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I'm in no position to comment on the success or lack thereof of Air America. Checking out Arbitron ratings just isn't my thing. But this portion of a conservative op-ed piece in today's L.A. Times got my attention:

Successful talk radio is conservative for three reasons: Liberal bias in the old media. That's what birthed talk radio in the first place. People turn to it to help right the imbalance. Political scientist William Mayer, writing in the Public Interest, recently observed that liberals don't need talk radio because they've got the big three networks, most national and local daily newspapers and NPR. Unable to prosper in the medium, liberals have taken to denouncing talk radio as a threat to democracy. Liberal political columnist Hendrik Hertzberg, writing in the New Yorker, is typically venomous. Conservative talk radio represents "vicious, untreated political sewage" and "niche entertainment for the spiritually unattractive," Hertzberg sneers. If some liberals had their way, Congress would regulate political talk radio out of existence. Their logic is that scrapping Air America would be no loss if it also meant getting Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Bennett off the air. To accomplish this, New York Democratic Rep. Maurice D. Hinchey has proposed reviving the Fairness Doctrine to protect "diversity of view," and John Kerry recently sent out some signals that he too thought that might be a good idea.

That bit about a fellow political scientist claiming that the media has a liberal bias made me pause. Virtually every study I've ever seen would disagree with that claim. True, journalists themselves tend to be more liberal than the average American, but that's true of anyone in in their socio-economic status. Short version - the more well educated you are, the more money you make, the more likely you are to be liberal. That's not saying there are no rich, well educated conservatives. It's just that, on average...

Anyhow, that bit got me wondering. And unfortunately for Mr. Anderson, the author of this piece and of the polemic "South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias," I have access to University eJournal systems. That allows me to do something known as fact checking. And here, direct from the text of William Mayer's article, is what he really said:

The questions of whether the American news media are biased and, if so, whether liberals or conservatives are the beneficiaries of that bias, have been the subject of an enormous amount of research over the last three and a half decades. As one might expect on such a politically charged issue, these studies reach no consensus. In general, liberals believe that the media have a conservative bias, while conservatives feel that the media favor liberals. And most journalists claim that both are wrong. In terms of the audience for talk radio, however, actual bias is probably less important than public perceptions of bias.[...] But a particularly striking divergence appears when one breaks these results down by ideology or partisan affiliation. Whatever liberal elites may say, most rank-and-file liberals are not convinced that the media are the enemy. In fact, many polls indicate that self-identified liberals are about as likely to see a liberal bias in the media as a conservative bias. By contrast, conservatives strongly believe the media are aligned against them. [...] Liberals, in short, do not need talk radio: They have Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and Tom Brokaw-not to mention NPR. A quite large number of conservatives, however, see network television and their local newspapers as promoting a perspective on national and world affairs that is fundamentally at odds with their own. Talk radio is a way of redressing the imbalance.

Two things jump out here:

First, there's a very important difference in what Mayer said and the way Anderson reported it. Mayer isn't suggesting that the media is actually biased. In the section not mentioned by Anderson he explicitly states that there's no consensus among researchers on that fact, and for that reason we have to fall back on people's perceptions of media bias, not reality. And based on perceptions, "liberals, in short, do not need talk radio: They have Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and Tom Brokaw-not to mention NPR." That's not saying that there is a bias. It's saying that people perceive a bias. But as those of us out here in the reality-based community know, perceptions can often be deceiving.

Second, in the sections I didn't quote (it was a 19 page journal article), Mayer discusses his methodology. The key fact? All of the surveys on which he's basing his perception argument are from 1996. I don't have time to go looking for more recent data, but I have a strong suspicion that if you asked liberals about media bias today you'd get a very, VERY different answer.

So... once again, we have a conservative commentator misrepresenting the facts in an effort to make a political point.

Those poor conservatives... they control all the branches of government, have the media spinning their daily talking points, and yet somehow they're the ones under attack. Boo hoo!

I mean, wow, if those crazy liberals had their way, "Congress would regulate political talk radio out of existence." And how would they do that? By re-imposing the Fairness Doctrine! Good god! The public airwaves might actually have to consider the public interest in their mad dash for cash! What is this world coming to?

Opposing the Fairness Doctrine is just something I'll never understand. If you've got truth on your side, what do you have to fear in an open and vigorous debate? Take it away, T.J.

"If [a] book be false in its facts, disprove them; if false in its reasoning, refute it. But for God's sake, let us freely hear both sides if we choose." --Thomas Jefferson to N. G. Dufief, 1814.

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