Posted on 04/02/2002 11:18:13 AM PST by Zonitics
When Republicans surrender, it is called bipartisanship.
A while back, Patrick Ruffini gave the world some solid proof of liberal bias in the New York Times and the Washington Post. Basically, Ruffini showed that these two venerable institutions were two or three times more likely to label someone as a conservative than they were to label someone as a liberal. I copied Ruffini's idea and showed that the Arizona Republic had a similar level of liberal bias.
Tonight, I want to offer more proof of the liberal bias. Someone (I think it may have been ConLaw professor and radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt) once said that the best example of liberal media bias is the "Miller-McCain Gap". He was referring to the fawning coverage every time John McCain sides with the Democrats versus the lack of coverage for Zell Miller when he sides with President Bush or the Senate Republicans. How often did you hear Bush's tax cut referred to as bipartisan even though Miller was a co-sponsor and it ultimately drew a number of Democrat votes in the Senate? It seems like anything associated with McCain is consistently tagged as bipartisan. If the newspapers do indeed refer to McCain's dalliances with the Democrats as "bipartisan" but fail to use the same term for Miller's journeys with the GOP, that should be additional proof of liberal bias.
There's the premise. Can I quantify it?
I ran a Lexis search of major papers for "Zell Miller" and "bipartisan" and "tax cut" in 2001. There were 159 matches. A lexis search for "John McCain" and "bipartisan" and "campaign finance" in 2001 produced 329 matches.
Why is there the big difference? In 2001, campaign finance reform didn't draw any more Republican votes than the tax cut drew Democratic ones. In fact, the opposite was true - 9 Republicans, including Jeffords, voted with McCain on campaign finance reform while 12 Democrats voted with Miller on the tax cut.
It wasn't that Bush's tax cut was a less reported story than was campaign finance reform in 2001. Both stories were widely reported in 2001, but the evidence is that the tax cut got almost four times the press attention in 2001. There were over 1,000 hits [Lexis won't allow searches to return more than 1,000 hits] in the major papers for both ("Bush and "tax cut" and "senate") and ("McCain" and "campaign finance reform" and senate). To narrow the results, and maintain a reasonable sample, I searched the Washington Post only. I assumed that, if anything, the Post's beltway pedigree would make it overreport on campaign finance compared to the rest of the nation's papers. A search of the Washington Post in 2001 produced 264 matches for ("campaign finance" and "McCain") and 991 matches for ("tax cut" and "Bush"). Thus, it seems pretty likely that the tax cut was the much more widely reported national story in 2001. This makes it all the more incredible that McCain was at least twice as likely to be called "bipartisan."
In case we need more proof, let's look at the economic stimulus package. Miller was one of the Democrat centrists who worked out a compromise in the Senate that Daschle refused to bring to a vote. A Lexis search of major papers during the seven-month period from September 1, 2001 to March 31, 2002 revealed only 13 matches for "Zell Miller" and "economic stimulus" and "bipartisan." A search during the seven months from February 1, 2001 to August 31, 2001 for "John McCain" and "gun show" and "bipartisan" revealed 22 hits.
Again, this isn't a case of McCain's "gun show loophole" legislation getting more press coverage than the economic stimulus package - a search of "gun show loophole" produced 140 matches while "economic stimulus package" produced over 1,000 hits. With this difference in the number of stories on the subjects, it is mindboggling that McCain was still nearly twice as likely to be labeled bipartisan. The truth is that the press loves to label McCain's forays into the Democrat fold as "bipartisan" and almost refuses to use that label on Zell Miller.
UPDATE: The situation may even be worse than these statistics show. Story after story uses Zell Miller as a sort-of exception that proves that there wasn't real "bipartisan" support for the Bush tax cut. Here are some examples (from the Christian Science Monitor and the Washington Post). Many of the results for the Miller tax-cut search were stories that noted that the Bush administration would need more "bipartisan" support than just Zell Miller to pass the tax cut.
1. Those who see it.
2. Those who are swept away by it - they honestly don't see it because they are not looking.
3. Those who see it, cover for it, participate in it, and do everything they can to dishonestly continue it.
: )
The prefix "arch" applied to people is generally unfavorable. "Arch-villain" and "arch-enemy" are fairly common expressions, but not "arch-hero" and "arch-friend." Yet the print media used "arch-conservative" over "arch-liberal" by a ratio of 20 to 1.
Not surprisingly, the phrase "right wing" was used almost three times as often as the phrase "left wing," and this factored in references to hockey. All of this merely confirms what conservatives already know, but it does help to quantify.
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