Media Matters took on a fascinating task, researching which newspaper columnists have the widest reach, and the most readers, in the country. It appears to be the first time anyone has amassed this data on every daily newspaper in the country, with MM contacting each paper individually to ask which syndicated columnists are published on their op-ed pages.
Given all of the “liberal” media rhetoric, the results should have been one-sided, with progressive voices dominating. But wouldn’t you know it; the results didn’t turn out that way.
* Sixty percent of the nation’s daily newspapers print more conservative syndicated columnists every week than progressive syndicated columnists. Only 20 percent run more progressives than conservatives, while the remaining 20 percent are evenly balanced.
* In a given week, nationally syndicated progressive columnists are published in newspapers with a combined total circulation of 125 million. Conservative columnists, on the other hand, are published in newspapers with a combined total circulation of more than 152 million.
* The top 10 columnists as ranked by the number of papers in which they are carried include five conservatives, two centrists, and only three progressives.
* The top 10 columnists as ranked by the total circulation of the papers in which they are published also include five conservatives, two centrists, and only three progressives.
The whole report is absolutely fascinating and definitely worth reading. In terms of the number of newspapers, the top three columnists in the country are all conservative (George Will, Cal Thomas, and Kathleen Parker). In terms of circulation, two of the top three are conservative (Will and Parker). Just as with guests on Sunday-morning shows, it’s another area of the media in which the right dominates.
The next question, of course, is why this is the case. There are plenty of competing theories.
Matt Yglesias offers a few ideas.
I would be fascinated to see a newspaper editor explain why he thinks this is. One possible answer, of course, is that readers love rightwingers. Maybe you gain a ton of subscribers, at the margin, by carrying Charles Krauthammer or John Podhoretz in your newspaper. Maybe that’s what the editors of newspapers think. Maybe they even have some market research to back that conclusion up. Alternatively — and in my view more plausibly — maybe opinion columns have little measurable economic value (does anyone really believe Washington Post circulation would change in either direction if they sacked Krauthammer and hired Rosa Brooks away from the LA Times?) and basically exist to put forward ideas that newspaper owners find congenial.
Ezra Klein offers a clever take:
Another contributing factor in the puzzling overrepresentation of conservative columnists is that how “interesting” an opinion is largely depends on how much it diverges from yours. So a liberal op-ed editor may be quite hard on other liberals, who don’t sound, to him, like they’re saying anything new. Conversely, he could be quite easy on conservatives, because even their basic arguments are, to him, analytically fresh and innovative. This is also why you get a lot of “liberal” columnists who spend their time attacking liberal orthodoxies, because attacks on things you believe in, like Social Security, are also “interesting” insofar as they challenge your biases.
Kate Sheppard makes a good point about the quality of the analysis in columns.
As recent studies have proposed, liberals tend to tolerate ambiguity and nuance more than conservatives, and this is perhaps most apparent in how they write about a subject. A liberal columnist may be more inclined to examine the many facets of a topic, to wade into the subtleties of an argument, explore the finer points, and concede to the possibility of conflicting evidence or opinion. And complex arguments don’t generally make for the same hard-lined, concise, and easy-to-read column fodder that our ever-more-dumbed-down mainstream media tend to favor. Conservative columnists tend to lean on the most basic, unexamined, talking-point-specific arguments – quick, easy to digest, appealing to reader’s basest instincts. Liberals tend to explore the issue and construct a case for the merits of their arguments, which fewer and fewer papers have the space for, and fewer and fewer readers have the attention span to get through.
But for my money, I think Atrios has the right take.
[M]y basic theory is that it was a response to all of the “liberal media” pressure put out by the right. At some point there may have even been a little bit of truth to it. My guess is journalists of a certain generation were kinda-sorta-liberal, and these were the people who wrote columns for local papers after putting in their time on the beat. Most of them weren’t all that liberal, and saw themselves as “journalists” more than “pundits” even if they were now writing columns. The point being is that maybe they were a bit liberal leaning, but they didn’t see themselves in any way as connected up with a “liberal movement.” But, due to right wing pressure they needed to be balanced by the stable of movement conservatives we now find ourselves with.
Sounds right to me. How about you?