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over onto its news pages. How dare O’Reilly make judgments about this case? He’s just a conservative windbag. Let’s get him. So they tried. To this day, I consider the
St. Petersburg Times
to be the nation’s worst newspaper. There is no sense of fair play in the paper at all, and ideology slants its hard-news coverage. It’s disgraceful.
    If you still don’t believe that the American media slants left-secular, then I’ll try one more time to convince you. A media study based at UCLA and released in December 2005 concludes: “Almost all major media outlets tilt to the left.”
    The coauthor of the study, UCLA political science professor Tim Groseclose, summed up his study this way: “I suspected that many media outlets would tilt to the left, because surveys have shown that reporters tend to vote more Democrat than Republican. But I was surprised at just how pronounced the distinctions are.”
    The other coauthor, University of Missouri economist Jeffrey Milyo, was also blunt: “There is a quantifiable and significant bias in that nearly all [the media] lean to the left.” The UCLA study identifies
The CBS Evening News,
the
New York Times,
and the
Los Angeles Times
as the most liberal news operations in the country (I know, you’re shocked). Only Brit Hume’s program on Fox News and the
Washington Times
were found to tilt right.
    By the way, if you dispute the UCLA study, let me throw one more set of facts at you. In addition to being ultrasupportive of the secular-progressive movement, the
New York Times
uses its opinion pages to savage powerful people with whom it disagrees (almost always conservatives). And we’re not talking polite debate here, either; we’re talking “rip their throats out” verbiage.
    The
Times
employs four columnists who utterly despise the Bush administration: Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman, Bob Herbert, and Frank Rich. In the year 2005 and the first two weeks of 2006, these individuals filed an astounding 149 columns lambasting the Bush administration; that was 47 percent of their entire work output. I mean, how much loathing do you need? The
Times
should just put up a daily headline on its op-ed page: “WE HATE BUSH.” Why bother with the repetitive analysis? And remember, the
New York Times
is the Big Kahuna among the secular media; that paper sets the agenda for the S-P press.
    So here’s my conclusion based on the data: U.S. journalism is essentially in the grip of a pack mentality. Most media people are well educated and many come from affluent homes. Also, a good number are urban dwellers who see themselves as sophisticated gatekeepers of the common good. These people don’t really have much in common with the “folks,” but hey, everybody needs a guiding light to deliver them from the traditional darkness, right?
    The split between “we” the people and the media is especially severe in the spiritual arena. A survey by the American Society of Newspaper Editors shows that the rate of atheism among journalists is about 20 percent, significantly higher than among the general population, where it stands at about 9 percent. When one in five media warriors does not believe in the existence of a supreme being, it’s not hard to figure out why many press people support secular causes like unrestricted abortion, gay marriage, and restraints on public displays of faith.
    This media “group-think” mentality is so powerful that even some establishment journalists are dismayed. Marie Arana, a
Washington Post
editor, was quoted in her own paper as saying: “The elephant in our newsroom is our narrowness. Too often, we wear liberalism on our sleeve and are intolerant of other lifestyles and opinions…. We’re not very subtle about it at this paper. If you work here, you must be one of us. You must be liberal,
progressive
[my emphasis], a Democrat. I’ve been in communal