(CNSNews.com) - Lawsuit reform has been a popular topic at the White House and on Capitol Hill in early 2005, as it was during the last presidential campaign when a former trial lawyer shared the Democratic presidential ticket. But the issue has been largely ignored by much of the establishment media, according to a new report released Tuesday.

The study by the Free Market Project (FMP), which tracks media coverage of economic issues, found that only six percent of 276 news reports on civil litigation over the course of a full year contained a "prominent discussion," of tort reform, with much of that news coverage skewed in favor of plaintiffs and excluding the perspective of businesses named as defendants.

Reports published in Time, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report, along with broadcast coverage by the ABC, CBS and NBC network news operations, were included in the study by FMP, a division of the conservative Media Research Center, the parent organization of Cybercast News Service. The year-long study was conducted between Nov. 1, 2003, and Oct. 31, 2004.

"Runaway litigation costs Americans more than $200 billion each year and legislatures across the nation have been trying to cope with the problem," said FMP Director Dan Gainor. "It's a crisis that is crippling business and costing jobs, but without good reporting, how can we expect to try and understand and fix the problem?"

Among the deficiencies uncovered in the FMP study was the lack of comment from defendants in stories about civil litigation. More than one-third of the news reports did not include comments from those being sued and many stories failed to even include a statement that the defendant refused to comment, which is not an uncommon practice for parties involved in court proceedings.

Also revealed was a propensity for slanting news reports in favor of plaintiffs. The FMP study found that 49 percent of the reports in the analysis were reported from the perspective of the party initiating the lawsuit, while 36 percent of the stories were considered "balanced."

President Bush made tort reform a campaign issue during his 2004 re-election bid and Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards made millions of dollars as a trial lawyer prior to his election to the Senate, but polling data during the presidential election did not indicate tort reform was a pressing issue for most voters, who tended to be more concerned about terrorism, Iraq, jobs and other economic issues.

"Any discussion \{of tort reform\ should have been obvious in a year where trial lawyer John Edwards ran for president and ended up on the Democratic ticket as a vice presidential candidate," said Gainor. "Instead we get '60 Minutes' reporter Steve Hartman telling an old friend that he never heard him use such big words like tort reform. That's not journalism, it's an embarrassment."

While tort reform may not have been a driving issue for voters last year, the actions of Congress and President Bush appear to have support among voters. A January 2005 Harris poll showed that 70 percent of those surveyed supported tort reform.

The FMP study also concluded that ABC News did the best job of reporting on tort reform.

"ABC had the most coverage of tort reform of any of the media we studied and it showed," said Gainor. "They were also the best about labeling conservatives and liberals in a consistent manner. That might not sound like much, but it can truly skew a story."

Liberal perspectives were quoted in civil litigation stories almost twice as often as conservative or industry officials, according to the study. The FMP report also found that sources were described as 'liberal' 31 percent of the time whereas conservatives and industry representatives were labeled as such nearly half of the time.

President Bush signed into law Feb. 18 a bill that would direct most multi-million dollar class-action lawsuits into federal courts rather than into state courts. Under the new law, certain class-action suits could still be heard in state courts if both the defendant and one-third or more of the plaintiffs resided in the same state.

In signing the measure, President Bush called the law, "a critical step toward ending the lawsuit culture," but critics predicted that consumer rights would be compromised by the law.

Both the House and Senate passed the legislation by comfortable margins within weeks of convening the 109th Congress.

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