Liberal media?

Fairness and Accuracy in Media, which analyzes media content from a portside perspective, has just released a fascinating study on the evolution of NPR's (Morning Edition, All Things Considered) content over the past decade. If you're a regular listener, you don't want to miss their analysis, which confirms the rightward drift at NPR that many regular listeners (like me) complain about.

Couple this study with yesterday's mea culpa in the New York Times regarding its uncritical coverage in the months leading up to the war of the Bush administration's and Ahmed Chalabi's claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and you get a damning refutation of the notion that the media is dominated by liberals.

The zeitgeist of the culture, of course, is quite the opposite. Right wing talk show hosts, best-selling conservative authors and Republican politicians still regularly accuse the media of harboring a liberal bias. Their evidence is usually drawn from surveys of jounalists' opinions at elite media institutions.

Opinions are one thing. Actions -- what journalists actually do to earn their paychecks -- are quite another. If you want an objective analysis of what the self-censoring liberal journalists at NPR put in your ear each day, turn your web browser to:

http://www.fair.org/extra/0405/npr-study.html
http://www.fair.org/extra/0405/npr-study.html