Study: Conservatives Dominate Op-Ed Pages

This Media Matters report won't surprise you, but it should infuriate you. They actually contacted almost every daily newspaper in the U.S. on an individual basis to collect the data to show that conservatives are greatly over-represented in the opinion pages. On the plus side, I remember coming of age in the 90s just knowing this was true -- it was obvious -- but back then it seemed like there was hardly anyone willing to say or do anything about it. That, at least, has changed.

Still, the findings are depressing. For instance:

• Sixty percent of the nation's daily newspapers print more conservative syndicated columnists every week than progressive syndicated columnists. Only 20 percent run more progressives than conservatives, while the remaining 20 percent are evenly balanced.


• In a given week, nationally syndicated progressive columnists are published in newspapers with a combined total circulation of 125 million. Conservative columnists, on the other hand, are published in newspapers with a combined total circulation of more than 152 million.

The ten-thousand pound gorilla in all this is -- again, no surprise -- George Will, who reaches half of America's newspaper readers, which comes out to slightly more readers than Alien & Sedition reaches in an average millenium.

Editor & Publisher reports on the report; the article interviews Alan Shearer, editorial director of the Washington Post Writers Group, which syndicates Will and other columnists. Shearer suggests that the bias comes about largely because newspapers publishers themselves tend to have conservative leanings. MyDD's Shai Sachs offers a more nuanced analysis, examining the effects of regional variation and the syndication business -- noting that "the real winner is the Washington Post Writers Group."

Sachs does what a good political analyst should do: rather than complaining about the state of affairs, she asks: "Is there an opportunity for a liberal entrepreneur to step into this space and offer low-cost but popular progressive syndicated columnists?" This is an excellent question. The syndicates, as Sachs notes, are unimaginative and stagnant, offering the same fare nationwide and ignoring the growing wealth of online voices. This could present an opportunity:

I'd be very interested to see a liberal entrepreneur create a new syndicate to compete with the titans of the syndication industry. Certainly, the raw materials for such a company are in abundance: the progressive blogosphere is well-stocked with a diverse collection of intelligent, articulate writers who can give George Will and Cal Thomas a run for their money. Aside from a chorus of fresh progressive voices, such a syndicate could offer services like localization (helping newspapers identify columnists in their region), integration with social networking sites, and increased writer/reader interaction. No doubt, it would be tough to drum up business, but I think it would be an interesting experiment, and it could help restore balance on op-ed pages.

I can't stress enough how important this kind of thinking is (and, again, how different from the hopeless 90's). One of the most fundamental lessons one learns, studying the conservative movment, is that when a movement is shut out from existing institutions, it must innovate. This Media Matters report is an opportunity for progressives, not to complain about how unfair the world is, but to develop innovative strategies to get around that unfairness.

Labels: George Will, Media, MediaMatters, MyDD

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 8:57 AM 0 comments

  NY Times Ending "Times Select"

After two years, down comes the pay-wall:

In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free. [...]

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” Ms. Schiller said.

A good decision by the Paper of Record.

Labels: Media, New York Times

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 7:50 AM 26 comments

  This Is Why Everyone Hates the MSM

Seriously, what the hell is wrong with these people? Bad enough we've had to be subjected to years of vacuous chatter about which presidential candidates people would enjoy having beers with (despite the fact that neither of our last two presidents have actually been beer-drinkers). Now ABC, in all its investigatory splendor, demands that the public discuss whether we'd rather go on a road trip with Hillary or with Giuliani.

Christ.

For the record, neither. It would be weird and awkward and unpleasant to go on a road trip with either of them. I can't even imagine going on a road trip with Hillary Clinton or Rudy Giuliani. The hypothetical has no conceivable bearing on anything even approaching reality. You might as well ask whether I'd prefer Hillary or Rudy as a ham sandwich.

Yeah, I'm no fun. But really -- ugh.

