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New York Times: Study Finds Imbalance on 3 Newspapers’ Op-Ed Pages (6/23/08) by Richard Pérez-Peña
Some discouraging results from a survey of 366 opinion pieces in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and New Jersey's Star-Ledger:In the great marketplace of ideas, the opinion pages of major newspapers offer nonjournalists—mainly academics—a rare chance to reach a big audience and influence public policy. So which college professors win the competition for that limited, coveted space? Overwhelmingly, they agree with the editorial page, and they are men, according to researchers at Rutgers University. Unfortunately, those findings do not suggest the kind of forum for diverse views that newspapers say their opinion pages should be.
Specifically, the researchers found that "men wrote 78 percent of the academics’ opinion pieces in the Star-Ledger, 82 percent in the Times, and 97 percent in the Journal"—plus, "90 to 95 percent of the published articles agreed with the editorial page stance on the issue at hand."
See FAIR's magazine Extra!: Opinion Omission: Women Hard to Find on Op-Ed Pages, TV Panels (5–6/05) by Julie Hollar
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