Shocker! Isaac Schorr at Mediaite reported a new study from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications found that just 3.4 percent of American journalists are Republicans. In the last ten years, the proportion of Democrats has increased to 36.4% and proportion of Independents has ticked upwards to 51.7%, while the already low Republican share has been cut in half.
The last study in 2013 pegged the proportion of Republican journalists in America at 7.1%, Democrats at 28.1%, and Independents at 50.2%.
It's fair to guess that journalists who choose "independent" are attempting to look nonpartisan, but we can safely guess a large share of them are Biden-Harris voters.
The study is based “on an online survey with 1,600 U.S. journalists conducted in early 2022” and is the latest in a series of studies stretching back to 1971 that take the temperature of the fourth estate’s partisan lean, job satisfaction, and professional attitudes.
When the first iteration of the study came out over 50 years ago, 35.5% of respondents said they were Democrats, 25.7% said they were Republicans, and 32.5% said they were Independents. The percentage that call themselves Democrats or independents have bounced around over the years, with the proportion of Democrats reaching a high of 44.1% in 1992.
Surveys of journalists across the country in local newsrooms used to provide a more bipartisan picture, but the national media has been severely liberal since Robert and Linda Richter and Stanley Morgan published The Media Elite studies in 1981. They found over 90 percent of national journalists picked Lyndon Johnson over Barry Goldwater in 1964 and over 80 percent picked Hubert Humphrey over Richard Nixon in 1968.
In 2022, just 3.4% of journalists were Republicans.
— Kevin Bass PhD MS (@kevinnbass) December 27, 2023
That figure was 18% in 2002 and 25.7% in 1971.
As with most professions, conservatives have been increasingly excluded or purged from the ranks of journalists.
If you wonder why the media is the way it is today, this is why. pic.twitter.com/AuZ8iCMiwQ
According to a Gallup poll from November, today's newsrooms are wildly out of step with the general public. Independents do make up the largest proportion of the population at 40%, but the same proportion of Americans (29%) are Republicans as Democrats.
In another Gallup poll in October, the 32% of Americans who say they trust the mass media “a great deal” or “a fair amount” to report the news in a full, fair and accurate way ties Gallup’s lowest historical reading, previously recorded in 2016. While 58% of Democrats and 29% of Independents have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in the media, just 11% of Republicans feel the same way. Given all the tilted reporting we expose at NewsBusters, that's also not a shocker.
