This country is heading down the toilet because of a TOTALLY BIASED press corps that does NOT report the news. This didn’t start out to be humorous, but it ended that way.
a: the collection and editing of news for presentation through the media
b: the public press
c: an academic study concerned with the collection and editing of news or the management of a news medium
Four times as many “media professionals” told the pollsters they considered themselves “liberal” (25%) than called themselves “conservative” (6%). Among the general public, self-identified conservatives outnumbered liberals, 38 percent to 21 percent.
MEDIA VOTE 7
Reporters struggled to name a liberal news organization. According to Pew, “The New York Times was most often mentioned as the national daily news organization that takes a decidedly liberal point of view, but only by 20% of the national sample.” Only two percent of reporters suggested CNN, ABC, CBS, or NPR were liberal; just one percent named NBC.
Journalists did see ideology at one outlet: “The single news outlet that strikes most journalists as taking a particular ideological stance — either liberal or conservative — is Fox News Channel,” Pew reported. More than two-thirds of national journalists (69 percent) tagged FNC as a conservative news organization, followed by The Washington Times (9 percent) and The Wall Street Journal (8 percent).
Preparing for a panel discussion on the media, the Annenberg Public Policy Center and the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands commissioned a poll of 673 journalists, including 424 from newspapers, 48 from broadcast and cable networks, 47 from top-50-market local television stations, 45 from Web sites, 41 from other television stations, 26 from national radio networks, 18 from wire services, 14 from top-50-market local radio stations and 10 from magazines. The surveys were conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates between March 7 and May 2, 2005, with the results released on May 24, 2005. The poll asked questions on journalistic ethics and about journalists’ views on issues and overall ideology.
Nearly all journalists (95%) rated “the ethical practices of journalists” as either “very good” (32%) or “somewhat good.” A majority of the same group (56%) found the “ethical practices of politicians” either “somewhat bad” or “very bad.”
Most journalists also said they thought “news organizations get the facts straight” (86%) and that “most news organizations quickly report” any mistakes (74%), compared to just three percent who saw a propensity to “try to cover up” mistakes.
Only 10 percent of reporters thought a major reason for CBS’s use of forged memos in the infamous National Guard story was because “CBS News and Dan Rather are liberals who dislike President Bush,” with most (54%) saying that was “not a reason at all.” Most of the journalists (76%) said they thought the story ran because “CBS News and Dan Rather believed the story was accurate and provided new information about the controversy surrounding Bush’s service in the National Guard.”
A total of 31 percent described themselves as “very liberal” or “liberal” compared to just nine percent who identified themselves as “very conservative” or “conservative,” with 49 percent maintaining they are “moderate.”
More than half of the journalists (57%) said they attend worship services only “a few times a year” (34%) or “never” (23%), compared to 27 percent who said they attend either “every week” (17%) or “almost every week” (10%).
Nearly three in five journalists (59%) favored laws allowing “two men or two women to marry each other.” Among the general public, only 28 percent favored so-called same-sex marriage.
IN THEIR OWN WORDS:
“There is a liberal bias. It’s demonstrable. You look at some statistics. About 85 percent of the reporters who cover the White House vote Democratic, they have for a long time. There is a, particularly at the networks, at the lower levels, among the editors and the so-called infrastructure, there is a liberal bias. There is a liberal bias at Newsweek, the magazine I work for — most of the people who work at Newsweek live on the upper West Side in New York and they have a liberal bias....[ABC White House reporter] Brit Hume’s bosses are liberal and they’re always quietly denouncing him as being a right-wing nut.”
— Newsweek Washington Bureau Chief Evan Thomas on Inside Washington, May 12, 1996.
“Personally, I have a great affection for CBS News.... But I stopped watching it some time ago. The unremitting liberal orientation finally became too much for me. I still check in, but less and less frequently. I increasingly drift to NBC News and Fox and MSNBC.”
— Former CBS News President Van Gordon Sauter in an op-ed published January 13, 2005 in the Los Angeles Times.
“A lot of my personal worldview is unmistakably sympathetic to things in a liberal playbook, but honest to God, I have been called a reactionary by some on the far left, a liberal by some on the far right and I’m insulted by both terms. My point of view is about delivering information and context. It has nothing to do with a political point of view.”
— MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, as quoted in a June 9, 2005 Houston Chronicle profile by Mike McDaniel.
“He [Dan Rather] should be remembered as the complete reporter, a person who should be remembered for the hundreds and thousands of broadcasts he did.... If we wish to be fair-minded rather than mean-spirited, we should not be fixated on the one story that went bad.”
— Former CBS News reporter Marvin Kalb, now at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, as quoted in the March 8, 2005 Boston Globe.
“I’m not political. I don’t vote.... I have no more interest in the political outcome of an election than I did in the winner or loser of any ballgame I ever covered.”
— MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, formerly with ESPN, in an Online Journalism Review interview posted November 30, 2004.
ROFL!
