"Doug McDonald" wrote in message
...

Actually, as I quoted from a scientific study, I am
correct.

That study is, to put it politely, bunk. First, there was absolutely no
attempt to measure whether Congress is really a good reflection of the views
of the American public. (And no, it's not self-evident just because "we
elected them".) Second, there was no attempt to show that the rate of
quoting publications of think tanks is a valid or useful measure of the
political views of members of Congress, or of the media. And those are just
the first two fundamental flaws that could be noticed right away.

A "scientific" study should account for all such things, or not try to make
claims about something that it is not measuring -- a real scientific paper
would have only been titled "A Comparison of Quotation Rates from Think
Tanks Between Congress and Major Media", wouldn't have editorialized about
its results, and wouldn't have claimed to have greater meaning than it
really did. Such a paper would also be peer reviewed before publication,
which this paper was not. In addition, any true scientific study would not
be widely accepted as fact until it had been even further reviewed, all
experiments re-run by other researchers for confirmation, parallel
experiments and data collection done to corroborate from different angles,
and thoroughly gone over and re-tested and re-analyzed until its results
were considered ironclad. At this point, the paper in question is nothing
but opinion with some selected statistics to back it up, and you know what
they say about statistics...

Even if it does say something about the relative positions of the news media
to Congress in terms of quotation rates from think tanks, it is just as
likely saying something about how conservative Congress is as about how
liberal the media is.

But I think it is mainly saying that right-wing think tanks are quoted a lot
precisely because they are nothing but influence organizations. Traditional
think tanks (like Brookings and Rand) primarily existed to do research.
Modern Republican think tanks (like Heritage, American Enterprise, and
Cato), exist to further a conservative political view, and to publicize and
promote that view. They generally spend more on PR than they do on research,
so it's no surprise they have a lot of visibility (as that's the entire
purpose of PR).

People who think Fox is right wing are generally
from very close to the coasts, in areas where Fox really
is right of the center for that local groups of people.

Go to Alabama or Wyoming and you will find Fox to
be well to the left of the center of those people.
Limbaugh would be closer to their center. When
you average over the whole USA, as represented in
Congress, Fox is centrist.

You may be right that progressivism is more concentrated near the coasts,
but an awful lot of people live in those areas. There are 70 times as many
people in California as in Wyoming, for instance, and almost 8 times as many
as in Alabama.