Friday, March 26, 2004
 

That liberal press

I generally like the Columbia Journalism Review's Campaign Desk website for its efforts to differentiate facts from spin, but I do have a bone to pick with this entry by Brian Montopoli. In an attempt to see if newspapers are really keeping their editorial stances out of their news reporting, Montopoli looks at four newspapers to see what he can find. He picks "two 'Times' and two 'Posts'", the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Washington Times and the New York Post, on the theory that the NYT and the WP are "left-of-center" and the two others are on the right.

The thing is, has Montopoli actually read the editorial pages of the WaPo and, to a lesser extent, the Grey Lady lately? It's increasingly hard to see any remnants of "leftness" there at all. If I had to categorize them on the left-right spectrum, I'd say that they are both basically centrist and drifting to the right, the Post somewhat more so than the Times.

The rags of Rupert Murdoch and the Unification Church, on the other hand, are resoundingly, proudly, unfailingly right-wing, pure and simple. It's difficult to compare them to any similar major-market daily papers on the left because there are no American left-wing daily papers. To categorize the New York Times and the Washington Post as liberal, or left-of-center is to accept at face value a major piece of right-wing spin that's not supported by the facts, or by simple observation.

Postscript: Michael Tomasky (now editor of The American Prospect) made a similar error in his study of editorial page bias for the Shorenstein Center of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where the conservative papers selected were the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times, and the same two papers (the Washington Post and the New York Times) were picked as being liberal analogues. The same objection was raised then, and is just as valid (even more so) now.

(Tomasky's study is available here in PDF form, but Tim Noah summarized the findings in Slate.)

Aside: When did proper formatting of newspaper names change from, for instance, the New York Times and the Washington Post to the New York Times and the Washington Post? I have to think that the need for specific branding of media outlets in crowded Internet marketplace must be partly responsible. It's not enough that there be a muliplicity of newspapers named the Times and the Post which are differentiated only by their place of origin, each newspaper (especially powerhouses like the NYT and the WaPo) must have a specific and particular brand name in order to stand out from the crowd -- hence, the paper is no longer the Times of New York, it's the New York Times.

(See James Gleick's interesting article on names and the "namespace" in the New York Times Magazine for more insight on this.)

Ed Fitzgerald | 3/26/2004 12:47:00 AM | | | del.icio.us | GO: TOP OF HOME PAGE







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