Labels: ABC, Media

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 4:05 PM 2 comments

  Hating the Media, and Being It

Nicholas Beaudrot points us to this 1996 piece by James Fallows on "Why Americans Hate the Media." It's an excellent read, every bit as relevant today as it was a decade ago. Matt Yglesias says the whole thing is so good that it's hard to focus on any one particular part; I agree, but I'm going to highlight one passage anyway:

The natural instinct of newspapers and TV is to present every public issue as if its "real" meaning were political in the meanest and narrowest sense of that term—the attempt by parties and candidates to gain an advantage over their rivals. Reporters do, of course, write stories about political life in the broader sense and about the substance of issues—the pluses and minuses of diplomatic recognition for Vietnam, the difficulties of holding down the Medicare budget, whether immigrants help or hurt the nation's economic base. But when there is a chance to use these issues as props or raw material for a story about political tactics, most reporters leap at it. It is more fun—and easier—to write about Bill Clinton's "positioning" on the Vietnam issue, or how Newt Gingrich is "handling" the need to cut Medicare, than it is to look into the issues themselves.

It is easier and more fun to focus on the game as opposed to the issues; I'm no professional journalist but in my own blogging I know that whenever I'm feeling lazy or rushed, my work gets distinctly hackier. But perhaps more to the point, such a shallow approach -- because it's quicker and easier -- is much better suited to the media driving contemporary American political discourse. Fallows was writing in an era of talk radio and the 24-hour cable news cycle, but I bring this up because the internet -- particularly the blogosphere -- is subject to the very same pressures.

Writing about policy is labor-intensive and time-consuming. But cable news is based on feeding viewers a continuous and ever-changing stream of stories, varying content and getting it out there before competitors do. It's very similar in the blogosphere. The number one rule of blogging (which I've thoroughly violated over the past couple of weeks) is Thou Shalt Post. The equation is really simple, and bloggers know it: the more you post, the more readers you get. Post less, your traffic declines. It's practically a law of nature. Doing in-depth research and analysis means you can't keep up the stream of content necessary to make a dent in a vast blogosphere. That's not to say there aren't some bloggers who do very good in-depth work and find readerships willing to wait for it, but generally speaking they're swimming upstream.

Even the best blogger-journalists, meanwhile, retreat to game-analysis on a fairly regular basis. In part that's probably because political blog readers are more interested in that sort of thing than the general public. But given the ferocity of the blogosphere's media criticism, it's interesting to note how much we're subject to the same forces. As Fallows puts it, the tendency is that "all issues are shoehorned into the area of expertise the most-prominent correspondents do have: the struggle for one-upmanship among a handful of political leaders." A lot of bloggers do a much better job avoiding this trap than do the titans of TV news. But given the imperatives of our medium, it remains a trap into which we can fall, if we aren't careful.

Labels: blogosphere, Media

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 1:29 PM 1 comments

  The Power of Spam

Crazy right-wing chain e-mails take over our media, one small-town paper at a time.

To be fair, I think a lot of that stuff originates in the Wall Street Journal editorial offices.

Labels: five before chaos, general rightwing looniness, Media

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 4:37 PM 5 comments

  The Fairness Menace

The editors of the Washington Times are angry with Trent Lott for speaking out in favor of the immigration bill. But they're especially upset with the Mississippi Senator's criticism of right-wing talk radio (Lott told the NY Times that "Talk radio is running America. We have to deal with that problem.") -- because they fear his comments will undermine the right's case against revival of the Fairness Doctrine:

Mr. Lott's comments about the immigration bill are unfortunate in their own right. But his suggestion that talk radio is a problem that someone has to "deal with" because it makes it harder to ram the immigration bill through the Senate is even worse, because it raises the specter of reviving the "Fairness Doctrine" — the Federal Communications Commission policy (repealed in 1987 at President Reagan's urging) that effectively barred any serious political debate from occurring on the airwaves.

Paranoia about a return of the Fairness Doctrine has been a staple of conservative commentary over the past couple of years -- and no wonder, since the explosive growth of right-wing talk radio was a direct result of the Doctrine's repeal. Most recently, comments by Sen. Dianne Feinstein and a major report by the Center for American Progress have fueled the fire.

