Tuesday, March 15, 2005
NEWSPAPER OF DUMB WRONG ON NUMBERS
"Blogs of war wrong on bias,” claimed a Sydney Morning Herald headline the other day. According to Michael Gawenda, the paper’s Washington correspondent:
Media coverage of the Iraq war by the American media was not biased in favour or against the war, according to new research, despite claims the coverage was generally biased and negative.
The Project for Excellence in Journalism, a Washington think tank affiliated with Columbia University’s school of journalism, looked at more than 2000 stories in newspapers and on television and websites.
Most were “straight” news reports, according to the survey’s director, Tom Rosenstiel, with 25 per cent of the stories positive and 20 per cent negative.
The survey is unlikely to pacify conservative critics of the mainstream media who have argued the media has concentrated on all the things that have gone wrong in Iraq while downplaying positive developments.
Conservative bloggers - who far outnumber liberal ones - have run a relentless campaign against what they see as the liberal bias of the mainstream media.
We also enjoy pointing out humiliating errors. Here’s the actual survey:
Over all, across all media studied, stories about the war were just slightly more likely to carry a clearly negative tone than a positive one (25% negative versus 20% positive).
Gawenda has flipped the figures. The man needs help with numbers.
(Via the excellent Attila the Pun and Alan R.M. Jones)