Freakonomics and contradicting yourself

Part of Levitt and Dubner's Freakonomics franchise is a bi-weekly podcast. The most recent episode talks about economics and political science research into media bias, among other things, research based on Tim Groseclose's measure of ideology called the Political Quotient. Here are two quotes from the show:

Groseclose’s argument, based on his research, is that most news organizations empirically lean to the left, although not as dramatically as some critics might suspect. He ultimately wrote up his findings in a book called Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind. Now, how did he come to that conclusion -- that the American Mind is being distorted by media bias? Well, Groseclose combined his own findings and existing research to calculate that the average American voter has a “natural” PQ, or Political Quotient, of around 25-30, which is firmly in the conservative range. But, as Groseclose sees it, the left-leaning media pulls some of those naturally conservative voters into the center. Which is why we generally vote about 50-50. Without media bias, Groseclose says, we’d be a much different country.

...and then later on:

(...) having categorized all this language along Democratic and Republican lines, Gentzkow and Shapiro looked at how often a given newspaper used these signature phrases. And from that, they were able to determine each newspaper’s political slant. But it was the next step that really mattered: figuring out where a slant comes from. In other words, is it that reporters have a bias that gets into their stories, or maybe newspaper owners demand a certain line of coverage? They looked into these factors and more -- including one very clever indicator: the voting patterns of the people who read a particular newspaper. Their finding? The most important factor driving the slant of a given newspaper is … the political leanings of the people who buy it. In other words: newspapers are giving the people the news that they want.

The show presents both these findings as take-home points, which is preposterous since at least prima facie they are in blatant contradiction to each other. Now there may very well be an explanation as to how those things can both be true; but Dubner and Levitt seem to think there isn't anything to explain in the first place. (Arguing that the average media consumer is more left-leaning than the average citizen doesn't work because how could the media then be "distorting the American mind"?)

C'mon guys, you gotta do better than that.