— More than Zero reports on a study done by Jeff Nunberg, one of the stalwarts of National Public Radio on the use of the labels “liberal” and “conservative” near the names of well-known politicians and actors, which concludes that liberals are more often identified as such by the press.
…the average liberal legislator has a thirty percent greater likelyhood of being identified with a partisan label than the average conservative does. The press describes Barney Frank as a liberal two-and-a-half times as frequently as it describes Dick Armey as a conservative. It gives Barbara Boxer a partisan label almost twice as often as it gives one to Trent Lott. And while it isn’t surprising that the press applies the label conservative to Jesse Helms more often than to any other Republican in the group, it describes Paul Wellstone as a liberal twenty percent more frequently than that.
But a while back, PatrickRuffini counted the phrases “right-wing” and “left-wing” in the liberal press, and came up with very different results:
This disparity was even more palpable at the New York Times, where 80.2% of the left-right mentions on the national news pages since 1996 have spotlighted the right. The research also found that the more loaded and derogatory the phrase, the more likely it was to be associated with the political right. The term “conservative” outpolled “liberal” by 66-34% in New York Times news page mentions, while the aforementioned “right-wing” clocked in at 80% in a similar measure. However, the term “right-wing extremist” was used at least six times as frequently than “left-wing extremist” (at 87.4% since ’96 in the Times).
So what’s going on here? Taking the two studies together, it would appear that the liberal press spills more ink on conservative politicians than on liberals, and that it’s more likely to identify liberals than conservatives when doing so.
