— Liberal media apologist Geoff Nunberg tries to weasel out of blogger Edward Boyd’s discovery that he fudged* his numbers, committing three major gaffes in the process (at Geoffrey Nunberg – Media Bias, linked by Instantman)
Gaffe Number 1 has Nunberg claiming NOW’s not a left-wing organization:
Goldberg’s other number involves one of those specious comparisons that critics of liberal media bias are prone to. In this case, he points out that “the Los Angeles Times ran only 98 stories about the Concerned Women for America and identified the group as conservative 28 times. But The LA Times ran more than 1,000 stories on the National Organization for Women and labeled NOW liberal only seven times.”
But that’s meretricious, in every sense of the term. Concerned Women of America is a self-identified conservative Christian group (it opposes, among other things, abortion, homosexual adoption, hate-crime legislation, the AmeriCorps volunteer program, and the teaching of “ill-conceived Darwinian theory” in the schools). Whereas NOW makes a point of rejecting explicitly partisan labels — the appropriate description of the group is “feminist.”
Nunberg doesn’t get out much. NOW takes a stance opposite to CWA on the relevant issues Nunberg mentions: abortion, gay adoption, and hate crimes, and NOW is in favor of unbounded welfare, comparable worth laws, quotas, and male disempowerment. There exists a broad spectrum of feminist organizations to the right of NOW, including the Independent Women’s Forum, the Women’s Freedom Network, iFeminists, so it’s not correct to simply label NOW feminist; they’re every bit as far to the left as CWA is to the right, and the inability to see them for what they are is the essence of bias.
The second gaffe has Nunberg claiming that labelling a politician “progressive” is evidence of conservative bias:
I found that Jesse Helms was described as “right wing” about thirty times as often as Paul Wellstone was described as “left wing.” But if you are going to look at “left wing,” you’re obliged to look at the other labels the press uses for liberal politicians, as well — terms like “progressive,” “on the left, ” “leftist,” and so on. In my own data, it turned out that these labels were applied to Wellstone slightly more frequently than the analogous labels with “right” were applied to Helms. And when I did some searches in the same database that Boyd used, I found that the inclusion of terms like “progressive,” “leftist,” and “on the left” would have increased Wellstone’s rate of labeling by about fifty percent, and doubled Barney Frank’s. In for a penny, in for a pound.
Excuse me, but this is a fine example of using a fact to prove its contrary. Paul Wellstone and Barney Frank are extreme left-wing politicians, the kind of people who would be socialists in every other country. But American socialists have invented the label “progressive” to hide their agenda from the public (who isn’t for “progress?”) and put on a shiny face. Calling Wellstone a “progressive” is going along with the deception; it’s hardly the same as calling Jesse Helms a “reactionary.” The data actually show that the press is more likely to call Wellstone a “progressive” than to call him an extreme left-winger, but it’s more likely to call Helms an extreme right-winger than, say, a moral conservative.
Nunberg’s third gaffe involves media mentions of the concept of “liberal bias” itself. He finds:
In the newspapers I looked at, the word “media” appears within seven words of “liberal bias” 469 times and within seven words of “conservative bias” just 17 times — a twenty-seven-fold discrepancy.
So the media is 27 times more likely to talk about liberal bias than about conservative bias. This arises out of the fact that credible books are on the best-seller list discussing this very thing, so the media has to defend itself. But to Nunberg, this self-defense is evidence of media complicity in the conservative plot:
The media may not have invented the “liberal bias” story, but people like Goldberg and Bozell couldn’t have put it over without their active help.
Nunberg should have left well enough alone, because in defending his shoddy methodology, he makes his biases quite clear and digs himself a deeper hole. He’s a Stanford professor, of course.
Update: see Live from the WTC and Zonitics for further illumination on the NOW thing, and pay a call to the NOW web site where they list “Fighting the Right” as a major issue.
*Update: see clarification on fudge vs. spin above.