Party Animals?

“Whispers and Screams: The Partisan Nature of Editorial Pages” by Michael Tomasky, Research Paper R-25 (July 2003), Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard Univ., 79 JFK St., 2nd floor Taubman, Cambridge, Mass. 02138.

Partisanship is no stranger on the editorial pages of the nation’s newspapers. But there’s a significant difference in the way liberal and conservative papers handle it, argues Tomasky, a former fellow at the Shorenstein Center who was recently named executive editor of The American Prospect, a liberal biweekly.

Tomasky examined 510 editorials from the liberal New York Times and Washington Post and the conservative Wall Street Journal and Washington Times. The editorials dealt with 10 pairs of “roughly comparable” issues during the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. The newspapers were about equally partisan in their treatment of “the other side” on matters of public policy, Tomasky writes. “For example, The New York Times opposed the [2001] Bush tax cut about as often, and about as strongly, as The Wall Street Journal opposed the [1993] Clinton stimulus package.”

But the papers’ treatment of “their own side” was markedly different, he says. The liberal papers criticized the Clinton administration in 30 percent of the editorials, and praised it in only 36 percent. The conservative papers rapped the Bush administration in only seven percent of the editorials, while lauding it in 77 percent.

When the issue was secrecy, for example—in First Lady Hillary Clinton’s 1993 health-care task force and in the 2001 Bush Energy Task Force, chaired by Vice President Dick Cheney—the disparate treatment appeared again. The New York Times published four critical editorials about the Clinton panel’s secrecy, and five deploring the Cheney group’s. The Wall Street Journal printed eight editorials condemning the secrecy in the Clinton case, but only one about the Cheney panel’s secrecy—and it defended the vice president.

Tomasky thinks that the liberal papers take “a traditional view of journalism as detached, independent, and unaffiliated (or at least less affiliated) with a particular political party,” while the conservative papers practice “a more activist-oriented journalism,” closely aligned with a cause and a party. For the liberal papers, in his view, the question now becomes whether to follow the conservative example.