What started out as an effort on my part to come up with a scientific way to measure bias (whether liberal or conservative), in the Houston Chronicle (or any other news publication for that matter), has turned into a real eye-opening experience. To begin with, I had a pretty good idea that a substantial liberal bias does exist in the HC, just from my own anecdotal impressions, but I didn’t initially believe that there was or is an active conspiracy to propagandize Chronicle readers, or that a “system” was in place to actually deceive those readers. I have since changed my mind.
Opinion Pages Editor, James Howard Gibbons, has gone to great lengths to deny that any liberal bias exists, which you can read on the HC blog, ““The Inside Story”, under “not Liberal or Conservative”.
Back in October of 2007, then Chronicle “Ombudsman”, James Campbell, also tried to dispel the liberal bias charges by citing a “Media Matters” study, which concluded that America’s newspapers were, in fact, conservatively biased. You can find this piece on the Chronicle’s website by searching on "Campbell". To reach their conclusions, Media Matters used some questionable national data, and Campbell went even further, cooking up some invalid HC data.
In the Chronicle’s erroneous view (from media matters), columnists are classed as “liberal”, “Conservative”, or “moderate”, and then publications are judged by how many in each category are carried, and how often they are carried. This is rather disingenuous to say the least. The analysis should really be based on the content of the writing, (regardless of the author), and whether that content criticizes or promotes liberal or conservative causes, positions, and/or persons, or whether it is just simply neutral.
Here’s how it works:
1. The HC routinely runs the harshest of Liberal columnists in the opinion pages; Krugman, Dionne, Dowd, and others, whose writings generally contain the harshest words about conservatives and Republicans.
2. The HC runs only the gentlest of conservative columnists; Will, Krauthammer, Novak, and others, and mostly when they have something bad to say about George Bush, conservatives, or Republicans.
3. The HC also runs some columnists they call “moderate”, like Neal Peirce, whose writings are more often than not, liberal.
4. The Chronicle’s own (though anonymous) editorial writers are all cut from the same liberal cloth.
5. Conservative letter writers are generally outnumbered by liberal letter writers.
6. No letter writer is allowed to seriously criticize the HC specifically, or the media in general.
7. The first column of the first page of the City & State section is reserved for a troika of liberal columnists, Casey, Falkenberg, and Robison. These 3 were conveniently left out of the “media Matters” and James Campbell computations, as was Cragg Hines. Their pieces need to be judged on content as well, and there has been nothing but praise for liberals and condemnation of conservatives from them so far this year.
8. If there is news that might have a negative liberal connotation, it will be relegated to the back pages, and vice-versa.
My opinion is that George Will knows what to say and what not to say to get these liberal papers to buy his column. In addition, I think he is well liked by liberals because of his fascination with his own vocabulary and “wordiness”, which at times degenerates into pure gibberish, and promotes a negative image of conservatives. If he writes anything critical of Democrats or liberals except the mildest of admonishments, I haven’t seen it.
On the other hand, Novak does write some very pointed conservative pieces. Unfortunately the HC does not “choose” to print them. There’s a lot of other things that the HC chooses not to print (see the “No-No’s” above).
In light of all of this it is difficult to come to any conclusion other than that they (the editors) are captains of a “For Liberals Only” publication that is exactly what Jeff Cohen says in the HC blog, “Inside Story” that he doesn’t want. Having worked in and around a lot of large organizations, I can tell you that this is a “top-down” culture; a direct result of the brain-washing that the editors received at the hands of their college journalism captors, and the subsequent brain-washing by these Muckety-mucks of their minions.