Today we learn in the Washington Post, courtesy of Howie Kurtz, that George Mason University Professor Robert Lichter claims to have discovered--for the umpteenth time--that university professors are liberal:
www.washingtonpost.com :
College faculties, long assumed to be a liberal bastion, lean further to the left than even the most conspiratorial conservatives might have imagined, a new study says.
By their own description, 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative, says the study being published this week. The imbalance is almost as striking in partisan terms, with 50 percent of the faculty members surveyed identifying themselves as Democrats and 11 percent as Republicans.
These "the universities are filled with a bunch of libruls" stories are by now so commonplace that the particular findings are hardly worth discussing anymore.
What is worth discussing is how the right wing noise machine generates these reports on a seemingly monthly basis, and how the SCLM falls for them just as often.
Robert Lichter, it would appear, is a well-greased cog in said noise machine, and makes his living finding bias in "elite" liberal institutions like academia and the press. In this case, he was paid to find liberal bias in the academy by the Randolph Foundation, which Kurtz describes--tho not til the 7th paragraph of his story--as "a right-leaning group that has given grants to such conservative organizations as the Independent Women's Forum and Americans for Tax Reform."
Lichter is a "media critic and commentator for Fox News," according to an announcement of his hiring as professor of communications at George Mason University. He is also president of Center for Media and Public Affairs, which describes itself on its website thus:
www.cmpa.com :
CMPA is classified as a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization. And we're the rare group that lives by that. Some groups' politics inform their work; we base our work in academically-accredited (and ideology-averse) "content analysis."
But being participants in an increasingly polarized political world, we're often accused of bearing a scarlet letter, the ultimate Washington, DC four-letter word: bias. More often than not, these allegations are more indictments of the people who issue them than serious criticism of CMPA's "agenda."
We are proud to be independent and nonpartisan. And we don't mind being tough to pigeonhole. Most Americans are.
So in other words--it's not Lichter and the CMPA who are biased. It's everybody else. And they're ruthlessly rooting out everyone else's biases. Funny thing is, Lichter and the CMPA seem to find liberal bias everywhere they look, and conservative bias virtually nowhere. Indeed, Lichter often bends over backwards to refute claims of conservative bias against Fox News, his employer.
Here he is, for example, on coverage of John Kerry and the presidential race, courtesy of a story on the website of campusreportonline.net, an affiliate of the right-wing Accuracy In Academia:
www.campusreportonline.net :
Lichter found that Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., the Democratic presidential candidate, has received more favorable media coverage than any White House aspirant in the past 20 years. The CMPA has been tracking news media coverage of presidential candidates since 1988.
...
Surprisingly, Lichter found that Fox News beamed as much negative coverage of the President as the other broadcast networks. The difference in the Fox Network's coverage of the presidential race is that the comparatively fledgling news operation delivered more overwhelmingly negative coverage of the Democratic challenger than any of its electronic competitors.
"Fox News Channel was about as negative towards Bush as the broadcast networks, but Kerry's evaluations were negative by a five-to-one margin," Lichter's study concluded.
"There was little difference in the evaluations of party- and campaign-based partisan sources; but Bush fared over four times better among non-partisan sources." Lichter's study, Election Newswatch, only looked at Britt Hume's nightly newscast and not at the more contentious political talk shows on the network hosted by, more or less, identifiable conservatives.
Surveying the sum total of network and print coverage of the campaign, Lichter observed, albeit cautiously, that "the longtime argument that liberals get better press than conservatives would seem to be validated."
And here's Lichter commenting on Dan Rather and the TANG document "forgeries":
www.philly.com :
Robert Lichter, president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a nonpartisan research organization at George Mason University, said: "It's the old story of gatekeeper media-elite journalism saying, 'We know what the truth is.' But this time the 'jammie patrol' was right," he said, referring to a comment by a former CBS News executive that bloggers who questioned the documents were just guys sitting at computers in their pajamas.
Lichter said the story showed "how enmeshed the media have gotten in election politics."
"CBS News became part of the political equation when they did the story, and what's disturbing is that they don't seem to have realized that. They seem to want everyone to believe they are pure and above partisanship."
"Gatekeeper media-elite journalism"-- that's supposed to sound "unbiased" huh? Um, okay.
In a September 2003 report on media coverage of the Iraq war, Lichter claimed that ABC was the "most anti-war," and that Dan Rather's CBS Evening News was the most "pro-war"--a convenient finding, since it meant CBS edged out BushCo cheerleader Fox News for that honor (and did I mention that Lichter is a paid commentator for Fox?). So apparently when Dan Rather was reporting positively on the Iraq war, he was just doing his job--but when he tried to investigate the president, he was a "gatekeeper media-elite" journalist.
That last story, as you'll see if you follow the link, was pimped in a 2003 Howie Kurtz column. Kurtz, it would seem, is a conduit for getting Lichter's claims of elite liberal bias into the SCLM, which would help explain why Kurtz--a media reporter--featured this story on academia in his column on the front page of the WaPo's style section today.
Update [2005-3-29 14:32:41 by Hprof]: For more on Lichter's ties to the Scaife and Olin foundations and the right wing noise machine, see
this report by Media Matters.
As that May 2004 report makes clear, denying his right-wing orientation is Lichter's m.o.. But Stanley Rothman, a co-author of this study about college professors, has no qualms about saying, "I don't think I'm as conservative as Dick Scaife. But I'm a conservative." Small comfort, that.
Update [2005-3-30 22:43:31 by Hprof]:: Lichter and Kurtz clearly have a bit of a love/love relationship. Not only is Lichter a frequent source for Kurtz, but it turns out he has Howie's back. After a 2000 TNR story, "Howard Kurtz and the Decline of Media Criticism," Lichter wrote in to defend Howie:
www.tnr.com :
[S]omeone needs to expose hypocrisies and conflicts of interest among these self-appointed watchdogs, who point out everyone's foibles but their own. The media beat is well-matched to this role, and Kurtz is its premier practitioner.
Does that sound like the Howie Kurtz you know? Me neither.