The New York Times reported today on the running Corporation for Public Broadcasting-National Public Radio-Public Broadcasting Service wars, and there wasn’t much there that you haven’t already read here.
But one new tidbit did catch our eye: in his ongoing effort to bring NPR to heel, Kenneth Tomlinson, head of the CPB, has suggested yet another survey of NPR’s reporting, this one focused on its coverage of events in the Middle East.
Late last year, without notifying board members or NPR, Mr. Tomlinson contacted S. Robert Lichter, president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA), a research group, about conducting a study on whether NPR’s Middle East coverage was more favorable to Arabs than to Israelis, Mr. Lichter said.
While the study appears to have been shelved — or at least postponed — Tomlinson’s selection of Lichter and the CMPA is worth noting. While any poll or study of media bias always takes fire from those who don’t agree with its conclusions, some of Lichter’s ties, and the criticisms leveled against his methodology, raise questions about his group’s findings.
Here’s what the Times didn’t tell you about CMPA: In March and April 2003, CMPA conducted a study of nightly newscasts to determine which programs had the most “positive” and “negative” reports about the war in Iraq. A total of 1,131 stories broadcast on ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox’s “Special Report With Brit Hume” were measured. There was wrinkle in the study, however: Although it was set up to gauge television news, CMPA didn’t include CNN and MSNBC in its tally for what it said were “budgetary reasons.”
It seems a bit odd that the researchers included Fox but couldn’t find the resources to study its two major competitors, CNN and MSNBC. While the excuse of not having the funds to include the two channels might fly on first blush, there may be more to the story than the Center simply running out of money. As Howard Kurtz reported in September 2003, “Lichter recused himself from the research because he is a paid Fox commentator.” While Kurtz didn’t deal with this, it does smell fishy that CMPA couldn’t include two of the three major cable news channels (and in particular the two that don’t pay Lichter) in a study looking at television news.
CMPA also took some heat back in December 2002, when Salon’s Joe Conason slammed a study the group conducted that purported to show that reporters are overwhelmingly liberal. Not only were the sources used for the study woefully outdated (covering reports from 1962 to 1996), according to Conason, “There is nothing ‘scientific’ about his research into bias, since all of his organization’s judgments about favorable or unfavorable coverage on newscasts are inevitably subjective.”
Conason and Lichter then got into a good, old-fashioned letter-writing fight, in which Lichter shot back that “The method of scientific content analysis that we use … specifically addresses the concern of subjectivity [Conason] raises through standardized reliability and validity tests.”
Lichter might be overstating his case a bit. Take, for example, two “positive” quotes Kurtz transcribes from the 2003 newscast study. On Fox’s “Special Report,” Michael Barone pronounced the war “the most amazing military success in human history,” while CBS’s Dan Rather, with somewhat more restraint, said, “Facts on the ground indicate that overall, from a military standpoint, the invasion continues to go well.” Rather’s comment, while nominally positive, included enough qualifications to render it sufficiently skeptical about the overall success of the war. Still, as with most opinion polls and media studies, little room is left for the gray areas of language or nuance.
On top of this, as Media Transparency has documented, CMPA has actually looked at public broadcasting before. In 1987 and ’88, the Center looked at 225 PBS documentary programs, concluding that there is a liberal bias in its programming. The study, however, left out some important source material, excluding conservative programming such as William F. Buckley’s “Firing Line” and Morton Kondracke’s “American Interests” in order to ensure “a group of programs that were similar in style and content, to maximize the comparability of judgments.” In other words, CMPA stacked the deck in order to demonstrate liberal bias.
Given the CMPA’s declared “independent” status, it’s also worth looking into where it gets its funding. Again, Media Transparency has the breakdown, and the donor list looks like a “Who’s Who” of conservative foundations. That’s not to say that CMPA is automatically in the pocket of big money conservatism, but since foundations generally give out money to those who have viewpoints not too far removed from their own, more often than not, where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
So, what’s the upshot of Tomlinson calling for a study of NPR’s Arab/Israeli coverage? As we reported on Friday, this whole situation is complicated by Tomlinson’s position as chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees U.S. government-sponsored media overseas. Now Tomlinson is trying to interfere with domestic media’s foreign coverage. He seems to be operating on the flawed assumption that our public airwaves are government property.
The CMPA has yet to get to work on that study, but it looks, once again, like Tomlinson’s preference is to form a conclusion, then launch an investigation.
Funny … we were always taught it should be the other way around.
–Paul McLeary
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.