This is, of course, a laughable assumption to any conservative or libertarian. We are only too familiar with the experience of being 'marginalized' by the media. Every other day I receive an update on the media's leftist bias from the invaluable Media Research Center. MRC's update rarely has a problem filling the space - in fact, they often have to defer regularly featured items to later editions to save space. Yet, somehow, the folks at FAIR, like many of their ilk on the fringe Left (they call themselves "progressives" these days), have convinced themselves that the mainstream media suffer from a conservative bias.

Corporate ownership causes conservative "bias"
Ostensibly, this position is rooted in corporate ownership of modern media. I don't claim to understand the Neolithic kind of liberalism that assumes that anything that involves a corporation is automatically conservative, but that's what they think. The logic goes like this:

• ABC is owned by Disney.
• Disney is a corporation.
• ABC is biased to the right.

The problem with this syllogism (apart from the unstated assumption) is that it doesn't have room in it for any other facts. One cannot alter it by pointing out that Disney gives reams of money to liberal Democrats, throws fundraisers for the likes of Chuck Schumer, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, gives spousal benefits to the same-sex partners of its employees, and is the subject of a long-standing boycott by Southern Baptist fundamentalists. Disney is a corporation; corporations, by their very nature, are corrupt, soulless minions of the robotic right-wing; ergo, any news outlet owned by a corporation is ipso facto biased towards the right.

Lest anyone accuse me of creating a straw man, allow me to turn your attention to a December 1998 FAIR "Action Alert" entitled "Protest the Corporate Media's Coverage of the Mumia Abu Jamal Case". This piece accused Sam Donaldson of "racism", holding "a dismayingly low standard for capital justice", and of ignoring all evidence that contradicted ABC's "preconceived conclusion to the story." Donaldson's crime? Stating that "[e]verything that we looked at compellingly points to the fact that Mumia shot [Philadelphia police officer Daniel] Faulkner in cold blood . . . and was convicted properly, and was sentenced [to death] according to the laws of the state of Pennsylvania." Conservatives and libertarians have been saying for years that the media is biased - so defending even Sam Donaldson from such a charge does not come easy - but Sam Donaldson was right: "The people who support his release don't do so from a position of knowledge.... They either oppose the death penalty, or they're campus rebels, or they're African-American activists who believe that a black man was railroaded, and will continue to believe it, no matter what's presented to them." The implication of the title is that Abu Jamal cannot get an "unbiased" account of his story from "corporate media" and that Sam Donaldson - one of the more independent-minded members of the elite media - is their flack.

FAIR's Extra (a "media criticism" magazine) makes FAIR's position clear: Corporate ownership of the media creates "a system that works to advance the cause of the global market and promote commercial values, while denigrating journalism and culture not conducive to the immediate bottom line or long-run corporate interests." ("The Global Media Giants", Extra!, November/December 1997) [Emphasis added] So, while they claim to be a media watchdog group, the import seems obvious: FAIR is a mouthpiece of the anti-capitalist (and therefor anti-democratic) Left. Media criticism from the Left is disingenuous at best when, as we well know, 90% of journalists are liberals. Perhaps they have a point, albeit a small one, in worrying about the possible homogenization of cultural outlets created by the recent spate of massive media mergers. But so what? The "global market and commercial values" are (indeed always have been) the driving force of culture and consumer choice. [For more on this point, see All Culture, All the Time and Buying Into Culture, two excellent articles from Reason.]

Now FAIR comes to us whining that they have a "study" which "proves" that that "progressive and left-leaning think-tanks" (a self-annihilating phrase if ever I heard one!) don't get quoted in as many news stories as "conservative" and "centrist" ones.

How on Earth did they ever come up with such a thing?!?
I know, I know... this is an statement strains credulity. To support it, the study's authors scanned NEXIS and "discovered" that, while "conservative or right-leaning" groups were quoted 8,014 times and "centrist" organizations garnered 7,803 quotations, "progressive or left-leaning" groups were relegated to a mere 1,632 attributions.

Naturally - as with so many things one hears from liberals - these "findings" are heavily dependent on some very elastic definitions. One would think no sane person could believe that "FDR was the most Capitalist President we've ever had." Yet one of my (neo-Marxist) college professors said just that. Only after a thoroughly mind-wrenching discussion did I discover that the statement relied on a very unusual definition of Capitalism (to the best of my knowledge there isn't actually a word for what he had in mind though "corporatism" comes close to capturing it). Like Humpty-Dumpty, words mean to a liberal what they say they mean (and dictionary definitions be damned). So, too, this "study."

