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Sunday morning public affairs shows on CBS, ABC and NBC are responsible for the fact that “our national debate – with all its consequences for policy and public opinion – has been pulled unmistakably to the right.” At least that’s the conclusion made in a new study released by Media Matters, which has found that the nearly 7,000 guests that appeared on those three networks’ Sunday morning interview programs skew heavily toward the right-side of the political spectrum.

Media Matters – the media watchdog organization “dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media” -- looked at each guest on CBS’ “Face The Nation,” ABC’s “This Week” and NBC’s “Meet The Press” for the years of 1997 through 2005 and classified each with one of the following designations: Democrat, Republican, Progressive, Conservative or Neutral. Among the findings:

The balance between Democrats/progressives and Republicans/conservatives was roughly equal during Clinton’s second term, with a slight edge toward Republicans/conservatives: 52 percent of the ideologically identifiable guests were from the right, and 48 percent were from the left. But in Bush’s first term, Republicans/ conservatives held a dramatic advantage, outnumbering Democrats/progressives by 58 percent to 42 percent. In 2005, the figures were an identical 58 percent to 42 percent.

You can read the entire report and its findings here (Adobe Acrobat required), but I want to focus on the methodology for the moment, particularly this part:

Our goal in designing the methodology for this study was to ensure that the classifications would be as unambiguous and defensible as possible, even to those who profoundly disagree with the goals of our organization.

Readers should be clear on what we did not do: These classifications do not represent an analysis of what each person actually said when she/he appeared on a show on a given date. Coding each guest’s comments for their ideological slant would have introduced enormous difficulties and opportunities for subjectivity. Instead, we simply classified each guest based on her/his general partisan or ideological orientation.

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