"The methodology is pretty solid"? Well maybe compared to most studies of media bias, which are pretty awful. I dismissed it on my own site, and linked to others who did the same.

And, you missed a wonderfully ironic point. Noah's article, explaining how media conservatives are nastier than leftists, called them "Stalinists" in the title. Now that's civil discourse!

Also, I think another really big problem is that editorial criticism of GW was (continues to be?) notably muted by 9-11. His overall popularity since that time has been extremely high, and I'm pretty sure that popularity is reflected in apparent bias these numbers seem to reveal. Meanwhile, any articles from the last third of Clinton's presidency are likely to be skewed in a negative fashion due to his..ahem..problems. I'd be very interested to see the results broken down over time.

(Also, I don't think the authors rhetoric is completely irrelevant in a study like this where subjective evaluations are an inherent part of the study.)

The report makes clear that it's about EDITORIAL PAGES.

Very clear, right?

So I go to Jim Miller's site to see what he has to say. He tells us that the WSJ is not conservative because its news section is as liberal as the WP (whatever that means).

Meanwhile he recognizes that the WSJ has a conservative editorial page, WHICH IS WHAT THE REPORT IS ABOUT! So what's his point?

Jim, you seem to have a problem understanding what is being debated. You made a mistake with the Guardian article and the BBC and now this?

I thought the Powerline refutation was devastating; and by the way, you have the wrong link to it.

The gist is this: Though Tomasky claims to have a sample size of 10 issues, 2 issues received 60% of the weighting. One was the treatment of Janet Reno v John Ashcroft in their first years; on that, all the moderation at the liberal papers was due to expressed reservations about her conduct in the Waco disaster. The other was a comparison of Bush's large tax cut with Clinton's tiny "stimulus" package, which had $15 billion of tax breaks that the liberal papers objected to. So the supposed liberal "moderation" is due to opposing tax cuts and embarrassment over the killing of 80 American citizens by the Justice Department.

What if the Bush administration was just better and thus more difficult to criticize?

GT - My point about the newspapers is simply that you can not match the newspapers as Tomasky did, that the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times are too different from the New York Times and the Washington Post to make the comparison valid. I mention the split between the news and editorial sides at the WSJ simply as one obvious example of the differences; there are many others.

Since you made a more general attack on me--best done by way of private email, in my opinion--let me mention some of the predictions where I have been correct on my blog: Low casualties in the war with Iraq, progress on free trade under Bush despite steps backwards at the beginning, majority support for short war by Iraqis, and my skepticism on the exaggerated claims about the looting of the Baghdad museums. Check them out.

BTW, is no one besides me bothered by the "Stalinist" in Noah's title?

I fail to see the point Jim. If the issue is to compare conservative vs liberal editorial pages why does the news section have anything to do with it? How would that affect the outcome in any way? How would an editorial page be more or less conservative depending on what the news section is?

Not to mention that you have provided no definition of what a liberla news section is.

As for your predictions I think they complement well what I posted. Your "mistakes" and your predictions all share that they are "conservative " or right of center". By this I mean that you consistently seem to predict or interpret what fits a conservative viewpoint.

It's as if I always predicted that the liberal position will win. Over time I will be able to point to a lot of successes. But since there is no method to it, other than ideological bias, it does not help me predict the future.

This, btw, is not something that is specific to you but to all of us (myself included). We view the world through our own biases and preferences and when things go our way we think we have been vindicated but whe they don't we tend to forget.

If the Guardian article had been about how well the BBC was doing and how badly Blair was seen, and had a clear error in it but of an opposite sign, I bet you would have caught it in a second and some liberal blogger somewhere would have made the mistake you made here.

I'll make my point clearer: suppose Tokarsky's work compares editorials about the Wilson administration and the Roosevelt administration. The Democrats have just won the election, so it won't be too much of a surprise to find out that the new administration is more popular than the old one, and that might be reflected in the editorials' content. Republican editorials might be more on the defensive, trying to find arguments against the new administration but not having found them for the time being.
My point is that Tokarsky's method seems to assume that all administration are equally deserving, and therefore, that any difference of appreciation can only result from a preconceived bias on the part of the media.
I don't know much about American politics, being not American, but it seems to me that conservative and liberals are alternatively more or less on the defensive, and that right now, the liberals - who have just lost the mid-term elections - are more on the defensive.
Thus it is logical that liberal editorialists are playing the game of honesty and objectivity. I suppose the conservative would do the same in other circumstances.
By the way, are Krugman's editorials taken into account in Tokarsky's study???

Hilarious. Conservative media? WSJ editorial page, the NY Post, FOX News (sometimes), Washington Times, a couple of magazines with limited readership, a handful of radio talk shows. Did I forget anything? Probably not.

Liberals media? All other newspapers, magazines, TV & radio news, academia, entertainment industry, education biz, publishing companies, judiciary. Did I forget anything? Probably.

The left is nuts. Rush is right (again) when he says that the left is much more fun when they're out of power. They become like frenzied, angry, buzzing yellow jackets at the end of the summer when it's clear their day is over.

This seems to be another attempt to use "science" to buttress one ideological side of the spectrum. Coupled with the Berkeley study that "conservatives" from Hitler to Rush are mean and don't like ambiguity, and we are seeing one side's prejudices buttressed by imitating the one religion that every American has complete faith in: science.

Just a note:
Many conservative complaints about the media are about opinion pieces masquerading as news coverage. Not about the opinion/editorial boards, but about left-wing slants in how the media reports news in the news section (or in neews programs).

One expects people who write opinion columns like editorials to have opinions. One also expects reporters to put their opinions aside and report the facts.

Thus, the principal problem with comparing editorial pages is that it is completely irrelevant to the typical conservative complaints about media bias, which are far, far more often about reporting.

thanks daniel for not making excuses.
it made my day.