News From Bizarro World

      Here's one of the most curious findings on media bias I've ever heard:

One of our measures found that the Drudge Report is the most centrist of all media outlets in our sample. Our other measure found that Fox News' Special Report is the most centrist. These findings refer strictly to the news stories of the outlets. That is, we omitted editorials, book reviews, and letters to the editor from our sample.

Alas, methinks the findings from this document just a teensy, weensy bit off-the-mark. Questions here, of course, remain: if, say, Drudge and Fox are the most "centrist," what does this suggest about the far ends of the right-leaning media in the United States? and is it official academic policy to scout for liberalism in the media as if it were, like HIV, to be detected and labeled? This blog won't even begin to go into questioning the insipid methodology of all this, or the obviously questional biases brought to the report itself (see, for example, the opening epigraph). The United States, with each passing day, becomes a stranger and stranger place, and one I less and less want to know.

      BTW: Some headlines from Drudge as of 12.40 today:

• UCLA/STANFORD STUDY: 'DRUDGE REPORT IS SIGNIFICANTLY CLOSER TO THE CENTER THAN ALL OTHER MEDIA OUTLETS'... ------ Gee, that doesn't sound like a profession of moderation, a profession normally insisted upon only my non-centrists;


• UPDATE: BUBBA BLOWS HIS TOP ON BEEB...
  Clinton Book Contradicts His Sworn Testimony On Lewinsky Affair... ------ Gee, absolutely no anti-Democratic, anti-Liberal leanings there....


• NY Promoter Wants Springsteen to Upstage Bush... ---- Gee, no sense of victimization and impropriety implied in that headline....


• Hitchens Trashes Michael Moore 'Crap'... --- Gee no privileging one conservative's opinion of the new liberal-slanted "documentary" there.....

But at least Drudge gets to the important stuff.....

      This just makes me sick to my stomach.