You don’t have to convince me that liberal media bias is real and large.  But Cato’s David Boaz points out another amusing example:

[M]ainstream (liberal) media regularly put an ideological label on
conservative and libertarian organizations and interviewees, but not on liberal
and leftist groups.  In a report about states accepting stimulus funds, reporter Kathy
Lohr quoted “Jon Shure of the Washington D.C.-based Center on Budget and Policy
Priorities,” “Maurice Emsellem with the National Employment Law Project,” and
“Tad DeHaven, a budget analyst with the fiscally conservative Cato Institute in
Washington, D.C.” (Thanks! And I’d say the label is correct, even if I might
prefer libertarian.)

Those are all legitimate sources for the story. But only one of them gets an
ideological label — even though the other two groups are clearly on the left…

Back on March 23, I noted but did not blog about references on “Morning
Edition” to “the libertarian Cato Institute,” the “conservative American
Enterprise Institute,” and “the Brookings Institution.” No label needed for
Brookings, of course. Just folks there…

[…]

It’s all too typical of the mainstream-liberal media: They put ideological
warning labels on libertarians and conservatives, lest readers and listeners be
unaware of the potential for bias, but very rarely label liberals and leftists…

Boaz quixotically concludes:

Journalists should be more even-handed: label all your sources ideologically,
or none of them. It’s stacking the deck to label those on the right but not
those on the left.

But what’s in it for them?