EMAIL SIGN UP!
Most Popular This Week
- Wisconsin Bill Would Treat Organic Milk, Sharp Cheddar, Brown Eggs as "Junk Food"
- Patent Filing Claims Solar Energy ‘Breakthrough’
- Climate Change's 'Evil Twin': Ocean Acidification
- Disaster Capitalism Strikes as Hedge Funds Circle Near-Bankrupt Municipalities Like Vultures
- Obama Did It For the Money
- Patent Filing Claims Solar Energy ‘Breakthrough’
- Wisconsin Bill Would Treat Organic Milk, Sharp Cheddar, Brown Eggs as "Junk Food"
- Climate Change's 'Evil Twin': Ocean Acidification
- In 'March Toward Disaster,' World Hits 400 PPM Milestone
- Ignoring Bee Crisis, EPA Greenlights New 'Highly Toxic' Pesticide
Popular content
Today's Top News
The Right-Wing Op-Ed Insurgency
Liberal bias? A Daily Beast investigation crunches the numbers and shows how conservative think tanks have quietly achieved domination over the opinion pages of America's biggest papers.
For all the noise about liberal bias in newsrooms, you'd think the country's big three papers had contracted George Soros, Ralph Nader, and Gloria Steinem as their exclusive opinionators.
But a Daily Beast review of the archives of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post tells a much different story: Conservative think tanks are pummeling their liberal peers in the race for the most prominent placement on op-ed pages. During the past year, 77 percent of pieces authored by think-tank affiliates came from conservative outfits, 18 percent came from centrist groups, and a tiny 5 percent came from the left wing.
With The Wall Street Journal carrying a heavier load of think-tank contributions than the Times and Post combined, conservative wonks are given a significant leg-up, according Alex Jones, former Times media reporter and current head of Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.
"There are more conservative think tanks, first of all," Jones said, "and they are very aggressive and very effective. The Wall Street Journal op-ed page has been extremely accommodating. That's the character and nature of the page."
Which think tank takes up the most opinion-page real estate?
The American Enterprise Institute crushes the competition, liberal and conservative, in racking up bylines, scoring 99 of the total 217 pieces published by major think tanks from the third week of July 2008 to July 21, 2009, as shown by a review of the archives of the Times, Post, and Journal.
Of course, you're four times as likely to find an AEI piece in the right-leaning pages of the Journal than in the more liberal pages of the Times and Post put together. In fact, 79 AEI-bylined op-eds appeared in the Journal during the period surveyed. Considering that the Journal publishes only six days a week, that's one AEI appearance every four days. Bush hawks like John Yoo, John Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle, who nest at the D.C. institute and are frequent contributors, help pad the stats. A recent offering from Yoo, the former Bush Justice Department official: " Why We Endorsed Warrantless Wiretaps." Last month, Bolton, Bush's former representative at the United Nations, floated this thought balloon in the Journal: " What Would Happen if Israel Strikes Iran?"
But it's important to note that the AEI crowd is not completely confined to the Journal. They also find themselves in the opinion section of the Washington Post more times-16 during the last year-than any other think tank.
"It's been something AEI has been really pleased about," AEI President Arthur Brooks told The Daily Beast. Brooks said he thought the AEI's reputation helped secure so many pieces: "Everybody knows the AEI guys write really good op-eds."
Stressing that he likes scholars to speak to audiences that aren't completely like-minded, Brooks nevertheless recognizes the special relationship between the Journal and his institute. "The Journal is certainly a big target," he said. "We love it."
Which think tanks does The New York Times seem to crush on?
Unlike the Journal, The Times has no consistent feeder like AEI. The most common partners are fellows from the left-center Brookings Institution, security analysts Michael O'Hanlon and Kevin Pollack, and the centrist New America Foundation, including foreign-affairs expert Peter Bergen.
The Times was generally more resistant to think-tank op eds; in The Daily Beast survey, the Journal had approximately five times more major think-tank bylines than the Times.
This absence may relate more to the approach of liberal policy centers than the direction of the Times. In recent years, organizations like the Center for American Progress have backed their own sites or affiliates as a way to get out opinions and comment on news stories rather than rely upon the traditional op-ed byline as the preferred platform.
