Mainstream media have lost their value for news

But their ideological biases may give us clues to election outcomes

The days of Walter Kronkite or Huntley-Brinkley are long since gone. In those days, mainstream media was a reliable source of news, free from newcasters “fake news” or ideological bias. Even CNN under Ted Turner was a worldwide favorite cable channel in every airport, hotel room or public venue at home or abroad. If you wanted to know what was happening, turn to CNN.

Today CNN (although it is trying to change course) is decidedly left wing as is its alter ego MSNBC, riddled with “anchors” who would rather make things up than report the news and who will overtly suppress stories that interfere with the narrative being advanced by their ideological leaders. The suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, the “fake news” of Trump’s Russian collusion, and the void in coverage of the violent BLM and Antifa riots throught the “summer of hate” following George Floyd’s death were neither extreme nor extraordinary examples of left wing bias, just the daily and sustained effort to suppress conservative voices and promote the progessive agenda of the Democrats and their socialist wing.

For its part, FOX News was decidely right wing, but at least took pains to ensure strong leftist voices like Juan Williams or Leslie Marshall were present as a counterpoint to pro-Republican spin on the news.

Now the mid-term elections are a short two weeks away, and both Democrats and Repubicans claim that “democracy” is on the ballot with both sides of the aisle alleging the other party is a threat to democracy even as a democratic election looms. The spin doctors are no doubt hard at work writing speeches to explain how their favorite candidate was “robbed” “cheated” or otherwise done out of a “fair and free” election and would have won by a landslide had the process been fair. It was ever thus in U.S. politics but never more so than today.

Even the pollsters exhibit bias, shading their polls not by misrepresenting their results but by careful choice of who is being polled. Do a poll in Italy close to the Vatican and try to get a result that does not support a claim that the Pope is in personal contact with God on a first-name basis, or a poll in Tuktoyaktuk that doesn’t find First Nations have suffered abuse since colonialization at the hands of the colonizers. Do a poll in Compton or Watts and try to find an outcome that is not peppered with “racism” and “white supremacist” epithets.

Oddly, for whatever reason, actual election outcomes tend to favor Republicans by about 2 percentage points over the predicted outcomes by the pollsters, and in Canada the actual election outcome typically has the Liberals lagging in popular vote when the polls have them leading, but owing to Canada’s gerrymandered ridings, winning a disproportionately high number of seats in Parliament despite low numbers in the popular vote.

The Las Vegas bookmakers are better at placing the odds than the pollsters anyway. Nothing like having a bit of money on the line to get objective results. The odds of the Republicans winning the House in 2022 were 82% in November 2021, according to the Lines. That may have been the height of Joe Biden’s popularity since election.

A lot has changed since last November and those odds have changed as well, but not in a way the Democrats will celebrate. Bonus.com puts the odds of a Republican sweep of both houses of Congress at 71% and of at least the House of Representatives at over 90%.

I have found a “somewhat reliable” poll that is not a poll at all. The lack of objectivity in mainstream media suggests that voters subscribe to the channel which best comprises an “echo chamber” for their own political wishes. Left wing voters subscribe to CNN and MSNBC or both of them, and conservatives follow FOX. The ratings of these media channels has its own clues, and since the “sample size” is much larger than any of the pollsters (millions, not just a couple of thousand) the results are likely more reliable. The most recent rating I have seen measures viewship as follows:

FOX 2.2 million viewers
CNN 1.3 million viewers
MSNBC 0.7 million viewers

Those data tend to suggest the mid-terms will be closer than most think since the FOX viewership should be compared to CNN and MSNBC combined. There are other news outlets but their subscribers are not as polarized as these three based on data from PEW Research in 2019. A more nuanced analysis which I was too lazy to attempt would be to multiply these percentages by the number of viewers or subscribers for each of the listed media to pin down how many actual voters leaned to one side of the aisle or the other.

The mid-term races are close enough that I decided not to be tempted to bet on the outcome but if I were compelled to make a prediction I would bet Republicans take the House of Representatives and the Senate remains divided.