The Elephants' Playground

One of the more baffling phrases in American pop culture is “the liberal media.” In fact, study after study has found that the news media and their employees are conservative in an absolute sense, and more conservative than the American public. This not surprising if you simply assume that the giant corporations that control our supply of news and entertainment are rationally pursuing the self-interest of their owners.

For many years, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has been studying news media bias by doing content analyses. The latest issue of their magazine, Extra, contains an analysis by Peter Hart of the guest list of the four most popular Sunday morning talk shows—Meet the Press (CBS), Face the Nation (NBC), This Week (ABC) and Fox News Sunday—from June 2011 through February 2012 (eight months). These are the people who get the opportunity to sit down at the table and present their political views to the public on network TV. (Unfortunately, this study is not available online.)

The guests on these programs fall into two categories: one-on-one interviews and roundtable discussions (segments with more than one guest). Guests were coded by profession, gender and race. Overall, 47% of the appearances were by politicians, and most of the rest (43%) were by journalists. Politicians were coded by party. Non-politicians who have clear ideological leanings were coded as liberal, i.e., Paul Krugman, or conservative, i.e., George Will.

Conservatives rule. Of the 264 people who were interviewed one-on-one, 236 were affiliated with American political parties. 166 (70%) were Elephants and 70 (30%) were Jackasses. (The remaining 28 unaffiliated people were considered too small a sample to analyze.) Of the 647 roundtable guests, 289 were politicians—180 (62%) Elephants and 109 (38%) Jackasses. Of the remaining 358 nonpoliticians, 102 (28%) were conservatives, 55 (15%) were liberals, and 201 (56%) were centrist or unclassifiable. To summarize, of the 393 roundtable guests presumed to have ideological leanings, 268 (68%) were either Elephants or conservatives, and 125 (32%) were Jackasses or liberals. (I realize it makes little sense to call many of these Jackasses “liberals” and perfect sense to label all of the Elephants “conservatives,” but that's a story for another day.)

The experience of actually watching these programs is one in which primarily conservative guests are interviewed by mostly centrist journalists. Progressives need not apply. Largely absent from the discussion were representatives of nonprofit or public interest groups—civil rights, labor, environmental, etc.—whose views are obviously of little interest.

White men also rule. The one-on-one interviewees were 92% white and 86% male. (Seven of the 15 African-American interviewees were Herman Cain. The media love black conservatives, since they give the visual appearance of balance without the reality.) The roundtable guests were 85% white and 71% male. During part of the study period, This Week was hosted by Christiane Amanpour. She took a different approach, featuring more international news, and having more women and people of color as guests. After less than a year, she was quietly dumped.

Since FAIR is a liberal organization, we might question whether the study itself is biased. However, most of the data collection leaves little room for error. The only subjective judgment is the classification of the nonpolitician guests as liberals, conservatives or centrists. But the results of this analysis are so consistent with the other findings of this and previous studies that I see no obvious reason to question their validity.

These results are similar to many previous analyses which find conservative dominance of political talk on all networks, including PBS. When Elephants are in the White House, this is usually justified by a need to focus on what people in power are doing. When the Jackasses are in power, the rationale changes. In this case, it could be argued that several Elephants were competing for the presidential nomination and therefore making news. However, Hart notes that a survey conducted during the most relevant comparison period, 2003-2004, when several Jackasses were hoping to run against George W. Bush, found the usual Elephant/conservative dominance.

The reality is that no matter who is in power and what is going on in the world at the time, conservatives dominate the television guest list. Some of them will no doubt be heard complaining about the “liberal” media.