Survey Finds 70 Percent Think News Media Reports With Intentional Bias

July 6th, 2015 11:59 AM

The Washington Examiner reports almost three-quarters of Americans believe the news media reports with an intentional bias, according to the 2015 State of the First Amendment Survey, conducted by the First Amendment Center and USA Today

The survey was released Friday. It shows that only 24 percent of American adults agree with the statement that "overall, the news media tries to report the news without bias," while 70 percent disagree. That’s a record low since the question was first asked a decade ago. When the question was asked last year, 41 percent agreed the news tried to report without bias, a 17-point difference.

The survey also found  that 69 percent of respondents believe that journalists should act as a watchdog on government, a significant percentage, but well below the 80 percent of the previous two years and another record low for the poll. Perhaps all the TV fluff that poses as “news” is discouraging the public from seeing journalists as watchdogs – or more people believe the watchdogs guard some politicians more than hold them accountable.

"These are discouraging results for those of us who have spent our careers in journalism," Ken Paulson, president of the First Amendment Center, wrote in an op-ed for USA Today on Thursday. "In 23 years in newsrooms, I saw consistent and concerted efforts to get stories right. Clearly, the public's not convinced."

That’s apparently not true of cable news, Paulson wrote:

It's possible that the public perceives the news media differently today because journalism is in such a state of flux. MSNBC and Fox News have established business models building a political orientation into their content, and online media increasingly embrace opinion and outrage...

But there may be a silver lining. It's possible that Americans see less need for a vigilant news media because they feel empowered to speak out on their own via social media channels.