'Conservative,' 'liberal': truth in labeling?

From time to time, I get complaints from readers about political labeling. Why is it necessary, they ask, for the newspaper to label people or groups as conservative or liberal? What do such political or ideological slugs really mean?

"Putting one type of label on us, we feel, is very inaccurate," says Robert Orr, director of the N.C. Institute for Constitutional Law, an organization that The News & Observer has described as conservative on more than one occasion. "When you guys slap a label on us, it doesn't accurately reflect how we operate, our constitutional priorities."

The question caused me to look more closely at our use of the political labels, and I found something surprising. A word search of The N&O's archives for 2005 and 2006 produced 4,192 uses of the word "conservative" and 1,971 of "liberal." The same two-to-one pattern held for the month of August: 157 uses of "conservative," 66 of "liberal."

This finding will set off all kinds of conspiracy theories out there, I'm sure. Some might say -- horrors -- that the "liberal" N&O is promoting an agenda by writing twice as much about conservatives.

A closer look at the August stories dispels some of that suspicion. Half of the conservative/liberal usages had nothing to do with the political meanings of the words. A race car driver had driven "conservatively;" "liberal" arts colleges abound in the Triangle.

Many of the examples came in the opinion pages. "Conservative" was used 10 times by liberal columnists (four times in one piece by Molly Ivins). "Liberal" popped up six times (by George Will and Charles Krauthammer).

Whittle all that away, though, and the mismatch still remains in news stories: 61 uses of "conservative," 25 uses of "liberal." The usages were about evenly split between stories produced by The N&O's own reporters, and those from the paper's wire services.

James Stimson, for one, isn't surprised. A political science professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, Stimson has made a career of studying how people place themselves along the political spectrum. A key finding: when people are asked to describe themselves in terms of ideology, self-identified conservatives outnumber self-identified liberals by a margin of nearly two to one.

"Conservative" has a positive connotation, Stimson says, while "liberal" is a dirty word, especially in the Bush era. "Americans don't know what the word means, and Republicans have done a pretty good job of filling in the empty vessel" -- defining liberal to mean unpatriotic, weak-kneed, lacking family values, Stimson said. Just think of how many politicians in North Carolina, or nationally for that matter, run as conservative (lots) and how many identify themselves as liberal (zip -- "progressive" is the preferred euphemism.)

Stimson has lots of other interesting findings, including the fact that half of those self-identified conservatives turn out to be liberal when you ask them about specific issues, such as reducing the size of government. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his book project, "The Liberalism of Professed Conservatives in America."

So, if twice as many people self-identify as conservative, it's no surprise to see the word used more in newspapers, especially in the South.

That still doesn't address the question of whether the political labels are useful. Louis Hodges, retired ethics professor at Washington & Lee University in Virginia, wishes we would dispense with them altogether: "I think they have no value at all. Vague terms are utterly useless, and sensible journalists, even George Will, should be embarrassed to use them in serious discourse," he wrote in an online conversation with editors earlier this summer. "Such language now simply ignites emotion and does not inspire thoughtful inquiry."