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insult in American society — even Gus Hall, general secretary of the American Communist Party, would probably feel obliged to take a swing at anybody who called him “unpatri otic’ — the reporter undoubtedly fig ured he had Mr. Reagan between a rock and a hard place. But the presi dent declined the gambit: “I think I'll leave that argument to others.” Or, in other words, if the shoe fits, Buster, put it on Leaving the question of patriotism aside (after all, when they aren't vir tuously defending their record on the subject, liberals are perversely fond of dismissing it as “the last refuge of a scoundrel”), the statistical evidence of the media's liberal bias is simply beyond challenge. The most recent and comprehensive analysis was the Lichter-Rothman survey, conducted in 1980. Based on 240 in-depth inter views with a random sample of pro fessional journalists employed by out top media (both print and electronic) the survey revealed, among many other fascinating things, that in the four immediately preceding presiden tial elections the proportion of these journalists who voted Democratic had never been less than 80 percent. When confronted with this statistic, some media spokesmen point out that the Lichter-Rothman study deals only with journalists’ private opinions, not their journalistic product. Quite true, but evaluations of their product are available, too. As far back as 1968, Edith Efron taped the evening news programs on all three networks every weekday night for the six months preceding the presidential election, laboriously counted every word spoken, and reported the results in a book aptly called “The News Twisters.’ She found, for instance, that on ABC there were 7,493 words spoken against Richard Nixon and only 869 for him, compared with 4,218 for Hubert Humphrey and 3,569 against him. Or, take the Media Analysis Project at George Washington University, which reported that “soft news’ (commentaries, features, etc.) on the three network's evening news in the first two months of 1983 was “‘dispro portionately critical and negative’ toward Mr. Reagan and his adminis tration.
Newspaper Details
Key West Citizen
Key West, Florida, US
Mon, Mar 04, 1985
Page 16
Full Page
Clipped by
Roger M.
USA 01 Jul 2026
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