Appearing on Tuesday's The O'Reilly Factor on FNC, former FNC anchor - and former ABC correspondent - Brit Hume recounted the liberal bias many journalists exhibit in how they treat wealthy Republicans versus wealthy Democrats.
The segment with Hume came after the segment in which former ABC News president David Westin denied the existence of a liberal media bias, and suggested that a greater attention on Mitt Romney's wealth in 2012 compared to the lack of media focus on John Kerry's fortune in 2004 may be justified by current economic events.
Hume suggested that, in spite of the supposed greater focus on the economy in the 2012 election, there does indeed exist a media double standard in the treatment of the two parties:
But I will say this about the atmosphere that I recall at ABC News: It is not surprising to me that Join Kerry's wealth and the way he lived did not occasion much coverage or interest from the news media in 2004, just as the Kennedy wealth never really occasioned any unfavorable references when the Kennedy family was front and center in American political life.
It's just that Democrats with money look different to reporters in the mainstream media than Republicans with money do. And there's always something, there's some taint that seems to attach in the minds of journalists to rich Republicans that doesn't attach to rich liberals. And this Romney versus Kerry example seems to me to carry evidence of that.
He soon elaborated:
When a liberal uses his fortune or her fortune to advance liberal causes, that always seems to journalists to be rather benevolent. When a conservative is advancing an agenda that has to do with light regulation or lighter regulation and lower tax rates and so forth, I think it strikes a lot of reporters as an effort to simply further their own wealth and those of people like them, and it seems to them not to be a very benevolent mission to be on, and I think that may account for part of it. But there's no doubt in my mind that what the point you're making about there being any logical bias is present.
I was in the mainstream media for 23 years in television and it was definitely there. And I'm not saying reporters got up every morning and thought, "Hey, how can I screw this Republican and help this liberal?" That's not how it worked. It's more unconscious than that, but it's there
