Media Bias 101 summarizes more than 25 years of survey research showing how journalists vote, what journalists think, what the public thinks about the media, and what journalists say about media bias. The following links take you to more than 40 different surveys, with key findings and illustrative charts.
Media Bias 101
The Sacred Heart University Polling Institute polled 800 Americans in late November and early December, 2007. The results, released early in January 2008, showed further deterioration in the percentage of Americans who trust the news media, while the percentage who saw a liberal bias vastly outnumbered those who thought the media tilt to the right.KEY FINDINGS:Fewer than one in five Americans (19.6%) said 'they believe all or most news media reporting. This is down from 27.4% in 2003.' Nearly…
Researchers at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government polled 1,207 adults in September 2007 to ascertain the public's 'confidence' in American leaders in a variety of sectors, including the military, business, government and the media. The poll (PDF) found 'leaders in the press have inspired less confidence than leaders in any other sector during each of the three years of the National Leadership Index (2005-2007),' with the military garnering the most public confidence.…
A pair of Rasmussen surveys conducted in mid-July 2007, each of approximately 1,000 adults, documented how Americans perceive various television news outlets and major newspapers. The first poll found a plurality of Americans see a liberal tilt at ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and NPR, while at the same time detecting a conservative bias at Fox News. The second poll, released one day later, discovered that most Americans saw the New York Times, the Washington Post and their own local newspaper as tilting…
Two polls conducted in 2007 found the public generally thought the media's coverage of the war in Iraq skewed in a negative, pessimistic direction. A March 5-11 TIPP poll of 900 adults done for Investor's Business Daily found the public judged the media's war coverage as 'neither fair nor objective.' A Pew Research Center analysis published August 9 found a big drop from 2003 to 2007 in the percentage of Americans who said they were 'confident' that they were getting an accurate picture of how…
In a February 20-26, 2007 survey conducted for the Politics Online Conference 2007, the George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet paired with Zogby Interactive to question 1,757 likely voters about their perceptions of media bias. The pollsters found 'the vast majority of American voters believe media bias is alive and well,' with only a tiny 11 percent of the public saying they don't think the media take political sides. And by a huge margin, the public…
In late January 2006, a CBS News/New York Times poll asked 1,229 adults about their attitudes toward the news media as part of a 'State of the Media' segment on the CBS Evening News. The poll found the public's view of the media divided by partisanship, with self-identified Democrats most confident of the media's ability to report news 'fully, accurately and fairly' and 'tell the truth' all or most of the time, and Republicans expressing much more skepticism.KEY FINDINGS:The poll discovered '…
In May 2005, Gannett's First Amendment Center in Nashville polled Americans about their attitudes towards the media. Some exclusive results were published in the August/September 2005 edition of the American Journalism Review. The article by senior writer Rachel Smolkin revealed that nearly two-thirds (64%) reject the notion that 'the news media try to report the news without bias,' and nearly the same number (65%) agreed that 'the falsifying or making up of stories in the American news media…
The Missouri School of Journalism's Center for Advanced Social Research surveyed 495 adults about their attitudes toward the press during June and July of 2004. Their results, released in April 2005, showed that most Americans (85%) thought that news reporting was biased, although a smaller majority (62%) still said they considered journalism credible. Of those who thought the media were biased, most said the bias favored liberals.KEY FINDINGS:Nearly six out of seven adults (85%) said there was…
Four different polls conducted in the last days and immediate aftermath of the 2004 presidential campaign discovered that more voters saw the media as biased in favor of Democratic candidate John Kerry than Republican George W. Bush. Polls by the Pew Research Center and Gallup in the final weeks of the campaign found twice as many thought the media had been biased in favor of Kerry than saw a pro-Bush tilt. An Election Day survey of voters in 12 battleground states also found one out of every…
In the summer of 2003, Princeton Survey Research Associates conducted a poll of 1,201 American adults regarding the media for the Pew Research Center for The People & The Press. They found that a majority (53 percent) of Americans regard the press as 'politically biased,' and most of those said the media tilted to the left.KEY FINDINGS:'Most Americans (53 percent) believe that news organizations are politically biased, while just 29 percent say they are careful to remove bias from their…