ABSTRACT
A signifi cant majority of the public believes the news media are biased and of these, most see the tilt as liberal. This is likely because the dominant discourse in American politics supports the assumption that the news and editorials produced by leading national media-the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, AP, UPI, NPR, ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN-tend systematically to support the left, which suggests that when it comes to the issue of media bias, those same allegedly liberal media support the conservative line.1 The purportedly liberal media appear to consistently slant in favor of conservatives’ preferred framing when the media themselves are on the agenda as a political issue. That seems a strange exception for liberally biased media to make. Yet make it they do.
