Right vs Left on the Sunday talk shows

An interesting new study by Media Matters for America suggests that there is systematic bias in favor of the right wing in the old networks' Sunday morning talk shows (on ABC, CBS, and NBC) "where policy makers state their case, the conventional wisdom takes shape, and the left and right in American politics debate the pressing issues of the day on equal ground." Or not so equal, apparently. As Broadcasting & Cable notes, the study (released last Tuesday) examined Meet the Press, Face the Nation and This Week during both the second term of President Clinton's administration and President George W. Bush's time in office to date. The Benton Communication Policy listserv points to the study's main contention that "conservative voices significantly outnumber progressive voices on the Sunday talk shows." Among the study's key findings:

1) During President Clinton's second term, the right held a small advantage in the balance between Democrats/progressives and Republicans/conservatives. But in President Bush's first term, Republicans and conservatives held a dramatic advantage, outnumbering Democrats and progressives by 58 percent to 42 percent. In 2005, the figures were identical: 58 percent to 42 percent.
2) Counting only elected officials and administration representatives, Democrats had an eight-point advantage during Clinton's second term, 53 percent to 45 percent. In Bush's first term, however, the Republican advantage was 61 percent to 39 percent, nearly three times as large.
3) In both the Clinton and Bush administrations, conservative journalists were far more likely to appear on the Sunday shows than were progressive journalists. In Clinton's second term, 61 percent of the ideologically identifiable journalists were conservative; in Bush's first term, that figure rose to 69 percent.
4) In 1997 and 1998, the shows conducted more solo interviews with Democrats and progressives than with Republicans and conservatives. But in every year since, there have been more solo interviews with Republicans and conservatives.
5) The most frequent Sunday show guest during this nine-year period is Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) who has appeared 124 times. A staggering 69 percent (86 out of 124) of McCain's appearances have been solo interviews. Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE) has been the most frequent guest since 2003, but only 31 percent (25 out of 80) of his appearances have been solo interviews.
6) In every year examined by the study -- 1997 through 2005 -- more multi-guest panel discussions tilted right (a greater number of Republicans/conservatives than Democrats/progressives) than tilted left. In some years, there were two, three, or even four times as many right-titled panels as left-tilted panels. 7) Congressional opponents of the Iraq war were largely absent from the Sunday shows, particularly during the period just before the war began.

So how damning is this report? Well, Broadcasting & Cable notes a response from NBC's Meet the Press stating that the study is "misleading." Meet the Press's Executive Producer Betsy Fischer points out in her show's defense that if the study had included Clinton's first term, "the same analysis would have found that, on Meet the Press, for example, the guests skewed heavily toward Democrats." (Media Matters noted that it was unable to analyze Clinton's first term "because of limitations of the data and the fact that it had to cut it off somewhere.") Fischer also noted,

"During the first two years of the Clinton Administration - when Democrats controlled both the White House and Congress, . . . the breakdown of ideological guests were as follows: 1993 (72 Democrats, 29 Republicans -or a ratio of (71% Dem to 29% GOP); in 1994 ( 71 Democrats and 47 Republicans - or a ratio of 60% Dem to 40% GOP).

"When both House of Congress shifted to Republican control in 1995 - the number Republican guest appearances also increased and resulted in almost an even number of Republican and Democratic appearances."

B&C does note that "there is something intuitive in the findings, given that key administration figures are the plum guests on those shows" and this suggests a natural "skew toward the party in power." And indeed this is what tends to happen in journalism: The people who are in power are the people who get quoted and interviewed most often. And there's lots of research on journalism newsgathering routines that has noted the heavy reliance of journalists on official sources in gathering and framing the news. This, in fact, is closely related to the "indexing hypothesis" proposed by Lance Bennett, who in a key 1990 article in Journal of Communication argued that journalists "tend to 'index' the range of voices and viewpoints in both news and editorials according to the range of views expressed in mainstream government debate about a given topic." It might not be right that the talk shows skew right, but it's probably inevitable, certainly until the Democrats start winning again. At least Lance Bennett must be happy that Media Matters for America has found more evidence to support his hypothesis.