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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Aggregate media bias across TV/Radio/Newspapers is interesting because both the direction and scale matters. Of course bias is only part of the story, do an objectively terrible job and you get more negative stories overall.

As a concrete example a great deal of left leaning media was very critical of Biden running for reelection and especially waiting that long to pull out. You almost never see that kind of thing from right leaning media outlets.

So, yes overall media bias favors Trump not because more outlets favor him but because the ones that do heavily favor him. Far left media is simply a more niche market than far right media. Mother Jones for example is well known but only pulls in ~16 million$ / year and even they where critical of Biden.

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NYT, WaPo, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS are not niche. They all ran cover for Biden until the debate made it too obvious. They were not "very critical". They are, however, extremely critical of anything Trump does.

You can’t ignore scale of bias here.

CNN and Fox don’t come close to canceling each other out because Fox is way to the right and CNN is more subtle. -2 + 4 is not zero.

Similarity Fox viewership is 3 million viewers in primetime vs CNN at 1/6th those numbers.

I wouldn’t say extremely critical of Trump. He brings half of it on himself. Simply reporting what he says and does that makes him look incompetent is not being particularly critical.

The media has been extremely critical of Trump. Sometimes deserved, sometimes not. But impossible to deny the bias.

The media is also extremely critical of shooting yourself in the face.

Is that bias? Or sensible?

Implying the media is sensible is hilarious

Is the media biased against shoot-yourself-in-the-facers?

A neutral stance isn’t an uncritical stance.

It’s undeserved praise vs undeserved damnation that signifies a non neutral position.

The media is far from neutral. Almost all have a major left bias. Fox has a major right bias.

Not when you look at objective metrics of bias such as sentiment analysis or track time spent on positive vs neutral vs negative coverage of various issues. Of course that’s in relation to US political parties, pick a different ‘center’ and you can get any answer you want for how the media is biased overall.

Objectively FOX isn’t pure propaganda they do include some coverage critical of R politicians and policies. It’s just far less than say CNN spends on coverage critical of D politicians and policies.

I can cite multiple studies showing the left bias in the media. I think it's pretty widely held to be true. I'm actually kind of taken aback that anyone would take the other side of that argument.

I’m not arguing about the existence of bias or the numbers of L/R leaning media.

There’s simply more left leaning Americans vs the stance of the Republican Party who’s specifically engineered their message to appeal to voters with more political power. Ex: Losing the popular vote when winning the presidential election only happens to Republicans.

However, simply counting the number of companies leaning left or right doesn’t tell you much. A local newspaper with 5k readers just doesn’t move the needle. Neither does an outlet that’s 0.1% left or right leaning.

So the only accurate measurement is level of lean * number of viewers, and when you do that calculation (as I have) you find the overall media landscape leans Republican.

That makes some sense to me, although the result is surprising. Do have anything you can point to for further reading on the subject?

There’s a few investigations into why Talk Radio became such a Republican dominated market, but I don’t have a good link. They also ignored how NPR fills a similar niche and leans left. But overall I setup a spreadsheet and ran the numbers on viewership vs scores on sites like:

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/ Fox: FOX: 6.7, CNN -3.7, another site giving them 4 vs -2 etc.

Then used numbers from sites like https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/first-quarter-2025-cable-new...

So for most watched cable news show you get FOX 4,552k viewers vs CNN 558k viewers. Multiply and you get a rather shockingly different impact.

Yeah, that's an interesting way of looking at it. Also I didn't realize Fox dominates so much.

It makes some sense!

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