by Frank James
Media Matters for America, the progressive journalistic watchdog group, is patting itself on the back today for discovering that most of the the syndicated columns in the nation’s newspapers skew conservative. So much for the myth of the liberal media.
“This project did something that has never been done before: It amassed data on the syndicated columnists published by nearly every daily newspaper in the country… The results show that in paper after paper, state after state, and region after region, conservative syndicated columnists get more space than their progressive counterparts.”
For instance, the MM study concludes:
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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.
The initial inclination of many readers to this might be, so what? After all, newspaper circulations have long been declining so why should it matter, even to an outfit named Media Matters, that most of the columnists they carry are conservative?
MM anticipated this reaction:
Though they have suffered slow but steady declines in readership over the last couple of decades, newspapers remain in many ways the most important of all news media. The Newspaper Association of America estimates that each copy of a weekday paper is read by an average of 2.1 adults, while each Sunday paper is read by an average of 2.5 adults,3 pushing total newspaper readership for daily papers to more than 116 million and Sunday papers to more than 134 million. This means that some columnists reach tens of millions of readers, and one, conservative George Will, actually reaches more than 50 million.
There’s one explanation for MM’s results which has nothing to do with a nefarious conservative cabal running the newspaper industry.
Demographically, newspaper readers tend to be older than non-newspaper readers. An older audience is likely to be more conservative. Newspapers are generally in business to be profitable. That means, more often than not, providing consumers with products that reflect their tastes. Thus, more conservative syndicated columnists than not.
While all of us in the newspaper industry will readily agree with MM that newspapers remain important sources of news and information, the growth of the Internet, particularly of blogs, especially of the political variety, suggests that the nation isn’t exactly starved for a diversity of political viewpoints. Never have so many been able to say so much to so many others.
So even though newspapers collectively may carry more syndicated conservative than progressive columnists, maybe it doesn’t really matter as much as Media Matters would have us believe.