Media Matters, like the last time it posted a study, is intentionally misleading its audience. Why would they do this? The answer is because they have utter contempt for their own visitors whom they hope will not expose their own deliberate misinformation.

The last time they posted a study, it was conducted by the University of Indiana. The study supposedly found that Bill O’Reilly uses name-calling 8.88 times per minute on his show. In reality, they found such a high number of occurrences because the study was coded by biased professors. Words such as far-left and very liberal were coded as a form a name-calling. It was also ambiguous whether or not simply being called a liberal was name-calling. The researchers even admitted that there were problems with the coding and their Subjects. Nevertheless, Media Matters made no mention of that to their audience. But, they did spout the entire study as fact.

Consequently, as a result of Media Matters running the story, liberal columnists could not wait to regurgitate the inaccuracies to their audience as well. For example, Rosa Brooks, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times said, “O'Reilly managed an impressive 8.88 name-calling incidents per minute — an insult every 6.8 seconds!” This is pretty ironic when Media Matters’ mission statement is, “To comprehensively monitor, analyze, and correct conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.” But, I guess misinformation can be deliberate if it is from the “Far-left.”

Just this week they posted another flawed study on their website. This time, however, they claim, “[T]hat in paper after paper, state after state, and region after region, conservative syndicated columnists get more space than their progressive counterparts.” Notably, the report focuses only on nationally syndicated columnists, not each paper’s local columnists (you will find out later why this almost dispels their study from the start).

Media Matters determined in its study that there are 201 nationally syndicated columnists in America. They claim there are a total of 74 conservatives, 79 progressives, and 48 centrists (Again, this will be shown to be nonsense). Their methodology for determining their results was to find 1,430 newspapers (If you can find anywhere in the study listing the 1,430 papers or telling anyone who reads the study where to find them, let me know) and then contact the editors of each paper.

They then asked the editors two questions: 1) Which nationally syndicated columnists do you publish on a regular basis -- 1. about once a week?; and 2) Which nationally syndicated columnists do you publish intermittently but not 2. every week -- about once a month?. They included only columnists who are published on the op-ed pages and who regularly write about public affairs. Columnists who appeared at least three times in a month were counted as regular, and those who appeared twice were counted as occasional.

Then they coded the columnists for either being a Conservative, Centrist, or Progressive (I guess liberal is a form of name-calling).

To avoid charges of injecting subjectivity into our process, Media Matters used the syndicates' own description of their writers to define the writers' ideological alignment. “For example, Universal Press Syndicate describes writer Maggie Gallagher as writing "right-leaning social policy analysis," which would give her a designation in this study of "conservative." In addition, Media Matters also went by political and media affiliations (for instance, a syndicated columnist who is also an editor for National Review can be safely classified as conservative) and writers' own definitions of their politics, whenever available.”

Here comes the best part: “For those whom we still could not comfortably identify, we read a sampling of columns to arrive at a designation.” Yes, you read that correctly!! Media matters read the column themselves to determine whether or not someone was a liberal, conservative or centrist. Let’s examine briefly how well they coded a few of their columnists.

Ronald Brownstein was coded as a “Centrist” according to Media Matters’ study. Ronald Brownstein, on August 1, 2007, wrote a editorial titled: “Stealing healthcare from babies: Is the president so antsy for a fight with Democrats that he'd deny coverage to millions of children?”

This is the type of opinion that Media Matters considers Centrist:

Does president Bush really believe what he's saying about the effort from congressional Democrats and some leading Senate Republicans to provide health coverage for millions of uninsured children? He's portraying it as the first step on a slippery slope toward "government-run healthcare," as if senior senators in both parties were conspiring with Michael Moore to import Cuban doctors to inoculate and indoctrinate American children.

In fact, Congress is moving responsibly to remove a blot on the nation: the 8 million children without health insurance. It is doing so by expanding the State Children's Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, a state-federal partnership that the Republican Congress and President Clinton created in 1997 to cover kids in working-poor families. Final votes on the House and Senate floors could come this week.”


If we look further at other people Media Matters coded, they state, “Ruben Navarrette Jr. writes a column for the San Diego Union-Tribune and is syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group. Editor & Publisher, the newspaper industry's trade publication, described Navarrette as a writer "who often -- but not always -- leans conservative.”” Notably, Navarette is a pro-amnesty columnist, pro-illegal immigration columnist, his views are much farther to the left than any Republican who believes in immigration reform. Still, Navarrette was coded as being a Conservative in the study.

So according to Media Matters, if an editorialist is someone who takes far-left positions sometimes, and occasionally supports the President, he is Conservative. But, if someone believes in socialized medicine, he is a centrist. At this point I would normally stop my analysis, being satisfied that I destroyed Media Matters’ study, but I am so sick of Media Matters that I will keep going.