The fear is misguided: for instance, as Think Progress points out, the CAP report specifically did not call for revival of the Fairness Doctrine, instead suggesting that "we should address the more significant problem of concentrated ownership and ineffective regulation in order to push the market structure to better meet local needs." But if conservatives want to uphold their tradition of fighting the wrong war at the wrong time, perhaps that will give progressives a little more space to pursue more effective reforms.

Labels: Fairness Doctrine, Media

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:29 AM 2 comments

  Whatever You Say I Am, That's What I'm Not

So I was reading Michael Kinsley's review of Christopher Hitchens's new book on religion, and this passage jumped out at me:

The big strategic challenge for a career like this is to remain interesting, and the easiest tactic for doing that is surprise. If they expect you to say X, you say minus X.

Consistency is foolish, as the man said. (Didn’t he?) Under the unwritten and somewhat eccentric rules of American public discourse, a statement that contradicts everything you have ever said before is considered for that reason to be especially sincere, courageous and dependable. At The New Republic in the 1980s, when I was the editor, we used to joke about changing our name to "Even the Liberal New Republic," because that was how we were referred to whenever we took a conservative position on something, which was often. Then came the day when we took a liberal position on something and we were referred to as "Even the Conservative New Republic."

Ezra Klein noticed it, too:

It's remarkable that prominent journalists will simply admit that an easy way to attract a reputation for intellectual independence is to engage in an endless series of ideological repositionings, and this does not appear to give them pause. All due acclaim to Kinsley for writing it, but this is actually a problem, not just an endearing quirk in a noble profession.

Interesting that it was Kinsley who made this admission, since he has been one of the biggest enablers of this dirty journalistic habit. It's one of the major reasons why the New Republic under his guidance was so deeply irritating (the magazine is still struggling to escape from the pattern), and why Slate is so often annoying in exactly the same way. It's no coincidence, for instance, that Slate is the online home of Mickey Kaus, who has made a career of praticing this pseudo-contrarian schtick in one of its most obnoxious forms. The fact that writers like William Saletan and Hitchens himself have taken up residency at Slate is further evidence.

Progressive activists and bloggers, of course, are enraged -- justifiably so -- when we see the same practices employed by politicians and political operatives, which is why "centrists" like Joe Lieberman and the DLC crowd frustrate us so much. It isn't that they're centrists, it's that they're "look-at-me" knee-jerk contrarians who are perfectly happy to make their political fortunes by attacking their own obstensible allies -- a tactic they're able to employ since the pundits moderating the national debate are the very same ones who tend to think that such dime-store heresy is so interesting and commendable.

The whole thing goes a long way toward informing the gap in perception between liberals and conservatives over the so-called "liberal media." Conservatives see a mainstream media largely made up of individuals who are personally liberal -- though most often in superficial, lifestyle-y ways. Be that as it may, those same pundits, as Kinsley admits, have elevated knee-jerk contrarianism to a defining virtue of political reporting; and since they tend to be liberal-ish themselves, they consider it most "courageous" and "interesting!" to attack liberal leaders, activists, and ideas. Of course, other factors are at work here -- timidity, laziness, elitism, and financial imperatives -- but one can't help but think that if mainstream reporters and pundits found it most courageous to, say, doggedly seek the truth, or to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, those other obstacles might be overcome.

Labels: Media, Michael Kinsley

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:24 AM 0 comments

  Do Adjust Your Sets

No TWICO today - I just haven't had time. In part that's because I've been working on some exciting New York politics-related stuff, which (I hope) will be announcible within maybe a month or so.

So anyway, what about conservative humor? you ask. You didn't ask? Well, that's probably smart. I won't actually say that conservatives can't be funny - they've got South Park. But fifteen seconds of Julia Gorin makes me want to claw my eyeballs out, and I'm afraid that's more representative of the right's efforts at organized comedy. I've heard conservatives be quite funny in actual conversation. But, for the most part, television seems to bring out their mean-spirited and clueless sides.