But Jones, a former Timesman himself, said he worried that the Times is missing important policy voices if it continues to avoid think-tank denizens.
"My impression is The Wall Street Journal's ed page is more reflective of think-tank thinking," Jones said. "The Times is geared away from that.... I wish the Times devoted more of its space to the conservation at the highest level that is going on in this country about policy and politics." Of course, the Times has gobs of policy-oriented opinion writers, like Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, who are unaffiliated with a think tank. (Krugman teaches at Princeton and is member of the Council on Foreign Relations, which was excluded from The Daily Beast's survey as it tends to operate more as club than policy-driven organization.)
Jones suggested the Times should double the size of its op-ed page and become more accommodating to those at think tanks with policy experience. The Times runs about four op-eds on a typical weekday.
Neither Andrew Rosenthal, the Times' editorial editor, nor Paul Gigot, the Journal's opinion editor, returned request for comment. The Post's Fred Hiatt is on vacation and declined to comment.
Every moment has its think tank. The Brookings Institution, founded during the First World War, so frustrated Richard Nixon that the president told his aides to firebomb its Washington building. The 1980s were boom years for the Heritage Foundation, where Reaganites like former Attorney General Edwin Meese still walk the halls. For the 1990s, the Brookings Institution once again ruled the day: Its current president was deputy secretary of state in the Clinton administration. The election of George W. Bush meant the ascendance of the American Enterprise Institute, which was created in 1943 and where Bush advisers like Yoo and Bolton now reside. The coming of Obama puffed up the reputation of the Center for American Progress; its leader, John Podesta, became the head of the president's transition team.
But when it comes to the byline battles, no matter who is in the White House, Podesta and his allies face an uphill battle. When it comes to influence, conservatives have the broadsheet opinion war won.
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
31 Comments so far
Show AllRead The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right by David Neiwert ( 2009) to see how the messages of repression, hate, racism, homophobia and the like increasingly move from the ravings of extremist groups right into the pages and programs of the corporate media. The author points out how various political and talk radio figures act as "transmitters" for the right wing messages that are soon voiced by the NY Times, the newsweeklies, and TV talking heads. He concludes with warnings of how para-, proto-, and neo-fascism could indeed make it happen here. "It" being an openly fascist state.
You're right, the hate talk, hate radio, hate TV, not editorials in newspapers, are the real problem.
Newspaper readership is tanking, and for decades the editorials traditionally have been the least read part of a paper anyway.
Still, if the corporations thought they really owned Obama we would see nothing but praise for him in the NYT, the WaPost and the WSJ.
The corporations would rather see a puppet in the White House than a collaborator.
I always wonder what these members of radical right and conservative think tank actually do to garner their hundreds of thousands of dollars in wages and fees.
Do they construct logically developed arguments supporting their position by building on verified factual information? Do they honestly present views opposing their's in all complexity. Or do they present strawmen positions that are easy on thinking and dishonest in thought?
Are they, instead, transmittors of various rightwing slogans, hackneyed righwing screeds and "books", slipshod thinking, etc.
If one actually views the historical record of scholarship and thought, very few rightwing "scholars" or thinkers have made lasting contibutions to intellectual life.
In fact, the pablum continuously produced by corporate- sponsered rightwing think tanks is getting to be more and more openly dishonest, double-standard propaganda. Any earlier pretense to scholarly discourse and an adherence to intellectual honesty and discipline slipped away long ago.
Like the US commercial culture, the products of these rightwing think tanks are geared toward maintaining blind faith in the plutocratic system its culture assumptions; they do so by protecting unquestioned doctrines. They usually aren't guided by faith in reason, factual proof, intellectual honesty or cultural uplift.
