Just Another Blog
Monday, April 01, 2002
 
More Conservatives than Liberals in the Print Media

That is what this article from Editor & Publisher.com would have you believe.
"Conservative columnists are a bit more popular," agreed Alan Shearer, editorial director and general manager of WPWG, which has four liberal, three conservative, and eight moderate or hard-to-pigeonhole Op-Ed columnists. He said one reason why conservatives tend to sell better is that conservative publishers, especially at smaller papers, often influence editorial-page editors' column buys.

This makes some Op-Ed pages more conservative than many of their actual or potential readers. And there are more conservative columnists on the far right than liberal ones on the far left. Then again, there are more liberal political cartoonists on Op-Ed pages.
I would be willing to bet that many of these hard-to-pigeonhole columnists aren't really so tough to categorize after all. I suspect that one of the big reasons for the popularity of conservative syndicated columnists is that they offset the liberal slant of many papers' local editorial staffs. The article seems to be written from an It's-Hard-to-Believe-Americans-Are-Reading-This-Stuff stance.