Using Mediatransparency.org…
So, how has talking with the folks at the Commonweal Institute, and reading their material, made me (someone who thinks of himself as fairly well informed already) more media-saavy? An example:
I’m reading the Dye textbook referred to below (which I’m learning a lot from), and a study with counter-intuitive results is cited; by this point, I’ve pinned the book’s major weakness from a media-saavy person’s point of view: he tends to only cite studies and works that support his positions, even when the positions are are reasonably in dispute - a fatal flaw in an introductory textbook… a textbook with a point of view is not an issue, but it needs to acknowledge when its position is weak and provide some idea of what other points of view on the subject are.
Dye presents a lot of positions and analysis as fact and/or settled opinion that are far from it. Another manifestation of this is that he tends to make generalized statements of conventional wisdom, without citation of sources, and then support them through studies that only support a portion of the statements in question.
Anyway: so, on page 224 (8th edition, published in 1990), he excerpts a study by Linda Lichter, from the August/September 1985 edition of Public Opinion (pp. 42-43) on differing attitudes between the black popular masses and black civil rights leadership as an example of how the leadership of public interest groups can often hold dramatically different opinions from the people they claim to represent.
Not seeing the whole study, I can’t really evaluate whether it is suspect, itself, but given the counter-intuitive results (Black Americans in general are much happier with the Democratic party than their leaders, they oppose affirmative action [question was phrased, I think, to elicit this result], majority haven’t experience discrimination applying for jobs, etc.), and my sense that Dye tends to cite conservative studies when it suits him (he did get $100,000 from the Bradley foundation in the mid 1980’s), I thought it might be interesting to see whether Linda Lichter shows up in Media Transparency’s database.
MT First try: “Linda Lichter” produces no result. Hmm…
MT Second try: “Lichter” three hits for Richard Lichter, head of Center for Media and Public Affairs, Inc. Hmm… could they be married?
Google: “Linda Lichter” - o.k., she’s associated with the CMPA, they’re probably married
MT Third query: A link to CMPA - lots of hits - $2,000,000+ donated over the years, and a web site
Web site: confirmation that Richard and Linda are married
FAIR has a page on Richard Richter, linked to by MediaTransparency. It identifies CMPA as “a conservative media research group”; an exerpt from the report:
“The Center for Media and Public Affairs was founded in the mid-’80s by Robert and Linda Lichter, two academics who have made a career out of claiming to document leftist bias in the news media. Their stated mission was “to conduct scientific studies of how the media treat social and political issues,” and they put great stress on their claim to non-partisanship. “It’s not in a scholar’s blood to have an ideology,” Robert Lichter told the Washington Post (2/10/92).
ng and history belie this stance of objectivity. From 1986 to 1988, Robert Lichter was a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Fund-raising letters for the launch of the Center for Media and Public Affairs contained endorsements from leading right-wing figures like Ronald Reagan, Pat Buchanan, Ed Meese and Pat Robertson.
Note the AEI fellowship. CMPA was founded in 1985, by the way… which makes it another part of the new conservative infrastructure.
What does this all mean? Nothing much, other than a confirmation of some intuitive suspicions about Dye’s choice of information sources and internal biases, leading to a more critical reading (which I’ll write about later) than might otherwise be the case. The Lichter study he cites, while not discredited, needs to be discounted based on it’s source - Scaife is pretty particular about where his money is spent, and very focused.
