The Assistant Director at PEJ is, I believe, an American Enterprise Institute alum. With some more sleuthing into the PEJ's staffing, I'd bet there were more wingers to be found. For what it's worth.

Oh for Christ's sake. Had the media simply reported the fucking truth Bush's ratings would have been in the goddamned teens.

I'm with Vinnie.

What does "tone" have to do with journalism? Is that what they teach in journalism schools these days, not who what where when how and why, but "it sounded like," "it appeared that," and "it was said with force and conviction."

Stacy Taylor was talking with ex-CBS reporter Tom Fenton about his new book this morning, and they talked about, among other things, how reporters are lazy and incompetent these days. How else can you explain the bush propaganda getting aired as is etc.

If you're an idiot, no amount of sugar coating is going to change that salient fact. After the first Kerry-bush debate, bush was exposed as the petulant and ignorant little twerp he is, and the facts of that should have been what was reported. But insteadthey reported on how the spinners spun things, the tone and appearences of the debaters, ad nauseum.

But the facts where that bush was completely exposed as an uninformed fraud, a puppet yanked about by his good friend Big Time Dick cheney and rover. He could not answer questions, his composure was non-existent, his rhetorical and logical skills were unexhibited. In short, he revealed himself as an ignorant failure. And if the media had done their journalism, that's what they would have said.

And it would have been unrelentingly negative towards bush. But, according to this study, that would have somehow been a bad thing, a biased thing, a false thing.

To which I call 'bullshit' on the report.

Just imagine, say, if President FDR was informed this way. "Well, Mr. President, there's been a rather nasty fight over in the Pacific area recently. I don't think the Japanese were very nice to our troops. And I don't know how many Battleships are available for action, but the Navy is very eager to push forward."

Meaningless, when the facts were that the Navy was crippled and incapable of taking effective and consequential action for some time.

Excellent information, eriposte. I fear that it would not matter if our media was capable of being more accurate, because the right wing has a media that totally lies and too many people blithely eat the lies without a problem. The election reporting was pretty bad because the media is so easily played by the refs, but the real question is: how many people that voted for Bush never read or heard anything critical about Bush because they were in the echo chamber of the right wing media? They were being fed lies from FOX, from Rush Limbaugh and talk radio and from their pulpits. I think a good percentage of the Bush voters never got closer to a fact than one can throw a pebble. (These are the crowds that come and cheer him on in his cult follower only appearances.) I think the only thing that breaks into that echo chamber is friends and families talking one-to-one about facts and consequences.

Posted by Mary: "but the real question is: how many people that voted for Bush never read or heard anything critical about Bush because they were in the echo chamber of the right wing media?"

Let me see, how many could that have been? Well, maybe over 50 million, ya think?

Well, I blame post-modernism and its rejection of objective truth. How else to explain equating of measures of tone with factuality? How else to explain the utter decline of a discipline that previously competed with the legal profession in its devotion to defining and respecting "facts", not to mention fact-based objectivity. My 87-year old father, an english professor and department head for most of his adult life, could not talk about its incursions in his own discipline without spluttering and gesticulating as though he had just fallen over a cliff. Something I could not appreciate at the time, having graduated from college and law school without being exposed to it. The sad thing is that while in the law, facts are carefully defined so that they can then be manipulated rhetorically to achieve a desired, often political effect, journalism was one of the few rhetorical disciplines teaching students how to avoid creeping opinionism in their prose. And just look what has happened in the past 30 years in science...where objective reporting was once secondary but absolutely essential to the objective design and pursuit of pure research. Now big pharma buys the professional results it wants to sell its products, and any rigorous research that exposes its false assumptions is relegated to the crank folder. Alas, Humpty Dumpty has triumphed everywhere.

What I wouldn't give for some media organization with massive research and investigational capacity/ability to follow any story about anything and give accurate reporting about what they find. Living in the United States now is like living with blinders on. I spend too much of my day just trying to ferret-out what I can about the truth of whatever matter interests me at the moment. With a 24-7 news cycle we get absolutely shit for national and world news.

Most research is trash. Like so many other professions that have been manipulated for commerical gain most 'professional'analyists are nothing more then credentialed whores. I analyize data as part of my job and I'm fortunate to be in a truly objective organization.

Excellent work eriposte and welcome aboard.
Kudos to the other posters who have as usual brought up good points.