Can You Trust The National Media?
Issues & Insights
Investors Business Daily - Monday, July 19, 2004
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This is an important election year. America was attacked on 9-11, and thousands of our citizens were brutally murdered. We are today engaged in a worldwide war on terrorism involving many nations. So you, by habit, faithfully watch the nightly news on TV or depend on your newspaper for up-to-date stories.
But can you trust and rely on our national news media? Are
they presenting the whole story, unbiased, evenhanded and
objective? Yes, if you are a liberal Democrat.
Key recent surveys and those taken since the 1980s now consistently document the fact that national news journalists vote overwhelmingly in national elections for Democrats and are much more liberal than the general voting public.
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"The Media Elite,"<font color=black> a book written in 1986 by Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman and Linda Lichter, surveyed 240 journalists at ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, and US News and World Report. It found that in the presidential elections of 1964, 1968, 1972 and 1976, on average, 86% of responding journalists in America's top media voted Democratic.
In 2001, Rothman and Amy Black updated the <font color=blue>"Media Elite"<font color=black> survey of national journalists and established that 76% voted for Michael Dukakis in 1988 and 91% for Bill Clinton in 1992.
A Freedom Forum Poll also reinforced the <font color=blue>"Media Elite"<font color=black> survey when it documented that 89% — nine out of 10 — Washington reporters and bureau chiefs voted for Clinton in 1992 and 7% voted for George W. Bush.
These stunning stats shatter the protective proposition that our national media are our independent <font color=blue>"Fourth Estate,"<font color=black> the ever-vigilant watchdog over government. If that's what they are, the Fourth Estate is now the least balanced of our branches. Bush got a higher percentage of votes in the liberal congressional districts of Berkeley, Calif., and Cambridge, Mass., than he did from reporters in Washington.
More recently, Tim Groseclose of UCLA and Stanford and Jeff Milyo of the University of Chicago published <font color=blue>"A Measure of Media Bias."<font color=black> They ingeniously counted the number of times a news outlet quoted certain think tanks and compared this with the number of times members of Congress cited the same think tanks when speaking from the floor. Comparing the citation patterns enabled them to construct an ADA (Americans for Democratic Action) score for each media outlet.
They found that Fox News Special Report was the only right-of-center news outlet in their sample, while CBS Evening News was the most liberal, followed by The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, NBC Nightly News and ABC's World News Tonight.
More surprising was the astonishing degree to which the
mainstream press was liberal. Using the median ADA rating
of the 435 members of the House of Representatives as the
most appropriate definition of a centrist voter in
America, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, USA
Today and CBS Evening News are not just liberal. Their
ratings are much closer to the Democrats' average ADA
rating in Congress than they were to the center, and miles
from the Republicans' average rating.
The liberal point of view is very important in America. It is needed to provide balance and ensure everyone's ideas are heard. The crucial question now is: At a time of war and future terrorist risk to our country's safety and open way of life, will the liberal media's bias help defend and protect us or weaken and undermine us?
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