Reading articles in most of the major daily newspapers will rarely, if ever, give you an indication of partisan bias. Reporters, now more than ever, are sensitive to accusations about “taking sides” and most go out of their way to play it straight. I would argue that sometimes they play it too straight, but that’s another story for another post.
If you want to get a sense of a paper’s ideology, however, news articles aren’t the place to look — the editorial page is. That’s where the paper, or more accurately the paper’s editors, will articulate positions that reflect the beliefs of those who run the publication.
The New York Times, for example, is widely recognized — fairly or unfairly — as a “liberal” paper. Times critics will attempt to prove their point with editorials that, more often than not, reflect a left-leaning ideology. The Wall Street Journal, considered a conservative paper, is the mirror opposite. Like the Times, Journal critics don’t point so much to news articles, which are generally very good, as they do the paper’s luridly right-wing editorial page.
Michael Tomasky, the soon-to-be executive editor of The American Prospect, came up with an interesting question: are liberal papers as liberal as conservative papers are conservative? Tomasky’s research, conducted with Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, came to some interesting conclusions.
Conservative editorial pages such as the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times, Tomasky found, are “far less willing to criticize a Republican administration than liberal pages are willing to take issue with a Democratic administration.” The so-called liberal papers are far more inclined to criticize other liberals while conservatives are loyal to those who share their ideology.
It’s like Reagan’s “11th Commandment” — Republicans shall not criticize other Republicans in public — adopted at a journalistic level.
How did Tomasky go about researching this question? He took four newspapers — the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, the Washington Post, and the New York Times — and reviewed 510 editorials on 10 pairs of comparable incidents during Clinton’s presidency and Bush’s.
To keep things fair, Tomasky immediately discounted extraordinary events. For example, editorials on Clinton’s Lewinsky affair were not considered because there was no comparable scandal with Bush. Likewise, editorials on Bush’s handling of the 9/11 terrorist attacks were put aside because no comparable crisis occurred during Clinton’s term.
There were, however, plenty of similarly controversial incidents. For example, when Hillary Clinton led an administration task force on shaping a new health care policy, the panel was widely criticized — and eventually sued — because of its secrecy. Likewise, Dick Cheney chaired a Bush administration group to shape a new energy policy with equal amounts of secrecy and an analogous lawsuit filed against it.
On these comparable situations, the papers reflected the same trend Tomasky found elsewhere. When Hillary Clinton’s task force was sued, the supposedly liberal New York Times wrote four editorials — all were negative. One Times editorial called Clinton’s secrecy “unseemly, possibly illegal, and wrong.” On the other side of the ideological spectrum, the Wall Street Journal wrote eight editorials about the same controversy, all of which were negative, while the Washington Times had seven, all of which were negative.
Now consider the Cheney situation. When his task force was sued for nearly identical secrecy, the New York Times had five editorials, all negative. The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, wrote only one editorial — and it was positive. The Journal called the lawsuit “purely political.” The Washington Times had three editorials on the Cheney suit — one positive, one mixed and one negative.
This same trend was found over and over again. Overall, the left-leaning papers criticized the Clinton administration 30 percent of the time. Conservative papers disparage the Bush administration just 7 percent of the time.
As for actually praising the administrations, the liberal papers wrote positive editorials about the Clinton administration 36 percent of the time, while the conservative papers praised the Bush administration 77 percent of the time.
The Wall Street Journal seemed to be particularly bad about criticizing Bush. Tomasky could only find one editorial that disapproved of a Bush decision — when the administration endorsed increased steel tariffs — but even that criticism was limited to just 123 words.
If this issue interests you, the report is definitely worth reading. A .pdf version of the report is available online.