FOX News host Bill O'Reilly tried to refute retiring PBS host Bill Moyers's claim that "[w]e have an ideological press that's interested in the election of Republicans" by insisting that “the consensus is about 80 percent of the press favored John Kerry in the election.” In fact, no such consensus exists; the 80 percent figure apparently originated with conservative New York Times columnist John Tierney, who wrote on August 1: “Some surveys have found that more than 80 percent of the Beltway press corps votes Democratic.” While O'Reilly and other conservative pundits have echoed Tierney's claim, no one has cited a specific survey or provided any evidence for the figure.

O'Reilly ridiculed Moyers's remarks on the "Most Ridiculous Item of the Day" segment of the December 13 edition of The O'Reilly Factor:

O'REILLY: Time now for the “Most Ridiculous Item of the Day.”

Our pal, Bill Moyers, is retiring from PBS at age 70, but he's not going out quietly. He told the Associated Press: “The biggest story of our time is how the right-wing media has become a partisan propaganda arm of the Republican National Committee. We have an ideological press that's interested in the election of Republicans.”

Well, that's very interesting and perhaps very ridiculous, as the consensus is about 80 percent of the press favored John Kerry in the election. But Bill Moyers is a committed progressive. He funds his son's progressive website Tom Paine. And Moyers is mad as all get-out that President Bush won reelection.

We would love to talk with Bill Moyers on this program. So, if you see him, you tell him that, OK?

Following Tierney's August 1 column, Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby quoted Tierney's 80 percent figure in his August 24 column. O'Reilly cited the figure in his exclusive interview with President George W. Bush, which aired September 28, though he falsely attributed the claim to Newsweek assistant managing editor Evan Thomas. “A guy over at Newsweek, Evan Thomas, one of the editors over there, said 80 percent in the elite media favors Kerry. That doesn't surprise you, does it?” O'Reilly asked Bush. (In fact, Thomas had simply opined on the July 10 edition of Inside Washington, a weekend show that airs on many PBS affiliates, that the media “wants Kerry to win” but cited no figures about what percentage of the media was purportedly pro-Kerry.) More recently, O'Reilly repeated the dubious statistic in his December 11 syndicated column, again with no citation: “Remember, surveys showed that about 80% of the media favored John Kerry for President. The divide between the press and everyday folks is enormous.”

Though it's unclear what survey Tierney was referencing, it's likely a 1996 study by the Freedom Forum and the Roper Center, which reported that 89 percent of “Washington bureau chiefs and congressional correspondents” voted for Bill Clinton in 1992. Apart from the fact that this survey covered is eight years old and concerns Clinton, not Kerry, there are other reasons to doubt its credibility. In a 1997 article, journalist Robert Parry of Consortium News found that the Roper Center received responses from only 139 of the 323 surveys it mailed out. And while the Roper Center would not disclose which journalists returned their surveys, many of the news outlets that received surveys were not, in his words, “what many would expect when they think about the Washington news media”:

That list contained news organizations from all over the country. But it was not what many would expect when they think about the Washington news media. Major national media outlets were represented, but not in very high numbers. Only 60 questionnaires -- or less than 20 percent of the total -- had gone to the likes of The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, PBS, National Public Radio, Time, Newsweek, US News, The Associated Press and Reuters.

The bulk of the newspapers on the list were regional dailies, such as The Modesto Bee, Boston Globe, Denver Post, Dallas Morning News, Atlanta Journal/Constitution, Richmond Times Dispatch and San Jose Mercury News. News services for newspaper chains, such as Knight-Ridder and Newhouse News Service, were included, too.

But more than 80 of the list's newspapers -- roughly a quarter of the total -- were much smaller, often with only one reporter or 'bureau chief' in Washington. One questionnaire went to the 58,000-circulation The Green Bay Press-Gazette, for instance. Another went to a Wisconsin neighbor, the 27,000-circulation Sheboygan Press. Also on the list were The Mississippi Press, Fort Collins Coloradoan, Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, Idaho Statesman, Thibodaux Daily Comet, Hemet News and many other newspapers that are not normally counted as part of “the national news media.”

[...]

But what was most dramatically missing from the list were many of the principal conservative journals. The Washington Times did get four questionnaires; Human Events one; The New York Post one; and another Murdoch newspaper, The Boston Herald, one -- the seven equalling about two percent of the total. But the other big-name right-wing publications got zero.