Kondracke: Liberal talking point.

Barnes/Hume/Cavuto: Only a traitorous scum would say that.

Kondracke: Yeah, you're right.

At the same time, given the continuously critical nature of George Will's commentaries on Bush for the past year-plus, shouldn't he be ranked a "centrist"? After all, the moderate liberal columnists like Broder are labeled "centrists" because they're not deemed bloodthirsty enough. And Kondracke a "conservative"? Now, in point of fact, I wouldn't call Will a centrist, but based on the way MM seems to be scoring partisanship, he shouldn't be used as their top data point.

And someone else describes Thomas Friedman as a lefty? C'mon. What kind of drugs are you people on?

Take it from someone on the left, none of these people are remotely liberal. They spend a huge amount of their time trashing liberals and do virtually nothing to advocate progressive causes.

If you borke it down by issue you might also find some interesting results.

Exactly right. There are a handful of firebrand columnists who are more-or-less pure progressives or conservatives but most are more complicated than that.

But, surely, Mort Kondracke isn’t a conservative now? Yes, he’s on FOX News and the Weekly Standard’s masthead. He’s always been a left-of-center guy, though; he just happens to be a hawk.

This comment sparked an idea.

maybe a better methodology than trying to identify a given commentator as liberal or conservative in total would be to look at a given issue, identify a number of liberal view, a number of conservative viewss, a number of mderate view and then quantify the number of columnists espousing the various types of views.

For instance take George Will, he's clearly very financially conservative but not very socially conservative at all (very libertarian). So is it fair, or more to the point accurate, to lump him in the same group as the Catholic League spokesman Donohue?

If you borke it down by issue you might also find some interesting results. I'd guess that in economics you'd see a fair amount of populist (liberal writers) whereas on war issues it would be dominated by hawks. Always seems to be.

Just a thought.

I have provided for you the most thorough analysis on the Internet my analysis of Media Matters' study. You can read it below. [Editing mine - jhj]

Media Matters Spouts its Own Flawed Study as Fact: How They Did It, In Great Detail

Kondracke may personally stand to the left of, say, Krauthammer, but both of them spend much of their column space criticizing liberals and Democrats.

Sowell, Cal Thomas, Parker, etc. make it their stock-in-trade to decry liberalism and Democrats.

Broder probably votes Democratic but in tone and inclination he is a pox-on-both-houses centrist with a disdain for ideological argument and a soft spot for people who he sees as somehow "beyond" partisanship - McCain, Lieberman, Bloomberg. Ditto your Fred Hiatts and Jim Hoaglands.

Even Tom Friedman, clearly a lefty, generally defines himself in opposition to both the right and the left.

Outright liberals who use their column real estate to advocate liberal policy and criticize conservatives, like Krugman, are much rarer than the equivalent Sowells on the other side.