Commentary

Our 2020 Coverage Emphasized 'Right,' Not 'Left'

Normally, I don't comment on comments from readers, especially when they are politically partisan in tone. But I was inspired by one yesterday grousing about our coverage of Nielsen data showing the top 10 local TV advertisers leading up to the election.

The ranking was dominated by Joe Biden, the Democratic National Committee and various PACs. For some reason, this elicited a "give it a rest" comment from one reader who implied we have a politically biased skew, although it was a straightforward sum-up of Nielsen quants.

I understand the perception that MediaPost's coverage is politically skewed, and I know that my own opinion-based commentary -- especially these Red, White & Blogs -- have contributed to them. But if anything, I have asked our editorial staff and even some of our op-ed contributors to bend over backwards to be, as they say, "fair and balanced."

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And since it's the end of an epic year that also included an unprecedented amount of political discord, I figured it was a good time to analyze how our coverage netted out. And while I know that quantitative rankers obscure the nuance of editorial coverage, I think it might not be possible to actually provide an objective assessment of our subjectiveness. So sticking with the quants, here's what I found.

"Right" garnered nearly four times the coverage as "Left" published by MediaPost in the last year, while "Center" was somewhere in between.

If you don't deem that a directionally significant finding, how about these explicitly political partisan terms? "Conservative" generated more than twice the coverage of "Liberal" references, while "Mainstream" was somewhere in between.

Since we are a media-centric business publisher (hence our name, "MediaPost"), I did find that The New York Times over-indexed all other news publishers by a wide margin, which surprised even me, given how many times I personally cited Fox News this past year. On the plus side, there were relatively few references to Sinclair, Newsmax, and OAN.

Looking at broader societal terms associated with 2020's political spectrum, the good news is that "diversity" and "justice" indexed the highest. The bad news is that "anti-Semitism" ranked third, followed by "racism."

"Democracy" ranked in the middle, while "Nazi" and "White Supremacy" were also-rans.

Speaking of diversity, "Black" overwhelming dominated our diversity references, followed by "White," "Hispanic," "Asian," and "LGBTQ." Though my personal favorite new diversity term is "neurodiversity," which got only two references on MediaPost in 2020. Must have something to do with the way we are wired.

3 comments about "Our 2020 Coverage Emphasized 'Right,' Not 'Left'".
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  1. Dan Ciccone from STACKED Entertainment, December 31, 2020 at 4:17 a.m.

    "I understand the perception that MediaPost's coverage is politically skewed, and I know that my own opinion-based commentary...have contributed to them. But if anything, I have asked our editorial staff and even some of our op-ed contributors to bend over backwards to be, as they say, "fair and balanced."

    Or you can lead by example as Editor in Chief instead of asking your staff to do the right thing so you can post your political bias all week. 


    How is coverage defined here?  Is it actually coverage of these topics or is it just mentions of these terms in Mediapost?  Did you just use the MP search tool for these mentions?  How did you qualify external news outlets for mentions? WIth all of these questions, what does it mean for marketers?  Why should we care? Perhaps this should have been an internal exercise to evaluate how and why Mediapost is offering so much political and social commentary vs. industry commentary.

    ABOUT MEDIAPOST.COM - Since 1996, Mediapost.com has been the largest and most influential media, marketing and advertising site on the net, providing news, blogs, directories to help our community of more than 150,000 members better plan and buy both traditional and online advertising. 

    How does this commentary, or any of your other commentary, help us better plan and buy media?


     

  2. Carl Gottlieb from Retired, December 31, 2020 at 11:33 a.m.

    Media Matters? Really? You posted a piece by a far left political astroturfing group as journalism. 

  3. Charles Pierce from Private, January 2, 2021 at 6:56 p.m.

    1) Mentioning a term is not the same as quantifying the bias around the mention.


    2) I find your daily summary email to be a good source of indsutry news, etc. I will say that out of all the pieces in the daily newsletter, I can't recall one Pro-Trump piece, although a few explicitly criticized Trump, which would make the overall bias to be "left leaning", or at least anti-Trump. President Trump is not a true conservative (asking for increased stimulus payments that the Democrats fully supported is a liberal approach, as a recent example).


    3) Overall, I think we live in a media environment where all media will be biased. There is no true "just the facts, m'am" reporting - choosing what to report on is itself a bias. However, overall your media reporting is valuable even though it has some critical opinion pieces on the President.

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