[lbo-talk] estimating the economic value of the right-wing pull of corporate media...

[Robert Naiman]

When Obama announced that he was not going to take public funding in
the general election, so as not to be bound by the spending limits,
Robert Parry had an op-ed in Consortium News noting that while
liberals were tinkering with the campaign finance rules, the right was
using its resources to carry out a long march through the the media
institutions.

Could one (crudely) estimate an economic value to the right-wing pull
of major media? In other words, with what deficit does a Democratic
Presidential candidate begin, if the candidate runs even slightly to
the left of the political line of the Washington Post, which trashes
Obama for supporting a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, even though
this is the position of the majority of Americans and Iraqis, the
majority of Congress, the majority of Iraqi parliamentarians? By how
much does such a candidate have to outspend his Republican opponent in
order to equalize, when this pull is taken into account?

Here are a few ideas to begin:

FAIR and others have done studies of the right-wing bias in the media.
One could estimate the economic value of the bias in those
institutions that have been studied in this way.

A friend who works at an NGO in Washington tells me that there's a
paid service you can subscribe to that tracks your appearances in the
media and reports an economic value for them (i.e. what would you have
had to pay if you purchased that time as advertising.)

Do folks have other ideas for how to go about estimating this?