Glenn Beck, I'm an entrepreneur. I am a reluctant, believe it or not, commentator and dad.

Alright, now to the theme of our conversation today, when I say media bias, you say what?

Yes.

From WNYC and APM American Public Media, this is Frickonomics Radio. Today, how biased

is your media? And how do we know? Here's your host, Stephen Dupner.

Let's say that Glenn Beck is right, that the news media is biased, whatever exactly that

means. Now, before you start foaming at the mouth, because I know that's what you're going

to do, let me just say that you'll also hear from someone on the other side of the aisle,

someone who sees things very differently.

I don't know where to begin, and you're just trying to go completely ridiculous, I think

that is. I mean, pick a spot and begin. Well, I mean, I don't...

That's Andrew Rosenthal.

I'm the editorial page editor of The New York Times, which means I'm in charge of the editorials.

We'll hear more from Rosenthal later, but first, let's get back to the assertion that

media bias is real and that it's a real problem. How do you prove that? How do you measure

something like media bias, rather than just opine or gloveate about it? Here's Steve Levit.

He's my Frickonomics friend and co-author.

So, measuring media bias is a really difficult endeavor, because unlike what economists usually

study, which are numbers and quantities, media bias is all expressed in words.

And so, in the last five or ten years, there have been some really tremendous advances

in how we think about text as data. So, how we take words and transform words into

quantitative measures. And at the forefront of this endeavor have been people like Jeff

...