MEDIA TALK: Study Finds Gender Imbalance on 3 Newspapers' Op-Ed Pages

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA - The New York Times - June 23, 2008
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.

The authors of the study are Bob Sommer, who teaches public policy communications and is president of Observer Media, publisher of The New York Observer, and John R. Maycroft, a graduate student in public policy. They combed through 366 opinion articles written by college teachers or researchers and published by three newspapers: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Star-Ledger, the largest-circulation newspaper in New Jersey. Their study will be published in the journal Politics and Policy.

At each newspaper, 90 to 95 percent of the published articles agreed with the editorial page stance on the issue at hand, they wrote, and when the opinion pieces disagreed, “it was usually in a point/counterpoint format where at least one of the authors by definition had to take a view in opposition.”

The study says 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. “Of all our analyses,” the authors wrote, “this is perhaps the most astonishing.”

They did not say whether the disparity was, in part, a reflection of the gender makeup at some university departments and institutes.

The study also found a pronounced tilt toward academics from a handful of high-prestige universities, including Harvard, Stanford and the University of Chicago.

Editors at The Journal and The Times declined to comment.

Josh McMahon, the op-ed page editor at The Star-Ledger, said he was surprised by the conclusions, adding that they did not reflect conscious biases.

“I’m often conscious of picking pieces I don’t necessarily agree with,” he said. “My only guideline is picking what I find interesting.”
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