Three years ago, the legal scholar Richard Posner reached beyond his field of expertise and published his study of 546 public intellectuals, in which he included such well-known scholars as Ann Coulter and David Horowitz but somehow did not see fit to include Paul Berman, Alan Ryan, Ian Buruma, Simon Schama, David Kennedy, Tzvetan Todorov and Robert Hughes, among many others. These public intellectuals, I wrote at the time, ''belong not merely on a list of 546 but on any competent grouping one-tenth its size.'' After reading his 4,600-plus-word essay in the Book Review on media criticism, I see that as a guide to media bias, as well as public intellectual discourse, Professor Posner is a good lawyer.

Posner asserts that my friend Bill Moyers and I are guilty of ''hyperbole'' when we point to the right-wing domination of our media discourse during the Bush era. Naturally, I beg to differ. During the course of his essay, Posner asserts that ''most journalists are liberals'' and deploys the term ''liberal newspapers'' without evidence or definition. He cites the figure of 56 percent for journalists describing themselves as liberal, compared with 14 percent using the appellation among the American public. In fact, a May 2005 study by the Annenberg Center at the University of Southern California found just 31 percent of journalists describing themselves as ''liberal,'' while a June 2004 Wall Street Journal report put the number of self-described liberals among the American public at 21 percent. Both figures are consistent with other findings and nowhere near Posner's convenient, but highly suspect, statistics.

What's more, Posner's ideological sleight of hand does not address the definitions of the descriptive terms ''liberal'' and ''conservative.'' According to a May 2005 survey published by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, 65 percent of Americans who were questioned favor providing health insurance to all Americans, even if it means increasing taxes, and a full 86 percent say that they favor raising the minimum wage. Seventy-seven percent of those polled believe the country ''should do whatever it takes to protect the environment,'' while 63 percent subscribe to that view ''strongly.'' With regard to foreign policy, a May 2005 Rasmussen poll found that 49 percent of Americans say that President Bush is more responsible for starting the war with Iraq than Saddam Hussein, compared with only 44 percent who believe that it was Saddam Hussein's fault. During 2005, strong majorities of Americans polled have consistently expressed disapproval of the war and told pollsters they believe the Bush administration deliberately misled the nation into it. By similarly significant majorities, Americans believe the Iraqi incursion has made the nation less, rather than more, secure.

In the mainstream media, these views are considered so ''liberal'' as to be all but unspeakable, save for a few outliers like The Times's Frank Rich and Paul Krugman. (Note that not a single liberal is the host of his or her own cable shout fest, while conservatives not only dominate commercial TV but are taking over PBS as well.) Throw in the power of advertisers to dictate content in many outlets, the adverse effects of media consolidation on journalists who wish to ask tough questions of the powerful, and the Bush administration's extremely unfriendly attitude toward those journalists who do not toe its hard-right line, and you have a recipe for media that both frame and report the news in a manner that is well to the right of the views of most Americans, with little evidence of an apocryphal ''liberal bias.''

Posner, a sitting Federal appeals judge, writes books faster than most Americans, myself included, reads books -- his velocity aided by a distinct pre-set ideology (he apparently believes that almost everything about human life can be reduced to simple mathematics) through which he filters everything, enabling him to avoid time-consuming thoughtful analysis. To say that Posner lacks empathy is an understatement. One would think that such a flaw would be a fatal one for someone in his position.