They also code Neal Peirce as a Centrist. Neal Peirce writes for the Washington Post. Read some of his titles: ‘Green’ Wal-mart: An Oxymoron?; Global Warming; Billboards vs. a Green Nation; Corporate Locations and Sprawl; and The threat of Sea Level Rise; just to name a few. So environmentalist kooks who hate Wal-mart are centrists according to Media Matters.

This coding bias demonstrates emphatically that the people behind this study are deliberately trying to mislead their audience. They simply cannot be trusted. Astonishingly, what I am about to tell you next is even more ridiculous. According to the study, sometimes “editors of papers provided the name of a syndicate or syndi¬cates in addition to or in lieu of specific columnists.” When that happened, Media matters “recorded such syndicate data but did not include them in the analysis, except for a few rare exceptions.” So according to these dishonest people, we are supposed to believe they did not omit newspapers from their study that would throw off their agenda?

They claim in rare instances when newspapers used syndicates with a clear ideological slant (e.g. Minuteman Media, a small progressive syndicate) they included the syndicate in the data. But, notice how they fail to mention other examples. In fact, they don’t mention the list of newspapers in the study at all, or at least I could not find them. This is a poor symptom of a biased study intending to create a conclusion that does not exist.

Wait there is more. Remember how I mentioned earlier that the study focuses only on nationally syndicated columnists, not each paper’s local columnists. Yet, Media Matters purports that they can determine whether or not each paper had a conservative slant. Here is a hypothetical that dispels that: “A newspaper pays for 10 syndicated conservative columnists, no syndicated liberal columnists, but 210 local progressive columnists. According to this study, Media Matters would assume the paper is Conservative.” This again is assuming their study is coded accurately in the first place.

But, the above hypothetical does raise an interesting hypothesis. Say you owned a paper and every editorialist was a liberal, which is probably the case, wouldn’t you be more likely to get a conservative syndicated columnist to balance out your writers? Yes, you would. Folks, I have just explained the results of this study in a “hypothetical” world where every newspaper in the Country is 99% liberal, but with more conservative syndicated columnists than liberal syndicated columists.

In fact, this also explains why George Will is at the top of the list of Conservative syndicated columnists according to study. As the nation’s most-read columnist, George Will appears in fully one out of every four daily newspapers in America. If an ignorant liberal editor is going to get one syndicated conservative, and has no idea who any of the other conservatives are, the editor is going to go straight to the top and get George Will. Again, this explains the study. Why get syndicated liberal columnists if your entire local newspaper is liberal?

Even after all the flaws, Media Matters claims with certainty that:

Though papers may be "willing to consider" progressive syndicated columnists, this unprecedented study reveals the true extent of the dominance of conservatives:
• 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.
• In a given week, nationally syndicated progressive columnists are published in newspapers with a combined total circulation of 125 million. Conservative columnists, on the other hand, are published in newspapers with a combined total circulation of more than 152 million.2
• The top 10 columnists as ranked by the number of papers in which they are carried include five conservatives, two centrists, and only three progressives.
• The top 10 columnists as ranked by the total circulation of the papers in which they are published also include five conservatives, two centrists, and only three progressives.
• In 38 states, the conservative voice is greater than the progressive voice -- in other words, conservative columns reach more readers in total than progressive columns. In only 12 states is the progressive voice greater than the conservative voice.
• In three out of the four broad regions of the country -- the West, the South, and the Midwest -- conservative syndicated columnists reach more readers than progressive syndicated columnists. Only in the Northeast do progressives reach more readers, and only by a margin of 2 percent.
• In eight of the nine divisions into which the U.S. Census Bureau divides the country, conservative syndicated columnists reach more readers than progressive syndicated columnists in any given week. Only in the Middle Atlantic division do progressive columnists reach more readers each week.


Isn’t this totally absurd that they can purport all these “facts” from their flawed study after I attacked it? Finally, Media Matter concludes its study with utter nonsense involving the consequences of the Conservative bias. They claim that,

“Structural advantage enables them to transmit an overarching narrative across the country, one that serves to convey the impression that conservative ideas that in many cases enjoy tiny support are actually the “reasonable center” in key debates. To take just one example, prominent conserva¬tive columnists who wrote about the topic were nearly unanimous in support of President Bush’s deci¬sion to commute Scooter Libby’s sentence, while some advocated pardoning him outright, despite the fact that polls indicated the decision had the support of only around one in five Americans.”


Well, I can explain that away too. Most Americans did not have a clue who Scooter Libby was. Most Americans did not know what the Scooter Libby case was about. If you polled them, it would be totally meaningless. However, Conservative editorialists who followed the case did know what the case was about and who Scooter Libby was. Consequently, they thought the sentencing was too harsh for Libby.

Overall, Media Matters should be utterly embarrassed for this pathetic attempt at social science. They may be able to fool their audience. They are not going to fool me.

(Actual Flawed Study)

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