<p>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%</p>
<p>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).” </p>
<p><a href=“http://people-press.org/reports/pdf/214.pdf[/url]”>http://people-press.org/reports/pdf/214.pdf</a> (data from page 3, page 7 of pdf)</p>
<p>The numbers are self-identified so one would expect the moderate numbers to be smaller.</p>
<p>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? </p>
<p>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.</p>