How Biased Is the Media, Really?

Journalists and umpires share a lot in common. The benefits of both jobs, at least on an armchair-psychology level, involve a mix of duty and narcissism—someone has to thanklessly call balls and strikes, someone needs to go to a city-hall meeting and write up what the mayor said. Why not us? The downsides are far more obvious: we are paid relatively poorly, catch blame for every bad result, and our integrity constantly gets called into question, sometimes for good reason.

This past week, Gallup released its annual report on “Americans’ Trust in Mass Media.” Readers of this column will know that I am skeptical of opinion polls, especially those that try to gauge something as subjective and conditional as trust in mass media, but Gallup has tracked this same question since 1972, and that, at the very least, should give a sense of how a portion of the population feels about the word “trust” in relation to the “mass media.” What Gallup found was that for the third straight year more American adults have “no trust at all” in the media than trust it a “great deal/fair amount.” In 1976, the percentage of Americans in the “great deal/fair amount” category topped seventy per cent. Today, that number sits at thirty-one per cent.

You don’t need a Gallup poll to tell that the public’s trust in the mass media—which for these purposes we can define as the major broadcast and cable networks, newspapers, and a handful of high-profile magazines—has fallen, and, although the reasons for this decline aren’t as immediately clear as they might seem, the fallout from decades of growing suspicion and contempt toward the press litters the political discourse. Much of the criticism aimed at the media is both fair and accurate, and, even if I don’t believe the scale of the harms to be as large as some say, I do think the attacks carry added significance in an election year. So I wanted to go through some of the more common accusations of bias from both ends of the political spectrum, not as a way to exonerate the media but more in the fashion of one of those new umpire reviews, where the league office looks through the controversial calls in a game and then tells the fans whether they were right or wrong.

Every news organization that feigns objectivity is actually heavily slanted toward the left. Not only that; the media is actively working with the Democrats to defeat Donald Trump.

The most obvious explanation for this impression is that the press corps is mostly made up of liberals. Conservative outlets are not shy about labelling themselves as such, even if only through a wink and a nod. At prestige outlets—many of which do don the armor of impartiality—the imbalance skews a lot further to the left than what many outsiders might imagine. This past April, a former editor at NPR named Uri Berliner published an article, in the Free Press, about how a decade of cultural shifts inside the company had ushered in the reign of an identity-based progressive politics that was anathema to the journalistic process. I assume that some of what Berliner described about his time at NPR was true enough, but I disagree with his reasoning. The proliferation of identity acronyms and employee resource groups for marginalized communities cannot explain the bias in coverage. Perhaps those groups have some influence in how stories get covered, but I imagine that their effect is for the most part negligible compared with the effect of the fact that nearly everyone who works there—even those who, like Berliner, are highly suspicious of the acronym and E.R.G. crowd—are college-educated Democratic voters from middle- to upper-middle-class families. I have mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: in the course of a fifteen-year career that has included stints at radio shows, print outlets, digital media and television, I have yet to meet a Trump supporter at work.

The basic ideological homogeneity of the press corps isn’t some secret that’s tightly guarded by journalists or even the people who run news organizations. In a 2src23 interview in this magazine, A. G. Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, said, “Almost everyone who works at the New York Times lives in the big city and graduated from college. That alone makes our staff unrepresentative. It means that we’re going to under-index in gun ownership, under-index in church attendance.”

So let’s start there: the people who make up the prestige press are overwhelmingly liberals who would satisfy most definitions of the “coastal élite.” But does that actually translate into biased coverage? As Sulzberger intimated, it’s difficult to believe that a press corps mostly made up of one type of person who votes one type of way would not be influenced by both their prior beliefs and their gaps in knowledge. And, indeed, the Times—who bears the brunt of media criticism across all political spectrums—has not endorsed a Republican for President since Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956, nor do they have a columnist or editorial writer who openly supports Trump. The situation is largely the same at the big network-news shows and most newspapers. So, yes, there is a liberal bias to the news.

The question, then, is whether or not this bias constitutes something bordering on a conspiracy where people within newsrooms and production rooms are actively trying to get Kamala Harris elected. The answer is still no. The American press is not some finely tuned machine but, rather, a chaotic institution in decline made up of individuals from similar backgrounds who hold similar political beliefs. If one must speak broadly about them, they tend to be much more hostile to what they see as the far left than they are to the moderate right, whatever that might mean these days. This happens for a variety of reasons, and much can and has been made of the mainstream press’s particular animosity toward the left. Some assume that it’s because the press serves Wall Street and Big Tech, both of which would reject anything smelling of socialism. Others believe, as I do, in a more sociological explanation: many reporters, especially at prestige outlets, do not come across all that many Republicans, whether in their everyday lives or on social media. Who they do encounter is a lot of highly-educated people to their left with views they find extreme, and to whom they attribute outsized influence on politics, public opinion, and the electorate.

I would consider the case about media bias closed at this point, mostly because I don’t think any of the other explanations, however well argued they may be, measure up to the majority-liberal makeup of the workforce. This is not to say that I believe the press can’t be impartial or tell the truth, only that if any slant exists it’s probably going to line up with the beliefs of the people actually writing the stories. But, for the sake of argument, I want to entertain a few of the more common cases that media bias actually runs the other way.