Media bias and people who are WAAAY out on the political spectrum

Andrew Sullivan points to this research by Pew on how American’s view the bias of the major television networks.  It’s nicely summarised in this diagram (from Pew):

Public perceptions of news network ideology

Andrew makes the obvious and easy comment bashing on Fox:

Clearly the public understands that the network MSM is skewed to the left. But there’s a difference of magnitude between that assessment and that of Fox. Quite simply, most Americans see Fox for what it is: an appendage of a political operation, not a journalistic one. Its absurd distortions, its relentless attacks on Obama from the very start, its hideously shrill hosts, and its tawdry, inflammatory chat all put it in a class by itself.

Personally, I don’t necessarily agree that the MSM is, on average, biased to the left (although maybe that’s just my internal biases talking).  I’ll get to that in a moment, but first …

14% of respondents consider Fox News to be mostly liberal in it’s bias!  That’s almost one in seven.  Just how far out in the political spectrum are those people? What would Fox need to do to convince them that they were neutral?  Actively promote the KKK?

Back to perceptions of bias.  Here is another graphical illustration of the Pew Research data:

US Perceptions of MSM Bias (Pew)

It seems safe to assume that anybody who thinks Fox News is liberal will consider the rest liberal as well, so that explains a large fraction of the “liberal” responses for the rest.  So, excluding the people who are personally so conservative as to consider Fox News to have a pro-liberal bias, this is what it looks like:

US Perceptions of MSM Bias (excl. people who think Fox is liberal)

In other words, when we restrict our attention to people who are not insane [1], the American public agrees with me: by and large, the non-Fox networks are pretty evenly balanced, although MSNBC  is pro-liberal.

[1] Okay, they may not be insane.  I have no evidence than any larger fraction of them are insane than in the rest of the population.  But they do strike me as having some pretty whacky personal beliefs.