The left gets it right

It appears some researchers have found a way to quantify liberal bias found in U.S print and TV news media. Last year in a study called, “A Measure of Media Bias," Tim Groseclose of UCLA and Jeffrey Milyo of the University of Missouri found it was possible to pick out more objectively the political inclinations of news publishers and broadcasters using a statistical technique that's like the U.S. Congressional voting records. The findings?

The Wall Street Journal ranked highest left off center (85.1 - the higher the score the more liberal), followed by New York Times (73.7)and CBS Evening News (73.7). [More here]

So it was refreshing to read that Wall Street Journal has something nice to say about Iraq for a change. The feature titled, The New Iraq: So Much For The Argument That the Arabs Don’t Want Democracy is no gushing prose, but it admits that the recent elections proved the terrorists were an unpopular minority rejected by the majority of Iraqis:

The world won't know for a week or longer which candidates won yesterday's historic Iraq elections, but we already know the losers: The insurgents. The millions of Iraqis who defied threats and suicide bombers to cast a ballot yesterday showed once and for all that the killers do not represent some broad "nationalist" resistance.

The true Iraqi patriots are those who risked their lives to vote, apparently in much larger numbers than anticipated. "I would have crawled here if I had to," 32-year-old Samir Hassan, who lost a leg in a car-bomb blast last year, told Reuters. "I don't want terrorists to kill other Iraqis like they tried to kill me." Yesterday's coverage on TV and in print was full of similar comments from Iraqis--which is especially notable since so much of the Western press has been anticipating a much worse outcome.

Read the rest of it here. It's not the end of terror, but it sure is a step forward.