In every political discussion always remember 2 things. 1) 95% of the news media in America is owned by 4 right-wing families (Murdoch, Luce, Disney, & Redstone) and the world's biggest company (and weapons manufacturer), GE. And, 2) 23.1% of Americans (the "crazy quarter") are authoritarian personnalities, incapable of rational thought. The media are consciously acquired by the wealthy for reasons eloquently explained in Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World. They have become particularly adept at manipulating the crazy quarter (WMDs in Iraq, Kerry didn't deserve his medals, Obama is a Muslim, has no birth certif., etc...) to their advantage... watch their current "kill the elderly" attack on Single-payer health care. It isn't "media", it's "Minitru" (1984), thought control, practiced quite consciously.
An almost positive side effect of the decline of newspapers would be the loss of their editorial pages as outlets for right wing propaganda. What remains to be seen is if these conservative noise machines adapt to the new media paradigm and continue to get their message out.
With The Wall Street Journal carrying a heavier load of think-tank contributions than the Times and Post combined, conservative wonks are given a significant leg-up . . .
Only if you read and believe the shit they peddle. I don't suppose there are many people who read CD who also read and are influenced by The New York Tombs, The Warshington Pissed and War Shit Jingoism.
Let's face it. The U.S. left-wing, such as it is, is inhibited by many of its own commitments to "political correctness" and "fair play" the virtues of which are ill suited to the realities of the current political environment. Popular mythology notwithstanding, the good guys don't always prevail in the rough and tumble of all-out conflict and purist idealists almost never do.
Oh goody. Lets all abandon our principles and come out slugging. I'm ready for the iron man fray. Winning at all costs is such a comforting idea.
The newspaper is dying, common dreams takes most of my day... oy vey.
There we are a face off between the corporate/military/bank elite and EVERYBODY else in a battle over the hearts and minds of their victims.
What will happen?? What will break this stalemate??
Whether the media is 'liberal' or 'conservative' amounts to a Rorschach test for one's own political preferences. While there are definitely 'liberal' or 'conservative' (I would say 'reactionary') slants to some stories, most will contain 'facts' that can be verified, interpreted differently or disproven.
Those to the 'right' of a given story or media outlet see that story or media outlet as 'leftist'. Those to the 'left' of a given story or media outlet see that story or media outlet as 'rightist' - notwithstanding the story or the presented facts.
Are you saying that you see no bias in the media's selection of "the facts" and its presentation of same? Nor in its selective omissions of other facts?
Actually, this article was under the heading of op-ed insurgency, but if you perceive no selective bias in the news itself, you've probably perceived no rightward shift there either.
I'm saying that everybody has a bias and that nobody is objective. Whether the media or a particular media outlet is politically 'left' or 'right' is relative to one's own political position and depends on the consumer's political bias at least as much as the news presenter's possible political bias.
What the media present as 'facts' (and you will notice the quotation marks on my original comment as well) and what they omit are of course pursuant to the various presenters' subjectivity. It is up to the consumer of those 'facts' to verify their truth and/or relevance in the light of their own subjective experience. But such a determination says as much about the consumer's political bias as it does about the presenter's political bias - which is why I suggest it amounts to a Rorschach test. How you can assume how I perceive either the news or the op-ed pages from that alone eludes me. And, frankly makes my point about subjective bias.
Finally, since all movement is measured in relation to something else, perhaps the news shift to the 'right' you perceive could just as easily be understood as your own shift to the 'left'. No?
"I'm saying that everybody has a bias and that nobody is objective."
And that says what, if anything, about the central issue? Do you perceive any bias in the media's selective 'factual' reporting or don't you? Or are you just trying to suggest that no one is ever capable of making any objective judgement about anything at all?
How many times must I repeat myself?
It says just what it says: nobody is objective - including you and me - unless of course you're the one exception in the world who is actually objective. If you carefully read what I posted you will find it suggests that by definition all media has a bias. From your post, it seems that on this we agree - since you ask if I perceive this bias or not. If you think about the previous sentences, not to mention the previous posts, you will find of course I recognize there is a media bias.
There is always bias. But the news and opinions you agree with do not necessarily reflect the TRUTH any more than the ones with which you disagree. If you're looking for TRUTH from the media, any media, then you're seeking the impossible. You may find things that you agree with or disagree with but you won't find any objective 'TRUTH' because neither the media nor you or I are objective.
