Is the media slanted? Without a doubt, it is. The research in Left Turn shows that, conclusively. The really interesting part, though, is that the amount of bias (both left and right) will surprise you. The chart below shows some of the slant quotients from our major media outlets.

Left Turn uses three different methods to calculate the Slant Quotients of media outlets. (A Slant Quotient of 50.4 is perfectly centrist. Higher numbers indicate liberal outlets. Lower numbers indicate conservative outlets.)

One method uses think-tank citations as the basic data. According to this method, the following are the SQs of twenty of the most prominent news outlets in the U.S.

ABC Good Morning America 56.1 ABC World News Tonight 61.0 CBS Early Show 66.6 CBS Evening News 73.7 CNN NewsNight with Aaron Brown 56.0 Drudge Report 60.4 Fox News Spec. Rept. w/ Brit Hume 39.7 Los Angeles Times 70.0 NBC Nightly News 61.6 NBC Today Show 64.0 New York Times 73.7 Newshour with Jim Lehrer 55.8 Newsweek 66.3 NPR Morning Edition 66.3 Time Magazine 65.4 U.S. News and World Report 65.8 USA Today 63.4 Wall Street Journal 85.1 Washington Post 66.6 Washington Times 35.4

A second method uses loaded political phrases (like “death tax” or “estate tax”) as basic data.

(These data were compiled by Mathew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro, two rising-star economists at the University of Chicago. Gentzkow and Shapiro did not compute “Slant Quotients” per se. Instead, their method solves the following thought experiment: Consider the loaded political phrases that a particular outlet reported, and suppose instead the outlet had been a member of Congress. What is the most likely conservativeness of the district of such a member of Congress, where conservativeness is defined by the vote share of George W. Bush in the 2004 election? Groseclose conducts a regression analysis [a common statistical technique], which allows him to convert Bush vote shares into a predicted Political Quotient of the district’s representative. This allows him to convert the Gentzkow-Shapiro results into Slant Quotients.) According to this method, the following are the SQs of the twenty highest-circulation newspapers in the U.S.

SQ Rank Newspaper Circulation Slant Quotient 1 Detroit Free Press 330,000 81.5 2 N.Y. Daily News 718,000 81.0 3 Atlanta Journal-Constitution 375,000 74.8 4 San Francisco Chronicle 386,600 71.9 5 Chicago Tribune 566,000 70.4 6 Dallas Morning News 411,000 69.8 7 USA Today 2,278,000 68.6 8 Philadelphia Inquirer 352,000 68.4 9 Boston Globe 382,000 67.8 10 New York Times 1,120,000 67.3 11 Los Angeles Times 815,000 66.1 12 New York Post 724,000 66.0 13 (Long Island) Newsday 398,000 65.9 14 Washington Post 699,000 65.9 15 Newark Star-ledger 372,000 65.8 16 Cleveland Plain Dealer 344,000 64.8 17 Mineapolis Star Tribune 345,000 64.0 18 Arizona Republic 433,000 55.5 19 Wall St. Journal 2,062,000 55.1 20 Houston Chronicle 503,000 53.8

A third method notes two equally-true sets of facts about the Bush tax cuts: (i) that in dollar terms, the rich received a disproportionate share of the cuts, and (ii) that the cuts made the tax system more progressive—that is, after the cuts took place, the share of the total taxes that the rich would pay actually increased. Liberal politicians and media outlets tended to report fact (i) relatively more, while conservative politicians and media outlets tended to report (ii) relatively more. The third method notes the relative frequencies that an outlet reported fact (i) or (ii). According to this method, the following are the SQs of twenty of the most prominent news outlets in the U.S.

Media Outlet SQ ABC Good Morning America 63.5 ABC World News Tonight 83.7 CBS Early Show 68.3 CBS Evening News 86.8 CNN Wolf Blitzer Reports 77.8 Fox News Special Report 65.3 Los Angeles Times 80.4 NBC Nightly News 63.4 NBC Today Show 63.5 New York Times 83.9 Newhour with Jim Lehrer 77.9 Newsweek 100.0 NPR Morning Edition 74.1 TIme Magazine 100.0 U.S. News & World Report 100.0 USA Today 82.2 Wall Street Journal 74.1 Washington Post 78.9 Washington Times 67.3