Thursday, June 21, 2007

Extent of Right-Wing Radio Bias Revealed

Today, the Center for American Progress and the Free Press released a report entitled “The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio,” which conclusively proves that there’s an overwhelming right-wing bias on American news/talk radio. Of course, this should be a surprise to no one. Even though it has been several years since the debut of Air America, most Americans would still be hard-pressed to name a single progressive or liberal radio host, while countless conservative hosts—including Glenn Beck, Neal Boortz, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, G. Gordon Liddy, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Medved, Bill O’Reilly and Michael Savage—enjoy national name recognition.

But the report is still shocking in terms of how one-sided the statistics are. CBS’s 30 stations feature 74% conservative content versus 26% progressive; Clear Channel’s 145 stations are 86% conservative and only 14% progressive; Citadel (23 stations), Cumulus (31 stations) and Salem (28 stations) are all 100% conservative. Not surprisingly, several major American cities—including Dallas, Houston and Philadelphia—hear no progressive or liberal-oriented news/talk radio at all. And even in a supposedly liberal city like New York, the majority of airtime (53% to 47%) is devoted to conservative content. Click here to read the report.

Now what we need is a study illustrating the right-wing bias on television. Fox is still the acknowledged leader in terms of conservative slant, but in recent years ABC has been threatening to overtake Fox in terms of right-wing bias. Meanwhile, CBS and CNN have both become predominantly conservative; only NBC maintains any semblance of balance.