New Report Exposes Corporate Media's Love Affair with Right-Wingers: 'Reporters Can't Get Enough of Them

Forget about fake moon-landings and Obama's birth certificate, the most enduring conspiracy theory in America is that the media -- along with the academy -- is hopelessly biased to the left. Yes, that's the same media that pushes relentlessly for "free trade" deals, foreign wars and fiscal "austerity." 

John Merline, opinion editor for AOL News, writes today that "when it comes to conservatives, reporters can't seem to get enough of them."

Indeed, a Pew Research Center survey found that of the top 10 most-covered candidates in the midterm elections, conservatives held the top three spots.

Here's more evidence. I asked AOL's Relegence team, which tracks more than 30,000 news sites on the Web, to compare coverage of comparable liberals and conservatives over the past 12 months.

The results are stark. Conservatives were featured in vastly more stories.

Check out the specific examples they studied over at AOL News.

To be sure, measuring the amount of coverage conservatives get doesn't tell you what the tone of that coverage was, but getting an opportunity to present one's side of a political value has a lot of value. I'm sure one of the reasons for the disparity -- which has been documented elsewhere as well -- is conservatives' constant whining about liberal media bias. They say it so loudly and so often, that reporters have a natural tendency to overcompensate -- it's gaming the ref.