Myth of the Liberal Media

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In a careful 1999 study published in the academic journal Communication Research, four scholars examined the use of the “liberal media” argument and discovered a fourfold increase over the past dozen years in the number of Americans telling pollsters that they discerned a liberal bias in their news. But a review of the media’s actual ideological content, collected and coded over a 12-year period, offered no corroboration whatever for this view. The obvious conclusion: News consumers were responding to “increasing news coverage of liberal bias media claims, which have been increasingly emanating from Republican Party candidates and officials.”

As GOP chair Rich Bond admitted, the right is working the refs. And they’re getting results. Much of the public believes an unsupportable myth about the so-called liberal media, and the media themselves have been cowed by conservatives into repeating these nonsensical nostrums virtually nonstop.

Even the conservative pundits, who constantly complain about alleged liberal control of the media, cannot ignore the vast advantage they enjoy when it comes to airing views on television, in the opinion pages, on the radio and the Internet. Take a look across the landscape of American punditry—the Sunday talk shows, the cable chat fests, the op-ed pages and opinion magazines, and the radio talk shows. Unabashed conservatives dominate this world, leaving the few lonely liberals to be beaten up by gangs of marauding right-wing bullies, most of whom voice views much further toward the hard-right end of the spectrum than any regularly televised liberals do toward the left. Grover Norquist, the right’s brilliant political organizer, explains his team’s advantage. “The conservative press is self-consciously conservative and self-consciously part of the team,” he notes. “The liberal press is much larger, but at the same time it sees itself as the establishment press. So it’s conflicted. Sometimes it thinks it needs to be critical of both sides.” Think about it. Who among the liberals can be counted upon to be as ideological, as relentless, and as nakedly partisan as George Will, Robert Novak, Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, William F. Buckley, Sean Hannity, William Kristol, and the self-described “wild men” of The Wall Street Journal editorial pages?

Liberals are not as rare in the print punditocracy as in television, but their modest numbers nevertheless give the lie to any accusations of liberal domination. Of the most prominent liberals writing in the nation’s newspapers and opinion magazines—Garry Wills, E.J. Dionne, Richard Cohen, Robert Kuttner, Robert Scheer, Paul Krugman, Bob Herbert, Mary McGrory, Molly Ivins—not one enjoys or has ever enjoyed a prominent perch on television. Michael Kinsley did for a while, but only as the liberal half of Crossfire’s tag team, and Kinsley, by his own admission, is not all that liberal. The Weekly Standard and National Review editors enjoy myriad regular television gigs of their own. Columnists Mark Shields and Al Hunt also play liberals on television, but always in opposition to conservatives.

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