So here's Vernon Lee, on the right's latest crime against comedy, which we were promised would be a conservative version of the Daily Show:

Perhaps all that Wingnut Welfare has made our brave men and women of the conservative fold soft.

For sadly, the creators seemed to have missed the point of TDS: its satire is not aimed at Republicans, it's aimed at the media and politics. (Republicans have largely dominated the political landscape, hence their overrepresentation in the goofball derby that is TDS.) Clearly, Jon Stewart is liberal; he endorsed John Kerry in 2004. And none would doubt that the show has a liberal slant.

But that's not because it attacks Republicans directly. Only indirectly. All of those Airhead Journo remotes - or better yet, faux remotes in front of greenscreen backdrops - are designed to mimic the vapidity that is our journalistic profession as practiced on teevee. And that is the heart and soul of TDS. [...]

The day conservatives leave the Barbra Streisand jokes behind is the day they lose their souls. (Or so they must believe.) But they wouldn't be losing their souls - they'd be gaining an audience.

Yeah, but I can never get enough Streisand jokes. And Michael Moore! Man, is he fat.

Labels: conservatives, Media, meta, Vernon Lee

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 3:43 PM 0 comments

  Are British Conservatives Gearing Up for a Culture War?

In a column at the Guardian today, Paul Dacre attacks the BBC's "cultural Marxism" - and predicts "an American-style backlash." It isn't the BBC per se he objects to - unlike American conservatives, who'll keep itching 'til they finally kill PBS and NPR. It's the content.

The BBC, Dacre argues, is supposed to be impartial. But instead, it has used "impartiality" as cover for a diet of left-wing propaganda. Not only has it supposedly failed to cover any of Labour's various scandals with sufficient zest, but it has set itself against conservative Britain altogether:

[W]hat really disturbs me is that the BBC is, in every corpuscle of its corporate body, against the values of conservatism, with a small "c", which, I would argue, just happens to be the values held by millions of Britons. Thus it exercises a kind of "cultural Marxism" in which it tries to undermine that conservative society by turning all its values on their heads.

Of course, there is the odd dissenting voice, but by and large BBC journalism starts from the premise of leftwing ideology: it is hostile to conservatism and the traditional right, Britain's past and British values, America, Ulster unionism, Euroscepticism, capitalism and big business, the countryside, Christianity and family values. Conversely, it is sympathetic to Labour, European federalism, the state and state spending, mass immigration, minority rights, multiculturalism, alternative lifestyles, abortion, and progressiveness in the education and the justice systems.

Whether Dacre's portrait is accurate is a matter somewhat beyond my capacity to judge. I catch the occasional half hour of BBC America, which is of course its own thing; the last time I was in Britain for a sustained period of time was during 2002-3, when it seemed that Channel 4 was going after the warmongers with more zeal than anyone else. But mine is a pretty limited sample. Of course, this kind of complaint is quite common in the United States. And as we like to say: reality has a liberal bias.

If the argument sounds familiar to Americans, that's part of Dacre's point. He sees the battle arriving on British shores:

How instructive to compare all this with what is happening in America. There, the liberal smugness of a terminally worthy, monopolistic press has, together with deregulation, triggered both the explosive growth of rightwing radio broadcasting that now dominates the airwaves and the extraordinary rise of Murdoch's rightwing Fox TV News service. Democracy needs a healthy tension between left and right, and nature abhors a vacuum. If the BBC continues skewing the political debate, there will be a backlash and I predict that what has happened in America will eventually take place in Britain.

Of course that explosion of talk radio and the rise of Fox News et al took place in a context Dacre fails to acknowledge. They happened only after a well-funded, ideologically disciplined conservative movement had been developing for a quarter century; the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine then set the demons free.

This is not to say that similar things couldn't happen in the UK. In fact, I'm very curious as to whether Britain has anything like a nascent conservative movement in the post-Goldwater model. I know there are British conservatives who would like to develop such a movement. But I haven't seen any signs yet of whether one actually exists.

