Political Perspectives in Periodicals   Tags: bias, conservative, liberal, magazines, newspapers, perspectives, politics, socialist  

For more information about the biases and emphases of individual magazines and journals, consult Bill Katz' Magazines for Libraries (Irwin Library Ref Desk Z 6941 .K2).

Some periodicals will have a specific political or cultural bias. This may be reflected in their choice of issues to report on, their tendency to express certain political or cultural opinions and advocate certain types of solutions to social problems, or both. If your research project requires you to examine a given topic from one or more political perspectives, the following list of titles might be useful.

Please note, however, that the categories listed below are quite broad and not all periodicals in a given category will necessarily be in close agreement on all issues. For example Freeman focuses on issues of economic conservatism and libertarianism, whereas The National Review and Christianity Today focus more on cultural conservatism. Commentary primarily covers Jewish interests, but with a moderately conservative perspective.

Many popular magazines will attempt to include a variety of perspectives within every issue, and hence cannot be identified on the whole with any specific political agenda, although individual articles may reflect the bias of the authors. Examples include Time, U.S. News and World Report, and Rolling Stone. However, each of these periodicals may reflect other biases, not identifiable on a simple conservative-liberal scale, which determine what type of news and opinions they are likely to contain and how the writers tend to treat their subjects.