The media is biased!

USNA81
Sun, 06 Aug 2006 03:17:14 +0000

Let’s take journalists at their word. The Pew Research Center, certainly no right-wing institution, polled journalists in 2004 to determine their political viewpoint. The results for national journalists:
Liberal: 34%
Moderate: 54%
Conservative: 7%

The report states, “Most striking is the relatively small minority of journalists who think of themselves as politically conservative (7% national, 12% local). As the case a decade ago, the journalists as a group are much less conservative than the general public (33% conservative).”

http://people-press.org/reports/pdf/214.pdf (data from page 3, page 7 of pdf)

The numbers are self-identified so one would expect the moderate numbers to be smaller.

Do I think the political views of those reporting the news leads to bias?-- of course. If journalists are professionally incapable of bias in reporting, why have newsrooms made a concerted effort to hire women and minorities so that news would not have a “white male” bias?

The comment about solving differential equations was an offhanded way of saying that students who choose journalism are generally not technically savy. The ability to solve differential equations is a trait one would find amongst engineers and scientists.