The Role of Media in Politics pt 1

There are interesting trends on the internet that are worth looking into. It seems as if everywhere you turn folks talk about media bias. Conservative or Liberal, Left or Right, Republican, Democrat, and Independent all agree that the MSM is against them.

The first thing we need to do is define the MSM and then we need to put a face to them. Most everyone accepts that MSM is shorthand for the major television networks as well as the major newspapers. But, who are they and how do they relate to the major political parties and thier supporters. It gets interesting right after you take the leap.

According to ebiquity the top ten MSM outlets look like this:

Again according to the research done by ebiquity the top ten MSM citations from both Republican and Democrat sources are:

The final dataset provided by ebiquity is the most interesting.

The final scoring function produces a ranked list of MSM based on preference of being linked to by either Republican or Democrat blogs. This shows some interesting results (complete list here and here):

Does anyone notice the overlap in some places?
What this tells me is that MSM bias is as much a talking point as anything else. It also shows me that bias is in the eye of the beholder.

Thanks to for sourcing this data.

Next we will look at the alternative media.

Thanks for reading.