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While accusations of media bias have long been a staple of partisan discourse, a number of issues have generally undermined their scholarly validity. While some have unearthed specific instances of biased story construction or patterns of bias in news content, these examples tend to be undermined by the inherent subjectivity of defining "bad" news. Moreover, these studies are generally unable to test for selection bias because they cannot observe the characteristics of stories that were not selected for broadcast. This study is designed to overcome these problems and allow for a more comprehensive test for detecting bias in television news. In particular, this study examines coverage of presidential approval polls on Fox News's flagship news program, Special Report, as well as on ABC's, CBS's, and NBC's evening newscasts over the last decade. The results provide substantial evidence for bias in the news choices across the four news outlets, although somewhat surprisingly, the results are stronger for some of the networks than for Fox.

"We [Democrats] stayed off FOX for a long time because your news department is, in fact, biased . . . there are some things in the news department that have really been shockingly biased, and I think that's wrong. And I'll just say so right up front."

- Howard Dean, appearing on Fox News Sunday, May 4, 2008

"I think Fox News has come on the scene and identified itself as 'fair and balanced.' We try to do that every day. I think others, instead of trying to get more fair and balanced, probably are offended by that or worried about it . . . What they're trying to do is say that Fox News is mixing opinion and fact. That's just simply not true . . . Bias can be a lot of different ways - story selection, story placement, story emphasis ... I looked at other people's polls, national polls, and most of the people thought the news was either biased or boring or both. And they generally thought it was biased in one direction."

- Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes, interview with C-SPAN's Brian Lamb, 2004

For many decades, Republicans have repeated a mantra alleging that the media as a whole are biased against their party and their...

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