Progressive media watchdog group, Media Matters, published a study this morning claiming that syndicated conservative columnists are taking over the world— or at least dominating the op/ed pages of your newspaper.
With a mission statement dedicated to “comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media,” you’ve gotta read the findings critically. Yet the study is thorough and the evidence compelling. Question is: What are all those “liberal media” editors doing running all those “right-wing nut job” columns? Do the righties have better agents? Do they draw more readers? Is a right-leaning column the print equivalent of platinum blond hair on TV— vanishing wrinkles and making the news seem more sexy?
Images: white-guy top columnists, left to right: Cal Thomas, George Will and David Brooks, syndicated in respectively 306, 328 and 90 U.S. newspapers.
Tags: syndicated columnists
As you noted, the study was done by a self-described progressive (i.e., liberal) think tank, so their results claiming a conservative bias should be looked at with great skepticism. It’s pretty easy to set up a study with statistics to prove just about anything you want and this looks like a good example of that.
The most remarkable item of the raw data is APPENDIX 2: COLUMNISTS RANKED BY AVERAGE CIRCULATION. Only two of the top ten, and only five of the top twenty columnists are conservative. Eight of the top ten columnists are liberal. On the other hand, papers with smaller circulations are dominated by conservatives. This is no surprise since big cities tend to be more liberal, and small towns are more conservative. What Media Matters has conveniently done is to NOT count any local, non-syndicated columnists, which one could reasonably assume would be overwhelmingly liberal (because large papers, which have 80% liberal syndicated columnists, would be much more likely to have local staff columnists, since they can afford them, while small papers would rely mostly or solely on syndicated columnist). This single omission in itself would likely sway the results to a completely different conclusion.
As it is, the data from Media Matters prove only that the total circulation of nationally syndicated columnists tend to reflect the similar balance of left vs. right leanings of the American public. (Actually, the columnists are still more left leaning than the public, although just slightly.) The latest Ipsos poll from April of 2007 shows that Americans still describe themselves to be conservative over liberal 38% to 30%, which is a big drop from the last poll –no surprise considering the terrible presidency of W. Compare that to any poll of how journalists view themselves and you will see a huge difference. (The last Pew poll of journalists that I’ve seen has 34% self-described liberal, and only 7% conservative.)
Frankly, I’m pretty fed up with both the left and right whining about conservative or liberal biases in the media. What’s driving major papers today is not really idealogy, but money — and hence sensationalism. I long for the days of Walter Conkrite where journalistic integrity seemed to be the norm.