networks’ stories were pri-
marily negative.
Emmy Award winner Bernard Goldberg spent nearly 30 years with
CBS News. His book Bias documents in detail how network television has