A Conservative is a Conservative ...
But a Liberal is a
'Progressive'? 'Forward Looking'?

"The problem is endemic." "Pernicious" even.

That's the assessment the conservative (note bene) Hoover Institution's David W. Brady and student Jonathan Ma reached and reported on the conservative (note bene) Wall Street Journal editorial page on Nov. 12.

They reviewed Washington Post and New York Times articles published between 1990 and 2003 for references to the 10 most liberal and 10 most conservative U.S. senators, using an established methodology for determining which senators to study.

"We found that conservative senators earn 'conservative' labels from Times reporters more often than liberal senators receive 'liberal' labels," they wrote: just under 4 percent of the Times stories called a liberal senator a liberal, but just over 9 percent of its stories making a distinction used the "c word" to characterize the conservative senators. "It appears clear that the news media assumes conservative ideology needs to be identified more often that liberal ideology does," they concluded. The authors found also that liberals often are presented "in a more favorable light than conservatives."

"We have detected a pattern of editorialized commentary throughout the decade. Liberal senators were granted near-immunity from any disparaging remarks regarding their ideological position." Not so conservatives though, and their study found the Post to suffer many the same problems as the Times.

"Our preliminary results for other papers –- USA Today, the San Diego Union Tribune, the Los Angeles Times –- reveal similar patterns to those described above," they wrote. "The major exception is The Wall Street Journal and even here the labeling of conservatives to liberals is a little less than two-to-one."

"One can conclude fairly from this survey that conservative senators, consistently portrayed as spoilers, are ill-served by the political reporting in two of the leading general-interest newspapers of the United States. Liberals, on the other hand, get a free pass. If this is not bias, pray what is?"