A favorite Republican complaint is that the “mainstream media” is biased against conservatives. Congressional Republicans invariably refer to the New York Times as “liberal” or “ultra liberal” and often make a similar accusation against major network TV news. Conservative authors, supported by wealthy “angels” or by “think tanks” such as the Heritage Foundation, publish a constant stream of hysterical books claiming that the “mainstream media” has a liberal bias.

While reasonable people pay little attention to fanatics such as Ann Coulter, who refers to Ted Kennedy as a “drunken slob” and women who support abortion choice as “feminazis,” this constant whining nonetheless seems to reach an audience.

Consequently, this mantra of “one-sidedness” has often been a topic at the Lucius Flatley coffee seminar. Although it has generally been dismissed as a cry of losers, shortly after the last election Lucius was inspired to call for three teams of his fellow caffeine clients to do some research into media reporting: one group for radio coverage, one to do TV, and one to look at the press.

The results were summarized this week.

The report on radio was brief: There was no discernible liberal bias. On the contrary, the team concluded that, with the exception of National Public Radio (less than 1 percent of the broadcast time) radio is the political lifeblood of conservatives. The researchers said they had no way to scientifically measure bias. However, they didn’t need to go beyond Rush Limbaugh with an audience of 15 mimllion-20 million (and a salary of $33 million) to arrive at some conclusions. A minotaur of hostility toward progressive ideas and people, Limbaugh is considered by many (including himself) to be the spokesman for the Republican Party.

Nor could the scholars assigned to TV find a method of reliably measuring bias in their medium. The three major networks (ABC, NBC and CBS) conduct their polling professionally and present news factually. There is bias, as in Fox News (run by Roger Ailes, a longtime GOP leader and architect second only to Karl Rove for “slash and burn” Republican campaigns), but most of it seems to result from an attempt to excite and entertain the watchers rather than to advocate a specific point of view. Similar channels with smaller audiences, such as CNN, tend to be somewhat biased to the right, but comedy, which has a much smaller audience (e.g., “Saturday Night Live,” Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Jay Leno, David Letterman), has a liberal bias. As far as total airtime is concerned, TV is in the business of selling their product. If Obama got more coverage than McCain, it was because more people wanted to see him. Sarah Palin certainly got more coverage than Joe Biden. But that did not prove bias.

The team concluded that TV bias seems to be in the eye of the beholder – and in the choice of station.

The press was a different story. Pew Research Center polls reveal that 66 percent of those who say they follow politics closely read newspapers regularly. This figure is likely skewed to older readers – but that does not change the characteristic of bias which the Flatley researchers were trying to identify.

And they found one way to perform that measurement quite meaningfully.

In the United States there are 201 nationally syndicated columnists (defined as writing for three or more papers in at least two states) and they can be reasonably classified as to their political orientation. Seventy-five are conservative, 79 liberal, and 47 are “centrists.” At first glance these figures give the impression that the political “slant” is reasonably balanced – but the total number of readers tells a different story. These columnists are carried in just under 400 newspapers. The 75 conservatives appear in papers with a circulation of 152 million, while the 79 liberals appear in papers with a circulation of 125 million – 20 percent edge for conservatives.

Larger papers (over 100,000 circulation) have only a slight difference in bias balance, but smaller papers lean right; three conservatives for every liberal. In fact, the smaller the paper, the further right – which may support the contention of Sarah Palin that “real Americans are found in small towns.”

The liberal voice dominates in only 12 states. Using the divisions of the U.S. Census Bureau, the liberals had the edge only in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast – and then by just 2 percent. As the periodical Editor and Publisher cautiously observed, “U.S. dailies run more conservative than liberal columnists, but some are willing to consider liberal voices.”

The coffee shop jury concluded: There is no demonstrable “mainstream media” bias – such claims are “bullpoop!”

Rodney Quinn, who lives in Gorham, is a former Maine secretary of state. He can be reached at [email protected]