But I suppose that's what I get for getting my news about Britain from the BBC.

Labels: BBC, Britain, conservatives Paul Dacre, Media

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 2:35 PM 0 comments

  N.Y. Times Unclear on the Concept

The headline is "House Tightens Disclosure Rules for Pet Projects." The article is about how the new Democratic Congress adopted new ethics rules.

The photo is of? Republicans.

Hey, Times! Who exactly is in the majority now?

Labels: Congress, Media, New York Times

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:29 AM 1 comments

  Fuss Magnets at Last

The New York Times gives us this report of one scene among many in today's Democratic takeover:

There were comparisons to “Alice in Wonderland,” “Star Trek,” “The Twilight Zone,” and all manner of clichés to convey the strangeness engulfing Washington this week as the Democrats prepared to assume control of Congress after 12 years in the minority wilderness. But nothing distilled the new aura of things like this conceit: Steny Hoyer, Rock Star.

“Here he comes, here he comes,” a member of the press throng effervesced when Mr. Hoyer of Maryland, the incoming House majority leader, strode into the room as if he owned the place. Which, in effect, he does — at least the larger, plusher office he is inheriting, which used to belong to Tom DeLay, Mr. Hoyer was compelled to point out. (Not that anyone’s keeping track.)

Mr. Hoyer surveyed the conference room and held his arms slightly apart, as if to frame the unusual site before him: a crush of 60 or so reporters, camera operators, TV types and assorted security people, staff members and hangers-on to befit the status of an emerging fuss magnet.

It's both funny and, inasmuch as it reminds us of the breadth of political egos, sort of irritating. But it's also really important.

For six years we have been told, again and again, that the Democrats had no agenda, no plan, no ideas. While there was some truth to the Democratic identity crisis, the major blame for this perception lay in the fact that the American media simply do not cover minority parties. If you don't have the power to make something happen, you're simply not interesting. In a great piece at the Washington Monthly last May, Amy Sullivan discussed this phenomenon:

When reporters do write about Democratic victories, they often omit the protagonists from the story completely, leaving readers to wonder why Republicans would change course out of the blue. A Washington Post article about the Ethics Committee rule change simply noted that "House Republicans overwhelmingly agreed to rescind rule changes," in the face, apparently, of phantom opposition. Or journalists give credit to maverick Republicans rather than acknowledge the success of a unified Democratic effort: The Associated Press covered Bush's reversal on Davis-Bacon by writing, "The White House promised to restore the 74-year-old Davis-Bacon prevailing wage protection on Nov. 8, following a meeting between chief of staff Andrew Card and a caucus of pro-labor Republicans." Or Bush is blamed for his own defeats, without any mention of an opposition effort, as with Social Security privatization.

Nor are reporters paying attention to Democratic policy proposals, as the party tries to develop a national agenda to run on. Congressional press secretaries say that reporters won't write about their efforts unless or until Democratic legislation comes up for serious consideration. "A lot of reporters tell me, 'Yeah, I'll write about that when it's on the floor,'" complained the Democratic communications director for a Senate committee. "So then some columnist writes that Democrats have no ideas and everybody in America says, 'You're right--I haven't read about any.'"

As a result, it's easy for talking heads to paint Democrats as a bunch of complainers who attack Republicans while putting forward no ideas of their own.

This is a vicious circle in American politics, the trap that parties fall into when, lacking power, they fail to set the agenda - and, by failing to set the agenda, are unable to gain power. If none of your policy proposals stand any chance of becoming law, why would America's lazy and star-struck journalists report about them?

It seems the only way this particular narrative is going to change is with a Democratic victory in November. "They'll have to pay attention to us if we win," [Rep. Louise] Slaughter told me.

That's why "Steny Hoyer, Rock Star" is such a big deal.

Labels: Amy Sullivan, Congress, Democrats, Media, Washington Monthly

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 2:32 PM 0 comments