The Sixth Estate

Last year, in the wake of the 2011 election, I ran a project to measure whose voices got amplified in the major newspapers’ op-ed pages, called the Media Bias Project. The result was a conclusion that Conservative voices outnumbered Liberal and NDP ones (but only by 11% to 8%), and more importantly, that business groups (32%) dominated over progressive and union groups (3%) and social conservative ones (4%), even in so-called leftist bastions like the Toronto Star.

Recently a commentor has challenged me to redo the project, accusing me of bias because I excluded the Sun chain and because of various other reasons. As part of the challenge between him and I, I’m opening up the Media Bias project again to see how things have changed over the last year as well as to make a couple of changes to the approach. So here we go again.

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On May 11, I announced a new study of political and economic bias in the major papers of Canada — the Globe & Mail, National Post, Toronto Star, Montreal Gazette, and Vancouver Sun. Today I am presenting the first update on results. This provides an important perspective on which perspectives are given the most access to the least neutral section of the newspaper: its opinion page. The Media Bias Page can be found on the top bar of this website.

Some trends are holding more or less solid. For instance, conservative parties are getting more op-ed space than the Liberals and the NDP combined, and Her Majesty’s Official Opposition is getting about half the opinion space that the Liberals are. More significantly, the data clearly show that business voices — think tanks, trade associations, lobbyists, and corporate executives — predominate. This isn’t just about progressive voices being squeezed out — although that’s certainly true. The media really isn’t hearing from social conservatives, either. This is interesting because

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I’ve decided to do something about the often-repeated claim that the English Canadian media is dominated by right-wing voices (or, according to right-wing Canadians, that it is dominated by left-wing voices). With the election over, it’s time to get back to my usual business of exploring political and corporate influence in the media and the damaging effects this has on democracy, vital Canadian institutions, and especially environment and climate change policy. But I’ve decided to do something a little more systematic, too. I’m going to track the types of people who get to write op-eds in the country’s major papers, aside from the regular in-house columnists. I think this is a useful proxy for assessing the bias of the editorial boards who make those decisions.

Another way of estimating newspaper bias are the endorsements they make in each election campaign. These are ostensibly geared towards picking out the most promising and visionary party in the campaign, not just the winner, but somehow the major papers manage to be very consistent in their endorsements across elections. This time, about 30 papers endorsed the Conservatives, 2 endorsed the NDP, and Le Devoir endorsed the Bloc. On May 2, just under 40% of Canadians endorsed the Conservatives, but they won around 90% of newspaper endorsements. This is an astounding credibility gap, and the implications of a “democracy” where 60% of the public is represented by only 10% of the media are very serious:

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