The most frequently quoted source in the study, with twice as many attributions as number two, was the Brookings Institute (2,883 citations), designated "centrist." On what basis? Well, you have to dig some to find out, but it turns out that it's because "much of Brookings' top brass has come from Republican administrations. Its current president, Michael Armacost, was an undersecretary of state for the Reagan administration and ambassador to Japan under Bush. Brookings' president from 1977 to 1995, Bruce MacLaury, spent most of his career in the Federal Reserve, with a stint in the Nixon Treasury Department.... Richard Haas, who heads the think tank's foreign policy department, was a senior director at the National Security Council under Bush. Stephen Hess was a speech writer for Eisenhower, an advisor on urban affairs for Nixon and editor-in-chief of the Republican platform under Ford." So, one Reagan undersecretary of state and a handful of people who had jobs in the Eisenhower, Nixon and Ford (!) administrations balances out the general leftism of the Institute and makes for centrism.

It is instructive that FAIR tries to bolster its case for the centrist label by noting that Brookings "[s]enior fellow [E.J.] Dionne places himself in the tradition of the turn-of-the-century progressive movement" and that that tradition forms the "the roots of the think tank" itself. FAIR further admits that Brookings' "influence on the operations of the federal government has been substantial." For instance, FAIR gives Brookings credit for influencing the creation of the unified Federal budget in the 1920's and for the creation of the Congressional Budget Office in the 1970's. It is unlikely that conservatives count these events as victories in the quest for smaller government, but FAIR seems not to recognize the contradiction.

Even more interesting is FAIR's acknowledgement that the first head of the Congressional Budget Office was Brookings senior fellow Alice Rivlin. This is the same Alice Rivlin who served as an economic advisor to Bubba (who later appointed her to the Federal Reserve; she is now back at Brookings). Other evidence of centrism includes a diversity of opinion among the Institute's fellows on the subject of campaign finance "reform," the fact that 15% of Brookings' budget comes from large corporations, and sizable individual donations from Washington insiders (such as well-known conservatives Vernon Jordan and Washington Post owner Katharine Graham). According to FAIR, Brookings' fellows see "themselves as sort of interdisciplinary philosopher-king technocrats" in the business of "building global structures." Setting aside, for the moment, that the animating purpose of "Progressivism" is also to build a global structure (specifically, the Communist International), it is difficult to see how any of this makes Brookings a "centrist" think-tank.

An examination of the Brookings Institute's web site reveals an unmistakable leftist bent. An article by the aptly named Alan Blinder on Dubya's Social Security privatization plan calls Social Security "a great success" and blasts the Bush proposal. Even the modest privatization suggested by Bush would "seriously undermine the finances of the present Social Security system. It would subject Americans, especially financially unsophisticated ones, to large additional risks. And it would abandon the noble commitment to social insurance that this country made in 1935." The only acceptable cure for the massive future deficits in Social Security's finances is "some combination of raising payroll taxes, cutting benefits and infusing general revenue into the trust fund" (in other words, Al Gore's "plan" to "save" Social Security). Arguing that personal control over one's retirement funds is too risky, Blinder goes on to say that even if he could opt out of the program he would not. "Universal social insurance," he says, "is one of those precious ties that bind our society together. Privatization, whether partial or total, would weaken that tie." Bush's plan would allow him to stay in the program if he wished - no-one is forced to divert their funds to a private account - but that isn't good enough for a liberal. In typically authoritarian liberal fashion, Blinder insists that we all conform to his preferences.

Other articles bemoan "urban sprawl", claim that missile defense would violate the ABM Treaty (which was signed with a country that no longer exists), and seriously argue that the AIDS crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa is a threat to U.S. national security. Perhaps FAIR believes that Brookings is centrist because articles on these topics treat the right-of-center view with respect, and even endorse some right-of-center proposals (the missile defense article is actually aimed at building a framework for deployment, for instance). Perhaps their willingness to consider regulatory reform as a necessary precursor to an expanded Federal role in areas such as education and environmental policy underlie FAIR's assessment. Maybe it's just the apostasy of hiring Republicans.

