Florida Today’s Watchlist recently reported on Media Matter’s study that seemed to show that conservative columnists were beginning to dominate Florida newspapers. This was supposed to be surprising because a) the typical claim against traditional media is that they are too liberal and b) the cry from the left is that conservatives are monopolizing the traditional media. This latter claim is most often hurled at Rupert Murdoch’s media empire which includes the less-than-liberal Fox News television station.

In Brevard, we have to wonder about Florida Today’s regurgitation of Media Matter’s “report”. We have to qualify the word “report” here because, Media Matters for America itself claims to be a liberal organization: “Media Matters for America is a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.”. Progressive is the new hip word that has replaced the more traditional term “liberal”. Thus, they took it upon themselves to label each columnist as either conservative, centrist, or progressive. While we don’t overly disagree with their assessment, or their numbers, we do find it curious that our local paper would use their “reporting” as the basis for any article. Florida Today is more than fully-qualified to run their own assessment of such an issue without borrowing material from a group that is largely funded by far-left groups like MoveOn.Org.

The theory seems to be that if, well, conservatives are virtually running the Florida media, than how can we, Florida Today (or any newspaper for that matter) be identified as “liberal” or “progressive”? The report only covers the columnists, mostly syndicated, throughout the paper. Cal Thomas and George Will dominate the list of Florida columnists, along with a handful of other names, including Thomas Sowell, and Kathleen Parker.

It could be argued that the very reason newspapers place conservative columnists in their pages is because they help to sell the newspaper to people who might otherwise not purchase it. In fact, if you consider that many of the biases of reporters, both local and nationwide, tend to seep through their reporting, then the placement of conservative columnists is a way for a newspaper to hedge against that.

In other words, it makes it easy for a paper to say, “How can you say we are a liberal rag? We publish every column of Cal Thomas and George Wills whether we agree with them or not?”. Never mind that they may be failing to find a more healthy balance in the newsroom itself, or in their hiring practices, or in the writings of their own op/ed pieces. Water under the bridge. And maybe that’s why Florida Today was seemingly a bit delighted to point out this study to its readers. Despite the recent influx of northerners and their more progressive politics, Brevard County is overall a conservative county. These are the people Florida Today has to sell their paper to each week. Publishing conservative columnists is cheap and easy to do, and apparently, placates the masses into believing the paper is balanced. We aren’t accusing Florida Today of being a mouthpiece for liberal toadies, but neither are we about to congratulate it for being on the Healthy Balance diet.

We certainly have noticed a particular maturation of reporting by Florida Today over the past ten years. Whether that is due to local politics, actual improvement, or just shrew business operations, we don’t know. But, if this report by Media Matters is supposed to hint at a conservative trend in Florida newspapers, we aren’t convinced. Publishing a few conservative columnists on page 9 whose sole job is to combat the stories on page 1 is interesting and fun to read - but hardly a domination of print media.