Editor & Publisher, the heretofore placid trade magazine that is getting an edge under editor Greg Mitchell, takes on Paul Wolfowitz this morning, as did the even more placid Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post. Wolfie dissed the press in testimony on the Hill. And now he’s already issued an apology.
Now if he’s just issue a resignation.
Still, I’m not happy with E&P and its decision to study whether the media is liberal. Following the Pew report that conservatives have hyped relentlessly as proof of the media’s bias, E&P said it will conduct a study.
The evidence is thin, though Robert Samuelson in yesterday’s Washington Post column says the proof is there.
Rush Limbaugh has 14.5 million weekly listeners. According to Pew, 77 percent are conservative, 16 percent moderate and 7 percent liberal. Or take Fox’s 1.3 million prime-time viewers: 52 percent are conservative, 30 percent are moderate and 13 percent liberal. By contrast, 36 percent of Americans are conservative, 38 percent moderate and 18 percent liberal. The liberals’ media favorites are slightly less lopsided. The audience for “The NewsHour” is 22 percent conservative, 44 percent moderate and 27 percent liberal. NPR’s audience is 31 percent conservative, 33 percent moderate and 30 percent liberal. Of course, many news outlets still have broad audiences. Daily newspapers are collectively close to national averages; so is CNN.
First of all, the definitions are murky. What is a liberal? And then, Samuelson says the balanced audience of The NewsHour of PBS and the almost 1/3 split of the audience for NPR proves they’re biased liberally. I’m not so sure that’s proof. Or even makes sense.
But there goes E&P, with its shorts in a knot, worrying that the media is biased in favor of liberals. I can name at least three conservatively biased news/talk show hosts for every liberal one. In fact, the latter are few and far between. But conservatives point to every journalist who isn’t some sort of O’Reilly nut case and claim that because they’re not like him, they must be liberal.
Jay Rosen at Press Think has more than you could ever want to read about this.