Evaluating The Daily Beast’s List of Top 25 Right-Wing Journalists
The Daily Beast took a stab at one of the harder sciences of the media world last night, publishing a list of the top 25 most influential right-wing journalists in America. It is a pretty comprehensive list, with all the usual suspects – Matt Drudge, George Will, almost everyone on Fox News prime time – making appearances, and both conservative and libertarian columnists taken into consideration. “What unites them all, broadly,” writes columnist Tunku Varadarajan, “is their influence on the public debate, and their place on the political spectrum—which is somewhere to the right of center.”
“Journalist” is quite a tricky word in the post-objectivity media world, especially when trying to rank journalists by their political inclinations. The list only has two main rules on who is excluded: media moguls like Rupert Murdoch and recent converts to punditry like Sarah Palin. This means that any public personality right-of-center who appears in some form of news media counts as a journalist, whether or not they engage in journalistic investigation and exposure of stories or merely comment on other people’s journalistic work. The result is a more complete picture of the right-wing media scene, but it does lead to some apples-and-oranges comparisons that rank people who actually break stories (like Drudge Andrew Breitbart, ranked #10 and #11, respectively) lower than commentators who depend on the Drudges and Breitbarts of the world for their material (like Rush Limbaugh, ranked #3).
Whether the list is accurate in its depiction of journalist thus depends more on the reader’s personal definition of the word than anything inherent in the list’s structure. As for accuracy in terms of influence within the right wing, here’s how the top five rank in comparison to their place on Mediaite’s Power Grid:
Bill O’Reilly clocks in at #5 for being “reliably—and relentlessly—omniscient” (which O’Reilly will likely be happy to hear). While this keeps him in the same position as he in among TV hosts in the Power Grid, it puts him behind two people he is well ahead of there crossing categories. The two exceptions are the radio hosts– Beck and Limbaugh. Peggy Noonan takes the #4 ranking on the Daily Beast list, while her top ranking on the Power Grid is #26 (in the columnists category). Beck and Limbaugh, numbers 2 and 3 respectively, are regularly swapping the #1 position among radio hosts in the Power Grid, while the surprising top right-wing journalist in the Daily Beast list, Paul Gigot of The Wall Street Journal, ranks at #30 as an online editor. Gigot takes the prize for his column being “the only editorial column that actually sells newspapers.” It seems counterintuitive compared to ubiquitous characters like O’Reilly, Beck, Limbaugh, and to some extent Noonan, but being the most prone to finding and airing new stories instead of simply his take on what is already out there, Gigot deserves the prize by definition only. What’s more, while the others may be more universally and publicly influential, Gigot goes about his work more privately, and by focusing on his newspaper has a wider influence among right-wingers than some of the more multimedia types on the list. This would explain his higher ranking among conservatives than using the universal metric of the Power Grid.
The list is a good effort, although in attempting to be as inclusive as possible it ends up a little scatter-brained. It will be interesting to see how the list evolves if the Beast chooses to reevaluate it in a year, after the midterm elections.
