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E-PrinceEven as the field of journalism faces financial difficulty and accusations of bias in its political reporting, Todd Purdum ’82, the national editor and political correspondent of Vanity Fair, argued for its continuing significance Thursday afternoon in a lecture in ...(back to the article)
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To understand why this is so, we need only to look at the many major studies of the media which have been conducted over the past three decades. These studies have pointed, with remarkable consistency, to a single, unmistakable, overriding reality: The professionals who constitute America's mainstream news media - the reporters, editors, anchors, publishers, correspondents, bureau chiefs, and executives at the nation's major newspapers, magazines, radio networks, and television networks - are leftists and Democrats in far greater numbers than they are conservatives or Republicans. These studies have of course excluded commentators, editorialists, and opinion columnists - all of whom make it quite clear that they are giving their opinions and analyses of the news as they view it. Rather, the focus of the research has been on those individuals whose ostensible duty is to impartially and comprehensively present the various relevant facts and perspectives - and to leave the task of analyzing the information to the readers, listeners, and viewers.
But the American news media no longer serve this function. Instead they have been transformed - by virtue of the one-sided, passionately partisan worldview shared by editors and reporters alike - into mouthpieces of the political Left. And their biases are all the more insidious because they present themselves as unbiased reporters. Those biases have been in place for several decades, but have never been more pronounced than they are in this election cycle.
http://www.aina.org/news/20081031034613.htm
Of 143 reporters making significant political donations, only 16 gave to consvervative or Republican causes, 127 gave to liberal or Democratic causes.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19113455/
Leftist is not the word I'd choose to describe Democrats. Socially more liberal than Republicans, sure, but by no means leftist in the traditional sense of the word. The real reason for media bias was perhaps best stated by Mr. Colbert: "reality has a well-known liberal bias."
Perhaps, but it's also racist, sexist, and all-around politically incorrect, and yet the media show no interest in reflecting *that* particular reality.