Back in September, Media Matters came out with a report entitled, “Black and White and Re(a)d All Over,” which was the result of a study of syndicated op-ed columns from newspapers across America. True, this is a little over 2 months old, but this blog is not even 2 weeks old….and this is just too relevant to ignore. The results were not a surprise to people like myself, but certainly come into conflict with the long, unchallenged notion of a “liberal” media.
Lowell Feld at Raising Kaine, waded through the numbers, and looked at just the results from Virginia newspapers. In the Free Lance-Star, conservative viewpoints account for 67% of the editorial content…and that’s by far the worst in the commonwealth. After the FLS, the Harrison Daily News-Record, the Virginian-Pilot, and the Richmond Times-Dispatch round out the top 4. Only 2 VA papers, the Roanoke Times and the Bristol Herald-Courier, have a lop-sided progressive slant…but neither is as as bad as our local Fredericksburg rag publication.
Of course this study doesn’t even mention the overwhelmingly right-wing opinions that dominate the airwaves. Talk radio pretty much speaks for itself, conservatives practically invented the genre. Randi Rhoads has a good following, and Al Franken had a good thing going for a while…but it’s the Rush Limbaughs of the world who own the dial. Not just in sheer size of their audience, but in the number of personalities as well.
Television is about the same. We know about Fox News’ obvious right-wing bias, but CNN and MSNBC have given us the melodious musings of Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, and Oliver North among others. Right now the left is loving MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, but, well, that’s about it. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are loved by many on the left, but that’s not hard when you’ve got the Bush administration to poke fun at. In fact, I know many a Republican who used to loooove The Daily Show during the Clinton years (but good luck getting any of them to admit it today…’cause, ya know, it hurts that whole “liberal media” narrative).
Filed under: Local Media, National Media
