Can you guess which side the Columbia journalist panel sympathized with?

Joshua Rhett Miller of FOX News reports.

Columbia University panel on Occupy, Tea Party was unbalanced affair, critic says

A panel at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism comparing the Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party movements was stacked with liberal journalists who offered one-sided conclusions, according to one alumnus who attended the event.

Panelists at the event, which was held on Oct. 1 in the prestigious school’s Pulitzer Hall, made “little attempt to hide their sympathies” to the Occupy movement, author Harry Stein wrote in City Journal, a quarterly magazine published by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.

“Indeed, the only participant who seemed not to have come to his subject with an agenda was a New York Times Magazine contributor, Jonathan Mahler, included on the basis of a single piece he’d done on Oakland’s over-the-top-radical Occupy movement,” Stein wrote. “Little wonder that the event went exactly as expected.”

Stein told FoxNews.com he’s well aware of the “liberal, left-leaning” slant at the iconic journalism school, but said he was surprised that the panelists presented such “uniformity of opinion” given the controversial topics.

“I live in the real world,” Stein said Thursday. “I know about the orientation of the Columbia J-school.”

Todd Gitlin, a journalism professor and chair of Columbia’s Ph.D. program, moderated the panel, which also included a writer for the Boston Phoenix, a reporter for NBCNews.com, a Ph.D. candidate from Harvard’s School of Government and a New York Times reporter.

Gitlin, who also wrote “Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street,” declined to comment when reached Thursday by FoxNews.com.

“You have nothing to do with news,” Gitlin said. “And you’re wasting my time.”

Chris Faraone, a Boston Phoenix staff writer who has written “99 Nights with the 99 Percent,” told FoxNews.com Gitlin assembled an “incredibly competent” panel.

“The Tea Party and Occupy are complex and amorphous topics, and the range of new and interesting information shared by those of us who spoke that evening was astounding — even for me, and I’ve visited Occupy camps and groups in more than 25 cities, and even covered the Tea Party quite a bit (though I was not specifically brought to discuss the latter),” Faraone wrote in an email.

Faraone said he believes he was selected for the panel because his work at the alternative newspaper is “about as far from so-called mainstream reporting” as possible.

“While conservative imbeciles online and on the radio were inventing story lines about Occupiers — that they’re ALL sporting iPhones and designer jeans, that every one of them is really rich and suburban — I was traveling across the country, meeting people, and actually listening to their stories,” Faraone’s email continued. “I covered a wide range of topics — from the good and hopeful to the extremely bad and ugly. As a result, I exchanged as many angry letters with Occupiers as I did with right-wing trolls.”