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Topic: Letters Sent to Romenesko
Date/Time: 12/15/2005 12:37:52 PM
Title: NPR guest pundits still lean right
Posted By: Jim Romenesko
 
From JULIE HOLLAR: FAIR is glad to see that NPR has decided to evaluate the balance of its guest list --something FAIR did in 2004 in a study that turned up a troubling bias towards elites and Republicans. But it's rather curious that NPR ombud Jeffrey Dvorkin says Brookings and CSIS are "seen by many in Washington, D.C. as center or center-left" and then places them firmly in the "left" category when tallying up his numbers, to reach a total of 239 "right" to 141 "left." Of course, if he didn't perform this rather clunky sleight-of-hand, the numbers would look even worse for NPR -- 239 right to 0 left. Essentially, though, they reconfirm FAIR's findings from our 2004 study. That study, which looked at four months of All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Weekend Edition Saturday and Weekend Edition Sunday, found right-leaning think tanks outnumbering left-leaning ones 62-15, with centrist think tanks coming in at 56 appearances. That's a greater than 4-1 right-to-left imbalance.

In our study, we classified Brookings as a centrist group and CSIS as right-leaning. Whether, as Dvorkin argues, some people in Washington see these groups as center-left, it's hard to argue that that perception reflects reality. One of the most-cited voices of Brookings, on NPR and elsewhere in the media, is Michael O'Hanlon, who has been consistently hawkish on the Iraq war, military spending and missile defense.

Classifying CSIS as left or center-left is even more of a stretch. In response to our study, Dvorkin had argued that it shouldn't be considered right-leaning because it "has both conservatives and liberals." Why he's now able to classify it as left, then, is difficult to grasp. But a look at the CSIS roster shows that, while it's not monolithic, it skews rather heavily toward the conservative end. If one had to place it on the ideological spectrum, center would be questionable, but left would be absurd.

It's good to see Dvorkin keeping up the think tank tally; it's unfortunate that the numbers, minus his spin, show that NPR seems to have done little to address the imbalance we noted last year. [Permalink]

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