Who is the Biased One?

Around 7:30 pm on election night, Fox News came out with its estimate that the Republicans would gain 60 seats in the House of Representatives. Later that evening, CNN made its estimate that Republicans would gain 52 House seats.

As of Sunday morning, Republicans picked up 60 seats with eight races undecided. CNN now estimates that Republicans will gain 64 seats when the undecided races are resolved.

So if Fox is such a biased news organization in favor of Republicans, and CNN is the arbiter of truth, why was Fox more accurate with its prediction than CNN? And similarly, why was CNN's prediction inaccurate in a way that helped Democrats? Did CNN want to shade the results in favor of Democrats to maximize Democratic votes where polls remained open in the west at the time of their prediction?

There may not have been anything sinister going on at CNN, other than not being as good at making such predictions. Or perhaps more subtly, their left-leaning organization had a hard time believing the blood bath their preferred candidates were undergoing.

Fox's more accurate prediction (even they seem to have underestimated the Republican win if some of the undecided races break for the GOP) is evidence of being good journalists, notwithstanding that many of their commentators are conservatives. It isn't as if Fox predicted a Republican win of 80 or 90 seats, which some people speculated was possible in the days before the election.

This reminds me of a study published by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism about the 2008 presidential election. The study characterized the percentage of stories in a journalistic outlet that were positive, neutral, or negative toward Barack Obama and John McCain. Here is that data:

			Obama						McCain
	Positive		Neutral		Negative		Positive		Neutral		Negative
Fox	25%		35%		40%		22%		38%		40%
MSNBC	43%		43%		14%		10%		17%		73%
CNN	30%		25%		39%		13%		26%		61%
NBC	43%		36%		20%		17%		30%		54%
Network TV	--		--		--		14%		29%		57%
Newspapers	45%		27%		27%		6%		25%		69%
Overall	30%		35%		29%		14%		29%		57%

Some interesting observations from the data. Fox's coverage was far more balanced than the other cable news programs and NBC (the study doesn't provide this data for CBS and ABC, nor NBC's Obama data, otherwise I would have included it in the table above).

Fox was equally negative toward Obama and McCain (40% each) and 14% more positive toward Obama than McCain (25% vs. 22%).

MSNBC, on the other hand, was 420% more negative toward McCain than Obama (73% vs. 14%) and 330% more positive toward Obama than McCain (43% vs. 14%).

CNN was 56% more negative toward McCain than Obama (61% vs. 39%) and 131% more positive toward Obama than McCain (30% vs. 13%).

Looking at NBC, network TV broadcasts, newspapers, and the media overall paints a similar picture as CNN and MSNBC - stories far more positive toward Obama and far more negative toward McCain than Fox.

So Fox is an outlier - it looks conservative not because its coverage is skewed Republican (as evidenced by the similar ratio of positive/negative stories about Obama and McCain) but because the rest of the media is so left-leaning as evidenced by its lopsided coverage in favor of Obama.

And the left is shocked and gasps in horror when Fox dominates the ratings, as it did on election. Fox's ratings not only beat the network election coverage but with 6.96 million average viewers dwarfed those of CNN (2.42 million) and MSNBC (1.94 million) combined.

Maybe the left should start living up to its claim to be advocates of science and reason and look at the data and think rationally about what it means. Instead, Obama claims Fox isn't even a real news organization. That's the response of a bully and a thug, not a man who claims science is on his side.