If It's Sunday, It's Conservative

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted February 24, 2006.

Last week, Media Matters released a study demonstrating empirically what we all knew from experience: the Sunday politics shows -- Meet the Press, This Week with George Stephanopoulos and Face the Nation -- skewed heavily towards right-wing guests. The Sunday gasbag fests influence the conventional wisdom far more than their audience -- about 10 million people per week -- would suggest. They shape the way our media frames the news, and determine who is and who is not a credible voice. Pols, reporters and other shows follow their lead.

The study, which analyzed almost 7,000 guests on the three shows during Clinton's second term and George W's first, is of course heresy to many. It directly challenged conservatives' most cherished belief that the "mainstream media" is hostile to conservatives, and that therefore, despite controlling all of the branches of government, having a stranglehold on corporate power and generally dominating the discourse on outlets like Fox and MSNBC, they are the beleaguered underdogs, the perennial victims of a pseudo-Socialist "media elite."

The central finding in the study [PDF] was that:

The balance between Democrats/progressives and Republicans/conservatives was roughly equal during Clinton's second term, with a slight edge toward Republicans/conservatives: 52 percent of the ideologically identifiable guests were from the right, and 48 percent were from the left. But in Bush's first term, Republicans/conservatives held a dramatic advantage, outnumbering Democrats/progressives by 58 percent to 42 percent.

The study's author, Paul Waldman, is a former editor of mine, a colleague on the Gadflyer blog and an occasional contributor to AlterNet's Echo Chamber. On Wednesday, I caught up with him over at Media Matters to get some followup on the study.

"Immediately, NBC blasted out a press release [on behalf of Meet the Press]," Waldman said. "What they did was they went back in their files to look up who had been on their show in the period before our study started, to the first Clinton term, to try to argue that what happened during the first Clinton term was an imbalance equivalent to the imbalance during the first Bush term."

The release, which called the Media Matters study "incomplete and misleading," didn't stand up to scrutiny. "They basically proved our point," said Waldman. "It turns out that there were more Democrats than Republicans during that period, but the imbalance was much larger during the first Bush term. So it's not just a matter of who's in power, there's something else going on."

ABC didn't respond to the study, but CBS's Vaughn Ververs jumped on Media Matters methodology on CBS's blog, the Public Eye.

Ververs wrote that "the most obvious and troubling" problem with Media Matters' methodology is "the intra-party dynamic. For example, while Media Matters says it classified former Democratic Sen. Zell Miller as a "conservative" for his role as an outspoken critic of his own party, the study also makes much of the fact that Republican Sen. John McCain has appeared 174 times in the period covered." For Ververs, McCain's not suitably obedient to the party line to qualify as a consistent conservative. "There's no doubt whatsoever that Miller supported President Bush's reelection and appeared on these programs as an advocate of his policies, particularly on the war. There's also no doubt that John McCain has built his career largely on being a "maverick" within his own party and someone the media traditionally turns to for Republican-on-Republican criticism."

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at AlterNet.

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