You seem to think that there is some sort of objective TRUTH out there waiting for us to find it. And you castigate the media for either not producing it, or distorting it. There isn't and objective TRUTH. It's all subjective truth. You may not like it but that's the way it is. Don't like it? Complain to the creator of your choice.
Finally, to make your life easier, yes, I perceive a slight shift of the media to the right - as the country as a whole is shifting that way. But the news and op-ed opinions have always been to the right of center so it's nothing new. And given that the country has moved to the right, the news and op-eds, even seeming to some of us to move to the right, remain in the center.
Tirebiter, you should spend a year in Europe. Then talk about bias in the United States. Methinks your philosophy of 'relative objectiveism' is a bit strained.
Nothing in my posts suggests that the bias is restricted to the US. We all have our own subjective bias. Or don't you think so?
And what the hell is 'relative objectivism'?
Yes, we all have our own subjective bias. That's what I call relative objectivism. You may call it what you like. Everything's relative, right?
In order to think, to talk, we have to have a construct of 'reality'. Even Hitler had a construct that justified his actions. So much for 'having our own subjective bias'. I like to think my bias rests on the philosophy of "do unto others". According to that bias, the United States media is definitely far, far to the right, and the media and general bias in Europe (and most of the rest of the world) is much more 'leftist' oriented. Take all the bias of the world and make an average. Where would the United States media be?
Since you too seem to recognize the existence of personal bias, 'relative objectivism', or whatever you want to call it - how is my saying so 'strained'? Personally I would resist calling it 'relative objectivism' because is infers an objectivism that doesn't exist. Something like using the term 'national socialism' (since you brought up Herr Hitler) that distorts the meaning by inferring a socialist philosophy for a clearly fascist state that it didn't exhibit or merit.
"Even Hitler had a construct that justified his actions. So much for 'having our own subjective bias'."
What does this mean? Are you dismissing personal bias by saying Hitler had one? Are you condeming his 'construct'? Are you trying to get me to defend Hitler? I can't tell what you're saying? Perhaps you could try again.
And you can rest your bias on anything you like, it is still subjective. That was my only point. The utility, or morality of that bias is a value judgment.
I submit that much of the US society is to the right of much of European society - but certainly not all of it - witness the current rise of the neo-Nazis and fascism in many European countries.
But why is it that the US society leans to the right? (If asked, I would suggest it is a result of corporate/capitalist needs for profit and the state's need for control, but it's probably far more complicated and since I haven't been asked...) And is the society wrong to be so? This too is a value judgment - which we have not yet broached as a topic. Be my guest.
The media, in both Europe and the US are interested more in profit than philosophy. Their priority is to sell an audience to advertisers. Why would they NOT reflect Americans' generally rightist views in the US and much of Europe's generally leftist ones in those places in Europe where there is a more leftist leaning?
"...the Council on Foreign Relations, which was excluded from The Daily Beast's survey as it tends to operate more as club than policy-driven organization."
Really? For insight into this "club's" status please see quotations below, or go here for the full article http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14552
In the midst of World War I, a group of American scholars were tasked with briefing “Woodrow Wilson about options for the postwar world once the kaiser and imperial Germany fell to defeat.” This group was called, “The Inquiry.” ...
...“The Inquiry” laid the foundations for the creation of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the most powerful think tank in the US, and “The scholars of the Inquiry helped draw the borders of post World War I central Europe.” ...
... Before America had even entered the war in late 1941, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the American branch of the round table groups Carroll Quigley discussed as having originated from the secret society of Cecil Rhodes, was planning on America entering the war. The CFR had essentially captured US foreign policy firmly in the grips of the banking elite. ...
