[laurav]

I found this interesting (for starters, that "disproving" media bias is becoming a sport in media circles these days). One possibility is that Clinton, in his triangulation, did things that ticked off liberals 30% of the time. Editor & Publisher isn't saying whether the 30% of attacks on Clinton were from the left or right. If they were from the left, that doesn't change the fact that the NY Times and Washington Post are liberal, it just says they are consistently so. The article also doesn't say if the Washington Times/WSJ critiques of Bush were from the left or right. My take on this is that the Washington Times/WSJ editorial boards are at the same place on the spectrum as Bush, but the Washington Post and NY Times were to the left of Clinton.

I do hope that the Washington Times/WSJ will take Bush to task, though, if he violates conservative principles.

[kesg]

I fully agree, and you have put your finger on the right question: when these liberal editorials "criticized" Clinton, did the criticism come from the right or the left? I certainly remember the answer.

[Only1choice____Freedom]

'Liberal' Papers More Likely to Criticize Clinton

For what? not being Liberal enough?

Notice the word Liberal is in quotes. Sounds like denial to me!

[mewzilla]

Click here for more info on the Shorenstein Center. Check out it's advisory board, too. Very informative.

[steveegg]

I noticed that this group is itself slanted to the lieberal cause, and appears to have made this charge simply to try to indict conservative media. While I don't get the Washington Times, I have seen plenty of criticism from the Wall Street Journal's and Investor's Business Daily's editorial boards.

[ko_kyi]

Liberal papers "criticized" Clinton with idiotic statements like "Clinton unable to fend off devious attacks by conservatives" or "Clinton too caring, intelligent to be President, expert says" and other shinola like that.

Really evenhanded.

[Mr. Bird]

You make a good point, but the article completely ignores the obvious: Bill Clinton engaged in conduct that, by their own admission, his closest friends could not defend. The Lewinsky scandal took up approximately 25% of Clinton's term. Even in editorials opposing impeachment, they were careful to slap Clinton for getting himself into the mess in the first place.

So the Shorenstein folks would have us believe that the papers of the left are more "open minded" or fair in their criticism? They had no choice. A simpler method of gauging a paper's ideological "open mindedness" would be to count up the number of lefties that supported impeachment vs. righties who opposed. It was the defining characteristic of that administration. Anything else is fluff.

Absent that, I would be much more interested in seeing the numbers pre-Monica. That whole sordid mess skews everything.

[KellyAdmirer]

Maybe there was just more to criticize Clinton about in general. I'm sure that never would have occurred to the folks at Harvard.

[swany]

"In a study for The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, Michael Tomasky looked at 510 editorials over the past decade."

1. Was there only total of 510 editorials in these newspapers over the past decade?

2. It seems they used 8 years worth of editorials regarding Clinton and 2.5 years worth of editorials about Bush.

Factor in whether the editorialists were liberal or conservative and the fact most writers could not blatantly be in favor of Clinton's poor behavior in the Oval Office, I'd say this study is without much merit.

[Uncle Hal]

Clinton is a worse President than Bush so he should be criticized more. Simple as that.

[MightyMouseToSaveThe Day]

I see the liberal media is still trying to give this story 'legs'. It didn't sway any opinions several weeks ago when this alleged 'study' was first published, and it aint' gonna convert any more believers today. no way is it going to convince conservatives that the liberal media is hard on liberal politicians. methinks they're trying too hard to get us to disregard reality.

[aynrandfreak]

It depends on what the meaning of "criticize" is.

[MarkL]

Actually, when Clinton was criticized, it was always for the "side issues," like sex. The liberal papers always managed to ignore the serious issues, like the purgery, obstruction of justice, sexual harrassment, rape, etc... They would bring up the stuff that was easily dismissed as "personal peccadillos," nothing serious that could impact his governing the US.

Mark

[Dimples]

If you scan through the paper, you'll see that the methodology is highly suspect. In particular, though only 10 "roughly comparable events" were chosen for study, they are not equally weighted in the sample. The dominant event is coverage of Reno and Ashcroft.

Where most of the other events have on the order of 3 or 4 Opinions from each newspaper (almost ALL towing the implied "party line") the NYT alone has 33 Opinions on Reno entered, 17 of which are "Negative." Of these, 6 are critical of Reno's failure to appoint a Special Whitewater Prosecutor", 5 are cricital of Reno's handling of Waco, and 4 were critical of Reno's failure to appoint a special prosecuter in the stabbing of Yankel Rosenbaum (??who??)

The crux of this so-called unwillingness of the "conservative" press to criticize Bush lies simply in the lack of a Bush Whitewater equivalent or a Bush Waco equivalent or a Bush Rosenbaum stabbing.

Two other topics have a similar problem. On The Clinton Welfare vs Bush Steel Tariff Issue (I know, these really don't compare either...) the NYT/WP get credit for 12 of 16 Opinions being against Clinton while the WSJ/WT get credit for only 3 of 6 Opinions being against Bush.

If one were to equally weight the events, the results look more like this:

NYT/WP critcized Clinton 35% of the time
WSJ/WT critcized Bush 10% of the time

And the reason Libs were tougher on Clinton turns out to be the problems with Reno described above and their criticism that Clinton held on to Zoe Baird far too long (as opposed to Bush accepting Linda Chavez withdrawl early.)

In short, this "study" is a classic example of how to lie with statistics:

To pump up your conclusion, take three events that favor you conclusion, count them multiple times and ... PRESTO!... your conclusion looks better than it really is!

[techcor]

Well, the liberal (notice no quotes) media lied on behalf of Bill Clinton. When he testified under oath that he "couldn't recall" whether he had been offered a million bucks by Riady, all the networks reported that he "denied being offered" a million bucks. They lied on his behalf because the networks figured the truth would convince Americans he was committing perjury again. The networks are willing to lied for a Dem president. That's all I need to know concerning bias in the media.