Friday, February 6, 2009

Mything In Action: Librul Media, the sequel

By GottaLaff

You already knew this. I already knew this. But I'm betting most others don't:

In a new analysis, ThinkProgress has found that Republican lawmakers outnumbered Democratic lawmakers 75 to 41 on cable news interviews by members of Congress (from 6am on Monday 2/2 through 11pm on Thursday 2/5):

graph_cable.jpg

Some observations from our analysis:

– Last week, Fox News came the closest to balance with 8 Republicans and 6 Democrats. But the so-called “fair and balanced” network was not able to maintain such a ratio this week, hosting 24 Republicans and only 11 Democrats.

The business news networks were particularly egregious this week. CNBC had more than twice as many conservatives, with 14 Republicans and 6 Democrats. Fox Business was even worse, hosting 20 Republicans for just 4 Democrats.

– In the previous study, the supposedly liberal MSNBC favored Republicans 15 to 9. This week, however, MSNBC became the only network to host more Democratic members of Congress than Republicans, with 17 Democrats and 12 Republicans.

[...] Some of the most frequent Democratic guests this week were outspoken critics of the proposed stimulus plans, such as Sens. Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Kent Conrad (D-ND).

Fortunately, the imbalance on the networks is not going unnoticed. A House Democratic leadership aide told Politico’s Michael Calderone yesterday that “what happened with cable last week is that Republican House members were the only show in town.” A “very senior” Democratic aide told The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent that the leadership is “aware of the problem and are taking steps to fix it.” The aide noted that “there is also an onus on producers to remedy this issue.

And yet the president maintains a high level of support and popularity. Imagine how he'd do if there were no bias. If you can.

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