"THE ARGUMENT over whether the national press is dominated by liberals is over. Since 1962, there have been 11 surveys of the media that sought the political views of hundreds of journalists. In 1971, they were 53 percent liberal, 17 percent conservative. In a 1976 survey of the Washington press corps, it was 59 percent liberal, 18 percent conservative. A 1985 poll of 3,200 reporters found them to be self-identified as 55 percent liberal, 17 percent conservative. In 1996, another survey of Washington journalists pegged the breakdown as 61 percent liberal, 9 percent conservative. Now, the new study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found the national media to be 34 percent liberal and 7 percent conservative.

Over 40-plus years, the only thing that's changed in the media's politics is that many national journalists have now cleverly decided to call themselves moderates. But their actual views haven't changed, the Pew survey showed. Their political beliefs are close to those of self-identified liberals and nowhere near those of conservatives. And the proportion of liberals to conservatives in the press, either 3-to-1 or 4-to-1, has stayed the same. That liberals are dominant is now beyond dispute.

Does this affect coverage? Is there really liberal bias? The answers are, of course, yes and yes. It couldn't be any other way. Think for a moment if the numbers were reversed and conservatives had outnumbered liberals in the media for the past four decades. Would President Bush be getting kinder coverage? For sure,
and I'll bet any liberal would agree with that. Would President Reagan have been treated with less hostility if the national press was conservative-dominated? Yes, again. And I could go on.

The Pew poll also found that 55 percent of national journalists believe that Bush should be treated more critically by the press than he has been. They think he's gotten off too easy, despite empirical evidence of media Bush bashing. The Center for Media and Public Affairs has examined the coverage of Bush by the broadcast network evening news shows and found only two periods of favorable coverage: in the weeks after September 11 and during the actual war in Iraq. This year, roughly 75 percent of the stories about the Democratic presidential candidates were positive. For Bush, they've been 60-plus percent negative.

With the evidence of liberal dominance so overwhelming, a leading press critic is now calling for more ideological diversity in the media. Tom Rosenstiel, who helped design the Pew poll and who runs the Project for Excellence in Journalism, says it's necessary not to think just of diversity that makes newsrooms "look like America," but to create a press corps that "thinks like America."

In truth, the effort to hire more minorities and women has had the effect of making the media more liberal. Both these groups tend to have liberal politics, and this is accentuated by the fact that many of the women recruited into journalism are young and single, precisely those with the most liberal views. "By diversifying the profession
Rosenstiel insists it would be quite possible for news organizations to find journalists with conservative views to hire. "There are ways to change the culture of the newsroom," he says. Media recruiters can turn to different colleges than the ones where they've traditionally recruited. They can look to different parts of the country. And they can seek assistance from organizations that already train young conservatives for careers in journalism.

Those who still doubt the press needs fresh, preferably conservative, blood, should consider these numbers: In 1999, 12 percent of journalists said fairness and balance were a big problem for the media. Now, in the Pew survey, only 5 percent say so--this, after further proof of liberal dominance and noisy debates about liberal bias. And in 1999, 11 percent said ethics and standards were a major concern. But after high-visibility scandals involving fabricated stories and controversies about plagiarism, only 5 percent agree today. The case for ideological realignment of the media is closed.


Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard."

LINK

Main Entry: media
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural me·di·as
Usage: often attributive
Etymology: plural of medium
1) A cesspool of liberal turds.
2) A liberal majority of idiots who falsely believe they report objectively.



Media Research Center


How the Media Vote. Surveys of journalists’ self-reported voting habits show them backing the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since 1964, including landslide losers George McGovern, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. In 2004, a poll conducted by the University of Connecticut found journalists backed John Kerry over George W. Bush by a greater than two-to-one margin.

Journalists’ Political Views. Compared to their audiences, journalists are far more likely to say they are Democrats or liberals, and they espouse liberal positions on a wide variety of issues. A 2004 poll by the Pew Research Center for The People & The Press found five times more journalists described themselves as “liberal” as said they were “conservative.”

How the Public Views the Media. In increasing numbers, the viewing audiences recognize the media’s liberal tilt. Gallup polls have consistently found that three times as many see the media as “too liberal” as see a media that is “too conservative.” A 2005 survey conducted for the American Journalism Review found nearly two-thirds of the public disagreed with the statement, “The news media try to report the news without bias,” and 42 percent of adults disagreed strongly.

Admissions of Liberal Bias. A number of journalists have admitted that the majority of their brethren approach the news from a liberal angle. During the 2004 presidential campaign, for example, Newsweek’s Evan Thomas predicted that sympathetic media coverage would boost Kerry’s vote by “maybe 15 points,” which he later revised to five points. In 2005, ex-CBS News President Van Gordon Sauter confessed he stopped watching his old network: “The unremitting liberal orientation finally became too much for me.”

Denials of Liberal Bias. Many journalists continue to deny the liberal bias that taints their profession. During the height of CBS’s forged memo scandal during the 2004 campaign, Dan Rather insisted that the problem wasn’t his bias, it was anybody who criticized him. “People who are so passionately partisan politically or ideologically committed basically say, ‘Because he won’t report it our way, we’re going to hang something bad around his neck and choke him with it, check him out of existence if we can, if not make him feel great pain,’” Rather told USA Today in September 2004. “They know that I’m fiercely independent and that’s what drives them up a wall.”

Evidence of Bias in News Coverage. The Media Research Center continuously reports on instances of the liberal bias in the mainstream media. Daily CyberAlerts offer a regular roundup of the latest instances of biased reporting, while our NewsBusters blog allows Web users to post their own reactions. Media Reality Check fax reports showcase important stories that the news media have distorted or ignored, and several times each year the MRC publishes Special Reports offering in-depth documentation of the media’s bias on specific issues.

Don't present facts Bug; everyone hates that!

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I'm cool with Bug so I don't have to!

I'm not sure how it happened, but it's true.

Sounds like someone has a Bug up their butt!!!

You'd have a bug up your butt too if you believed all that crap about "the liberal media" that just got spewed.