Word: biases
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...evaluating a newspaper's performance, Rowse did much more than tally up the number of column inches a story received. He rightly states that length is one of the least important indications of bias. He asked a great many questions, such as: How soon after learning of a story did the paper print an account? Was it on the front page or an inside page? How prominently was it displayed? What was the size and wording of the headline? What was the tone and content of the story as it appeared? How were quotation marks used? Were there also front...
Rowse found the charges of news bias to be valid--in selection, in display and in tone--on both political sides, but preponderantly in the pro-Republican direction. He concluded that, "with the possible exception of the New York Times, all papers--both Republican and Democratic--showed evidence of favoritism in their news columns in violation of their own accepted rules of conduct," and that "almost every example of favoritism in the news columns coincided with the paper's editorial feelings." This "would indicate that over 80 percent of the nation's newspaper readers may be getting their editorials with...
Generally fair, but slightly biased (the first two in the Democratic direction, the rest in the Republican): Milwaukee Journal (bias mainly in front-page cartoons); St. Louis Post-Dispatch; Chicago Sun-Times; Kansas City Star; Cleveland Plain Dealer; New York Herald Tribune; Portland Oregonian; Christian Science Monitor...
...Strongly biased (all but the first pro-Republican): New York Post; Buffalo Evening News; Chicago Herald-American; Minneapolis Star (whose publisher professed belief in news "without bias or slant or distortion or suppression"); Boston Post (whose major efforts during the period were the championing of Senator McCarthy and the denunciation of the Boston Public Library for housing Russian literature); Detroit Free Press (which at the end of the period said it was "proud of its long record of unbiased coverage of the news"); Indianapolis Star; Los Angeles Times; New York Daily Mirror; New York Daily News (whose president said...
Rowse concludes his book with remarks on the problems of measuring bias. "The persons best qualified to evaluate newspaper fairness," he says, "are newspapermen themselves; yet they are unwilling to do this." He thinks that the next step is to set up regional panels of newspapermen who would meet periodically and rate each paper's performance...