New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt has not had a chance yet to respond to questions about his commentary on the ACORN hoax (FAIR Action Alert, 3/11/10), instead devoting his Sunday column (3/14/10) to a discussion of political labeling. It included this question:

Why is the American Enterprise Institute almost always called "conservative" in the Times, while the Brookings Institution seldom gets a label, although it has been described as a Democratic government in exile during Republican regimes?

First off, the right-wing AEI (Extra!, 3-4/99) is not "almost always called 'conservative' in the Times"; a Nexis search of the paper over the past year turns up 77 references to the think tank, of which 18 have the word "conservative" in the vicinity.  Twenty-three percent of the time is not "almost always."

And Brookings "has been described as a Democratic government in exile"--who, exactly, has described it thus? The only previous time that Brookings was described as a "government in exile" in the New York Times, it was a column (9/29/89) that said the think tank served as such for Democratic and Republican economists alike.

It would certainly be an odd shadow government for Democrats that provided a home for so many Republicans. While its current president, Strobe Talbott, was a deputy secretary of state in the Clinton administration, his predecessor, Michael Armacost, was an undersecretary of state under Reagan (Extra!, 11-12/98); the president before that, Bruce MacLaury, worked for Nixon's Treasury Department (Extra!, 5/91). Brookings' current roster of experts includes George W. Bush administration alumni like Ted Gayer, Mark McClellan and Ron Haskins--not to mention prominent Iraq War hawks Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack (Extra! Update, 10/07).

Poking holes in the Brookings Institution's "preening conceit"--"they bequeath their website with an '.edu' suffix... They are 'scholars.' Just ask them and they'll tell you"--Salon's Glenn Greenwald (5/26/09, ad-viewing required) quotes one blogger fundamentally debunking Brookings mainstay William Glaberson's May 22 New York Times contention that, as U.S. president, Barack Obama "has sworn an oath to protect the country": "Barack Obama did not swear an oath to 'protect the country.' He swore an oath to protect the principles upon which the country was founded and the document in which those principles are enshrined."

Looking more broadly at "Beltway world," in which "the Brookings Institution is a 'liberal' think tank," Greenwald explains that

when it comes to foreign policy and civil liberties, these are three of its most consequential contributions over the last several years: (1) the invasion and ongoing occupation of Iraq, in the form of Ken Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon (working in tandem, as usual, with the ultra-neoconservative American Enterprise Institute); (2) unquestioning devotion to Israel's right-wing policies, in the form of major funder Haim Saban ("I'm a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel.... On the issues of security and terrorism I am a total hawk"); and (3) indefinite, preventive detention with no charges or trial in the form of Benjamin Wittes (with his close associate, Bush OLC lawyer Jack Goldsmith), who also serves at the right-wing Hoover Institution and writes for the Weekly Standard. Only in Washington would such a group be deemed anything other than extremist.

In fact, U.S. journalists see the Brookings Institute as so far from the "extreme" that they have made it the No. 1 most-cited think every single year since FAIR started tracking such things in 1995. See our annual Think Tank Spectrum report by longtime contributor Michael Dolny.