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
In 1985, the Los Angeles Times conducted one of the most extensive surveys of journalists in history. Using the same questionnaire they had used to poll the public, the Times polled 2,700 journalists at 621 newspapers across the country. By a two-to-one margin, reporters had a negative view of then-President Ronald Reagan and voted by the same margin for Walter Mondale in 1984. The survey also asked 16 questions involving foreign affairs, social and economic issues. On 15 of 16 questions, the…
In late 1982 and early 1983, Indiana University journalism professors David H. Weaver and G. Cleveland Wilhoit surveyed more than 1,000 journalists, and reported the results in their 1986 book, The American Journalist. Their poll included more than just top reporters, and, overall, they detected only a modest skew towards the liberal side of the spectrum — 22 percent of those interviewed called themselves liberal, compared with 19 percent who said they were conservative. But among 136…
In 1982, Fred Evans of California State University in Los Angeles asked reporters from the fifty largest U.S. newspapers about their political identification and for whom they voted in 1980. In that election, Republican Ronald Reagan won with 50 percent of the vote, compared with 41 percent for Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter and 8 percent for liberal Republican-turned-independent John Anderson. (Evans' data included in a 2009 paper by Northeastern University professor William G. Mayer, "The…
In 1981, S. Robert Lichter, then with George Washington University, and Stanley Rothman of Smith College, released a groundbreaking survey of 240 journalists at top media outlets — including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS — on their political attitudes and voting patterns. The data showed journalists hold liberal positions on a wide range of social and political issues. Lichter and Rothman's book,…