In the online American Prospect, intern/Princeton junior Asheesh Kapur Siddique makes a very amateurish mistake today in citing the MRC. In trying to refute Richard Posner’s NYT Magazine piece that said 76 percent of reporters self-identify as liberals, he writes: “This is an overstatement even by the standards of most conservatives (the right-wing Media Research Center, for example, says 61 percent identify as liberal).”
Actually, the MRC Web site does have a 1996 study, by the American Society of Newspaper Editors in which 61 percent identify as liberal or liberal-leaning. But that is not an MRC survey. If young Mr. Siddique was going to attribute someone else’s study to MRC, he could have tried the latest numbers from Pew, reproduced on our site, in which only 34 percent self-identify as liberal (and 7 percent say they’re conservative.)
Personally, while polls can be a useful starting point in asking if the media favor liberals, you are counting on them to identify themselves, and they love to quickly place themselves in the sensible center. Beware: that’s the same place that locate Hillary Clinton. The real proof is in the press’s daily pudding.