Op-ed pages: 77 percent of pieces authored by think-tank affiliates came from conservative outfits

The Right-Wing Op-Ed Insurgency | CommonDreams.org

Liberal bias? A Daily Beast investigation crunches the numbers and shows how conservative think tanks have quietly achieved domination over the opinion pages of America's biggest papers.

For all the noise about liberal bias in newsrooms, you'd think the country's big three papers had contracted George Soros, Ralph Nader, and Gloria Steinem as their exclusive opinionators.

But a Daily Beast review of the archives of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post tells a much different story: Conservative think tanks are pummeling their liberal peers in the race for the most prominent placement on op-ed pages. During the past year, 77 percent of pieces authored by think-tank affiliates came from conservative outfits, 18 percent came from centrist groups, and a tiny 5 percent came from the left wing.

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The American Enterprise Institute [the organization that brought you the Iraq war ... ed.] crushes the competition, liberal and conservative, in racking up bylines, scoring 99 of the total 217 pieces published by major think tanks from the third week of July 2008 to July 21, 2009, as shown by a review of the archives of the Times, Post, and Journal.

Of course, you're four times as likely to find an AEI piece in the right-leaning pages of the Journal than in the more liberal pages of the Times and Post put together. In fact, 79 AEI-bylined op-eds appeared in the Journal during the period surveyed. Considering that the Journal publishes only six days a week, that's one AEI appearance every four days. Bush hawks like John Yoo, John Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle, who nest at the D.C. institute and are frequent contributors, help pad the stats. A recent offering from Yoo, the former Bush Justice Department official: " Why We Endorsed Warrantless Wiretaps." Last month, Bolton, Bush's former representative at the United Nations, floated this thought balloon in the Journal: " What Would Happen if Israel Strikes Iran?"

But it's important to note that the AEI crowd is not completely confined to the Journal. They also find themselves in the opinion section of the Washington Post more times-16 during the last year-than any other think tank. ...