80% of op ed columnists in the Tampa Tribune are conservatives.

madfloridian

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Sat Sep-22-07 12:48 AM
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80% of op ed columnists in the Tampa Tribune are conservatives.

In the St. Petersburg Times, 43% are considered progressive and 23% are considered conservative.

Media Matters Says Florida Newspapers Dominated by Conservative Op-Ed Writers

The St. Petersburg Times is shown featuring more progressives than conservatives, with 43 percent of columnists considered progressive and 29 percent considered conservative. Just three other newspapers in the state featured more progressive voices than conservative: The Palm Beach Post, the Ocala Star Banner and the New Smyrna Beach Observer.

According to their study, 80 percent of op-ed columnists featured by the Tampa Tribune are conservative -- only the Winter Haven News Chief, the Villages Daily Sun and the Fort Walton Beach Northwest Florida Daily News had highest percentages of conservative columnists. Only one newspaper among Florida's 38 daily newspapers, the Gainesville Sun, declined to reveal information to the site's researchers or offered no way to track their use of columnists from Washington D.C.

Odd that an Ocala paper has a good number of progressive voices. More odd it that the Gainesville Sun won't reveal info about their DC columnists.

Read the full Media Matters report here.

It is an amazing report with charts and graphs. But it is a scary one. The facts show that by far conservative columnists have a broader reach and more circulation. Please note that is not going by preference but is policy. Progressive voices are in sad shape as far as reach and circulation.

The top 10 columnists as ranked by the total circulation of the papers in which they are published also include five conservatives, two centrists, and only three progressives.

In 38 states, the conservative voice is greater than the progressive voice -- in other words, conservative columns reach more readers in total than progressive columns. In only 12 states is the progressive voice greater than the conservative voice.

In three out of the four broad regions of the country -- the West, the South, and the Midwest -- conservative syndicated columnists reach more readers than progressive syndicated columnists. Only in the Northeast do progressives reach more readers, and only by a margin of 2 percent.

Here is only one of the Media Matters graphs. It is self-explanatory.

If one were to throw a dart at a map of the United States and pick up the local newspaper where the dart landed, chances are one would be reading a paper whose op-ed pages lean to the right. Putting aside for a moment the question of circulation, the data show unequivocally that most newspapers in America run more conservative syndicated columnists than progressive syndicated columnists.

In fact, there are fully three newspapers that run more conservatives than progressives for every one newspaper that runs more progressives than conservatives.

While it might be easy to bring to mind a few prominent newspapers (e.g. The New York Times) that run more progressives, looking across the data it becomes clear that at every circulation level, one finds more papers that skew to the right on the op-ed pages. This difference is modest within the largest papers -- the 103 papers with circulations over 100,000 -- but becomes an enormous gap that grows larger at each smaller level of circulation.