Suspect methodology!

And if that title doesn't get your toes a tapping, I don't know what will.

Bruce Bartlett's latest article is titled "A little rightward tilt is a good thing." It helps to have the writers opinions stated right there in the title.

Anyway he refers to a study by Tim Grosedose and Jeff Milyo that I imagine will get a lot of play over the next couple of weeks which suggests that the most unbiased sources of news are Fox News and the Drudge Report. However, as I subtly indicated above, I'm not sure about their methodology.

Here it is.

Step one is to divide all the Senators and Representatives into liberal and conservative camps based on their votes. I'm not sure how this is done, but as one person at Democratic Underground pointed out, Congress is somewhat dominated by conservatives right now. It's not hard to imagine this methodology moving the center a bit to the right.

Step two is to note which think tanks each side quotes from, and in this manner label said think tanks liberal or conservative. There doesn't seem to be any means of determining validity or partisan ship of these various think tanks. If a liberal senator quotes a non-partisan think tank, it becomes a liberal think tank. Which is par for the course; "liberal" think tanks are non-partisan, conservative think tanks are fiercely partisan. So it all balances out.

Step three is finding out how regularly news broadcasts quote from the same think tanks. If a news source quotes from a "liberal" source than it moves left on the scale. If a news source quotes from a conservative source than it moves right. Simple. And based on this methodology Fox News's "Special Report" and the Drudge Report are the closest to the middle of the road.

Grosedose and Milyo also regurgitate the statistic that only 7% of journalists voted for President George H. W. Bush in 1992, as opposed to 37% in the general populace. They out to go back and look at how editors and publishers vote, because that might tell a different story. And editors and publishers have a lot more control over what goes on the air than the reporters.

But remember, "A little rightward tilt is a good thing." So perhaps the answer is more important than the methodology used to get there.