That the “mainstream” press is overwhelmingly liberal is obvious to everyone, and I think is now admitted by most liberals. Still, it is interesting to see quantification of what we all know to be true.
The Economist attempted such an objective measurement, using an interesting criterion:
The first step in our analysis was compiling a partisan “dictionary”. We took all speeches in Congress in 2009-22 and broke them up into two-word phrases. We then filtered this list to terms used by large shares of one party’s lawmakers, but rarely by the other’s. The result was a collection of 428 phrases that reliably distinguish Democratic and Republican speeches, such as “unborn baby” versus “reproductive care” or “illegal alien” versus “undocumented immigrant”.
Next, we collected 242,000 articles from news websites in 2016-22, and transcripts of 397,000 prime-time tv segments from 2009-22. We calculated an ideological score for each one by comparing the frequencies of terms on our list. For example, a story in which 0.1% of distinct phrases are Republican and 0.05% are Democratic has a conservative slant of 0.05 percentage points, or five per 10,000 phrases.
The result was what you would expect.
Of the 20 most-read news websites with available data, 17 use Democratic-linked terms more than Republican-linked ones. The same is true of America’s six leading news sources on tv, of which Fox is the only one where conservative language predominates.
This Democratic slant has grown over time, driven mainly by changes in once-centrist outlets. In 2017 cnn used more Republican terms than Democratic ones, while msnbc and the evening news on abc, cbs and nbc had only modestly left-leaning scores of around 1.5 phrases per 10,000. By 2022, the broadcast channels and cnn had Democratic leanings of near 2.5, and msnbc had reached 5.5, putting it twice as far from the centre as Fox.
This chart places the New York Times and Washington Post on the spectrum:
It is interesting that, by this measure at least, the Times and the Post are farther to the left than Breitbart is to the right.
This chart shows the leftward drift of selected media outlets to the left in recent years:
Again, there is nothing surprising about this to anyone who pays attention, but that fact that it is based on objective measurement, using a plausible standard, makes it a useful contribution.
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