And, if you can’t bring yourself to read yet another magazine article about the Boomers, how about a piece on an equally neglected topic — media bias? In this month’s Washington Monthly Paul Waldman, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, assures liberals that “it’s not your imagination,” that he has in fact crunched the numbers, “looked at every one of the 7,000 guests who appeared on the three major Sunday [political talk] shows from 1997 to 2005” and “found that the left of late has found itself outnumbered.” The “ideological imbalance” is not limited to “official sources that are interviewed: the elected officials, candidates and administration officials who make up most of the shows’ guests” but also exists in the “roundtable discussions with featured journalists,” Waldman writes. That the producers of these shows “believe that a William Safire (56 appearances since 1997) or Bob Novak (37 appearances) is somehow ‘balanced’ by a Gwen Ifill (27) or Dan Balz (22) … suggests that some may have internalized the conservative critique of the media, which assumes that ‘daily journalists’ are liberal almost by definition and thus can provide a counterpoint to highly conservative pundits.”

Liz Cox Barrett is a writer at CJR.