David W. Brady and Jonathan Ma

About the author: David W. Brady is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of political science at Stanford University, where Jonathan Ma is a student of economics.

The liberal bias in newspaper articles can be seen in the terms used to identify senators and members of Congress. A study of articles printed in the New York Times and the Washington Post reveals that Republican representatives are more often identified as conservatives. Meanwhile, Democrats such as Senator Ted Kennedy are rarely identified as liberal although their voting records show them to be so. In addition, conservatives are more often given negative labels such as "combative" and "cantankerous" while liberals are identified with positive terms such as "respected" and "intellectual." This method of identifying...