... The CFR, established six years after the Federal Reserve was created, worked to promote an internationalist agenda on behalf of the international banking elite. It was to alter America’s conceptualization of its place within the world – from isolationist industrial nation to an engine of empire working for international banking and corporate American interests. Where the Fed took control of money and debt, the CFR took control of the ideological foundations of such an empire – encompassing the corporate, banking, political, foreign policy, military, media, and academic elite of the nation into a generally cohesive overall world view. By altering one’s ideology to that of promoting such an internationalist agenda, the big money that was behind it would ensure one’s rise through government, industry, academia and media. The other major think tanks and policy institutions in the United States are also represented at the CFR. They are constitutive of divisions within the elite, however, such divisions are predicated on the basis of how to use American imperial power, where to use it, on what basis to justify it, and other various methodological differences. The divide amongst elites was never on the questions of: should we use American imperial power, why has America become an Empire, or should there even be an empire? If one takes such considerations to heart and questions these concepts, be it within the foreign policy establishment, intelligence, military, academia, finance, corporate world, or media; chances are, such a person is not a member of the CFR.
The CFR effectively undertook a policy coup d’état over American foreign policy with the Second World War. When war broke out, the Council began a “strictly confidential” project called the War and Peace Studies, in which top CFR members collaborated with the US State Department in determining US policy, and the project was entirely financed by the Rockefeller Foundation.[57] The post-War world was already being designed by members of the Council, who would go into government in order to enact these designs.
The policy of “containment” towards the Soviet Union that would define American foreign policy for nearly half a century was envisaged in a 1947 edition of Foreign Affairs, the academic journal of the Council on Foreign Relations. So too were the ideological foundations for the Marshall Plan and NATO envisaged at the Council on Foreign Relations, with members of the Council recruited to enact, implement and lead these institutions.[58] The Council also played a role in the establishment and promotion of the United Nations,[59] which was subsequently built on land bought from John D. Rockefeller, Jr.[60]...
... The founding of the CIA was urged by the War and Peace Studies Project of the Council on Foreign Relations in the early 1940s, and the architects of the CIA, designing the shape and organization of the Agency, as well as its functions; were all Wall Street lawyers, largely made up of members of the Council on Foreign Relations. The Deputy Directors of the CIA for the first two decades were all “from the same New York legal and financial circles.”[61]
Thanks for pointing out and documenting the Council on Foreign Relations as a primary nesting place of the ruling elites and showing how their oligarchical rule dominates so many of the central decisions and institutions of this "government of the people, by the people, for the people". The idealized version of US history and governmental structure is pounded into people from grade school to grad school, such that very few have any real knowledge of just how a narrow interconnected ruling class makes all major decisions. Political figures are just the visible front men and women, often mere puppets whose strings can be sharply jerked into performing the policies determined by the INVISIBLE government that is always there, watching closely to see that their core agendas are carried out. These days there are only two core ones: global empire by military force and occupation as needed and propping up the criminal actions of global finance capitalism, two enormously costly operations draining the nation of any real funding for domestic initiatives like national healthcare, infrastructure repairs and upkeep, education, alternative energy, the climate change challenges, etc. Unless and until there are large scale citizen mobilizations to take back the country to some sort of representative democracy, then the invisible, to most, government will continue to rule, with the CFR group right at the heart of the oligarchy.
Good informative posting. Comments like yours are why I bother to read CD.
Even us liberal critters need to be reminded from time to time who the enemy is and how they operate.
Non-think tanks is a more accurate description of so called rt. wing think tanks. Without these bastions of Corp. think bow tie sales would all but cease. Need someone to shill for your particuliar noxious object or some other rt. wing screed just pony up the cash to these soul less whores. America has legions of these creeps for sale.
RE: "Non-think tanks is a more accurate description of so called rt. wing think tanks."
MY COMMENT: I like to call them 'stink tanks'.
Good name for them. Can I use it?
Good name for them. Can I use it?
"Neither Andrew Rosenthal, the Times' editorial editor, nor Paul Gigot, the Journal's opinion editor, returned request for comment. The Post's Fred Hiatt is on vacation and declined to comment."
All three were scared by the name of the publication requesting comment, "The Daily Beast", which reminds them of who they sold their souls to.
Nobody under 40 reads newspapers anymore except entertainment newsweeklies. Those great big New York and Washington papers are preaching to a dying choir.
Listening to your own propoganda is a fatal sin for a nation.
How naive. I think what is meant by "liberal bias" is liberal input. The end.