Media Nearly Ignores Liberal Think
Tanks
FAIR.org
Right, Center Think Tanks Still Most Quoted
By Michael Dolny
May/June 2005
A study of media citations of think tanks in 2004—the 10th year of
collecting such data—finds that think tanks of the right and center still
predominate, despite a slight increase in citations of left-leaning think
tanks.
The study counts citations of the 25 most prominent think tanks of right,
center and left, using the Nexis news media database. Citations are counted in
what Nexis designates to be major newspapers, as well as in Nexis' transcripts
file, which includes the major broadcast and cable news outlets. Because
stories included in the Nexis database change over time, figures for previous
years are recalculated for comparison purposes rather than taken from previous
editions of the study.
Conservative or right-leaning think tanks garnered 50 percent of citations
among the 25 most-cited think tanks, the same percentage as last year, and near
their 10-year average of 51 percent of citations. Centrist think tanks declined
slightly this year, garnering 33 percent of the citations, compared to 37
percent last year and 36 percent as their 10-year average. Progressive or
left-leaning think tanks had the greatest percentage increase this year,
receiving 16 percent of citations, up from last year's 13 percent and their
10-year average of 14 percent.
The usual suspects remained on top. The centrist Brookings Institution once
again led among all think tanks by a wide margin, and accounted for almost half
of all centrist citations. The Heritage Foundation regained the second spot
from the centrist Council on Foreign Relations, and was once again the most
prominently cited conservative think tank.
The conservative/libertarian Cato Institute, whose drop in citations since
2002 coincided with its opposition to the invasion of Iraq, saw the biggest
percentage gain among the leading think tanks. Cato's fluctuations suggest that
conservative think tanks may pay a price in visibility for deviating from the
Republican Party line.
The Economic Policy Institute was the top-cited progressive think tank,
seeing a noticeable rise from 2003, a year when international issues dominated
the news. However, nearly half of the progressive gain in citations in 2004
came from the Center for American Progress, a new think tank founded by
financier George Soros and headed by John Podesta, former Clinton
chief-of-staff. CAP's politics are close to those of the Democratic Party
mainstream; it favors sending more NATO troops to Iraq rather than withdrawing
U.S. forces, for instance (Iraq: A Strategy for Progress, 5/5/05). As such, the
group is distinctly to the right of, say, the Institute for Policy Studies,
which dropped out of the top 25 in 2004; so some of the slight gain in
progressive think tank citations may have resulted from moving toward the
center.
Rube Goldberg, media critic
Despite the marginal gain on the left, the survey once again found that the
right receives about half of all think-tank citations, and that the
center-to-right spectrum dominates with a combined 84 percent of citations.
Certainly little support can be found in the media's use of think tanks for the
notion of a "liberal bias.'
Not that some on the right aren't willing to try. Academics Tim Groseclose
and Jeff Milyo got considerable attention for a paper they wrote called
"A Measure of Media Bias' (12/04), which deduced a "strong
liberal bias' from an analysis of news outlets' use of "think
tanks.' (The groups the study looks at are actually a combination of
think tanks and advocacy groups.)
The report used a peculiar Rube Goldberg–like method to calculate
media bias from think tank citations: Taking the Americans for Democratic
Action ratings of congressional voting records as its yardstick, it assumed
that media outlets have ideologies similar to those of members of Congress who
cited the same think tanks that the media outlets did.
This approach is based on the problematic notion that politicians cite the
think tanks that they most agree with rather than the ones whose citation will
be the most politically effective—a problem the researchers acknowledge
when they attempt to explain away some curious anomalies that their method
produces. (The National Rifle Association comes out as a centrist group; the
Rand Corporation turns out to be left-leaning.)
If the authors truly wanted to rank media outlets on the ADA scale, the
simpler method would be to look at the ADA ratings of congressmembers quoted by
those news outlets. One suspects that the authors avoided this obvious approach
because the results would have been less to their liking: Studies in Extra!
have repeatedly found various media outlets quote Republicans more often than
Democrats, by ratios ranging from 3 to 2 on NPR (5–6/04) to 3 to 1 on
nightly network news (5–6/02) to a startling 5 to 1 on Fox News' Special
Report (7–8/04). Fox News, according to Groseclose and Milyo's method, is
a "centrist' news outlet.
Source: Nexis database on major newspaper and radio and TV transcripts.
Political orientation is based on FAIR's evaluation of published work and media
comments.
Note: The numbers for the Heritage Foundation were adjusted to correct for
false positives. Approximately 21 percent of the time in 2004 and 22 percent of
the time in 2003, the words "heritage foundation" appeared in Nexis without
referring to the Washington-based think tank.
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