Looking over Brookings' policy proposals and research does show a fairly middle-of-the-road viewpoint, which, combined with the scholarly credentials of the Institute's fellows, probably accounts for its popularity with the media. But a more thorough examination shows that the group subscribes to any number liberal assumptions, often unthinkingly (i.e., the sanctity of the ABM treaty and the appropriateness of government redistribution are unquestioned). I'm willing to accept that Brookings runs to the center, but an unbiased study would acknowledge that they lean left. Unfortunately, that would utterly destroy what FAIR's "study" purports to prove. Add Brookings' 2,883 citations in NEXIS to the meager 1,632 that the groups FAIR is willing to call left-leaning would result in a total of 4,515 (as compared to 4,110 for the top three right-of-center groups).

It's all in a name
The next three think-tanks were the Cato Institute (1,428 attributions), the Heritage Foundation (1,419), and the American Enterprise Institute (1,263). These three are undoubtedly right-leaning, though the Cato Institute is an unabashedly libertarian organization - which is not the same thing as being conservative, liberal bluster to the contrary notwithstanding.

It isn't until we get to number nine on the list, the Urban Institute, that we find a group that FAIR is willing to acknowledge as liberal (FAIR's label - "center-left" - is definitely open to debate). In between are some labeling choices equally as questionable as their designation of Brookings as centrist. The Center for Strategic and International Studies is tagged "conservative." This is nonsense. While there are certainly quite a few Republicans on the staff, Sam Nunn (former Democratic Senator and Chair of the Armed Services Committee) is CSIS' Chairman and the likes of Joseph Leiberman (one of the most liberal members of the Senate) and Representative Robert Matsui (a Democrat) are involved in various CSIS activities (Leiberman and Matsui have lifetime ratings of 19 and 6, respectively, from the American Conservative Union; Nunn's was 45). While one might be able to make the case that CSIS is center-right, the reality is that, like FAIR's designation for the Council on Foreign Relations, CSIS should be probably be labelled centrist. So, too, the RAND Corporation (designated center-right). This non-partisan group may exhibit some degree of right-leaning assumptions but its central purpose is to do research into various areas of public policy - leaving interpretation to the recipient. The real problem with these two, from FAIR's point of view, seems to be that they take money from corporations - and that their scholarly research is taken more seriously by the GOP Congress than FAIR's.

We continue to find this tendency to define groups a bit farther to the right than they deserve with Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Yes, this group just honoured Richard M. Scaife with an award, but it also shows more balance than the label "conservative" implies. Brookings Institute Senior Fellow Diane Ravitch is a visiting fellow. The Institute's fellows offer such policy proposals as lifting the embargo on Cuba, promoting greater accountability in cases of police misconduct, re-examination of national drug policy, more open immigration, and promoting greater understanding about the benefits of biotechnology. As a conservative libertarian, I personally agree with every one of these positions, but they don't correlate all that highly with traditional conservatism. Once again, at most this group should be labeled center-right.

And what are we to make of such as the Institute for International Economics? This think-tank - which FAIR labels centrist - is dominated by former Carter administration staffers, IMF and World Bank advisors, and crossovers with the Brookings Institute and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (also debatably labeled centrist). Should not they be carrying a "center-left" label?

I won't argue that the Independent Women's Forum is conservative, but I do wonder why their opposite number - the National Organization for Women - isn't listed at all. Surely NOW (knee-jerk liberals to a man, er, person) garnered more than 194 media mentions (the lowest number ascribed to a think-tank on the list)! Which brings us to other methodological questions: How were the groups in this study chosen? How many other such groups were omitted?

Methodological Shenanigans
What is abundantly clear is that this study labeled most of the groups it examined at least one notch farther to the right than was warranted. There is certainly room for debate about some of them - what exactly defines centrism or how wide an umbrella that term implies are far from clear. What is clear is that we are dealing here with the same type of mentality that considers Bubba "too conservative," so we should know to take their study with a grain of salt. The authors of this study did not define the ideological perspective of the groups they tracked from a neutral or centrist point of view but, rather, from a viewpoint that has to look right to see Maxine Waters. The result was to significantly bias the "findings" to support FAIR's position that corporate media cannot be relied upon to present balanced news. This reconsideration points to the truth we all already know: Media bias is decidedly left of center.

As we have seen, the designer of a study has considerable leeway to frame the issues at hand. How the designer defines terms, what subjects are considered, what counts as an attribution... all these things can be (and were) manipulated to force the findings to be whatever the researcher wants them to be. This practice reinforces the deep suspicion the public - most of whom are not even superficially trained in research methodology - holds for statistical research. Since statistical research is vitally important in understanding an increasingly complex world and in crafting and adapting policies that work, this does none of us any good.

C. Dodd Harris is a writer with The Potatoe and is now a contributor to KeepAndBearArms.com.