Just Updated: MRC"s Collection of Studies Showing Journalists" Liberal Views

As 2014 begins, the MRC has just updated of our “Media Bias 101” resource page, which now links to nearly 50 articles summarizing decades of scholarly research showing the mostly liberal attitudes of American journalists, plus opinion polls showing the public’s growing recognition of the media’s liberal bias. The package also includes dozens of quotes from reporters denying this bias, plus a few notable instances of media figures admitting their tilt.

If you’ve ever found yourself looking for research on this topic, this is a good page to bookmark; our goal is to update the page with fresh material when it becomes available. Most of the pages include full-color charts illustrating key points; there’s also a fully-formatted, 48-page PDF version containing much (but not all) of the data included in this section.

Key stats and links to major studies after the jump

One of the new pages added this year summarizes research uncovered by Northeastern University professor William G. Mayer for a 2009 academic paper, “The Political Attitudes of American Journalists: A Survey of Surveys.” The first study that attempted to gauge journalists’ political views was conducted in 1962, and found self-identified liberals outnumbered conservatives by a 2-to-1 margin.

Other key studies documenting that journalists have, for decades, proven to be far more liberal than the public they purport to serve:

Story Continues Below Ad ↓

■ In the late 1970s, political scientists S. Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman and Linda S. Lichter found 54% of top journalists “placed themselves to the left of center, compared to only 19% who chose the right side of the spectrum.’ They also discovered that between 81% and 94% reported voting for the Democratic candidate in presidential elections from 1964-1976.

■ In 1985, the Los Angeles Times polled news and editorial staffers at newspapers around the country, and found self-identified liberals outnumbered conservatives in the newsroom by more than three-to-one, 55 to 17 percent. This compares to only one-fourth of the public (23 percent) that identified themselves as liberal at that time.

■ In 1996, the American Society of Newspaper Editors surveyed 1,037 journalists at 61 newspapers, and found those calling themselves “liberal/Democrat” outnumbered “conservative/Republican” by a four-to-one margin (61% to 15%).

■ In 2001, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll found four times as many ‘media professionals’ said they considered themselves ‘liberal’ (25%) than called themselves ‘conservative’ (6%). And, more than six times as many media professionals called themselves Democrats (27%), than said they were Republicans (just 4%).

■ In 2004, the Pew Research Center found that the proportion of liberals in the national media had actually grown over the previous nine years, from 22% in 1995 to 34% in 2004. Meanwhile, the percentage of conservatives remained minuscule: just 4% in 1995, 7% in 2004.

As for what the public thinks of the media:

■ A 1996 poll of 3,000 Americans conducted by the Center for Media and Public Affairs found “those who see a liberal tilt outnumber those who detect a conservative bias by more than a two to one margin….Even self-described liberals agree: 41 percent see the media as liberal, compared to only 22 percent who find the news to be conservative.”

■ In Gallup polls conducted nearly every year from 2001 through 2013, the percentage saying the media are too liberal has ranged from 44 percent to 48 percent; the percentage seeing the media as too conservative never exceeded 19 percent.

■ No fewer than five different polls conducted during the 2008 presidential campaign found the public strongly believed the news media were biased in favor of Democrat Barack Obama. A Pew Research Center poll released in late October of that year found “by a margin of 70% – 9%, Americans say most journalists want to see Obama, not John McCain, win on Nov. 4.”

■ A Rasmussen poll of 1,000 likely voters conducted in February 2013 found two in five voters (41%) “think the average media reporter is more liberal than they are,” compared with just 18 percent “who feel the average reporters is more conservative than they are.”

And, a few of the more-recent quotes of journalists defying the evidence and denying their bias:

■ “I can see how the intensity of coverage on certain issues may, to some people, seem to reflect a liberal point of view. But I actually don’t think it does.”

— New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson talking about her newspaper’s political slant in an interview with the New Republic’s Michael Kinsley, August 20, 2013.

■ “It’s silly that there’s a liberal bias in media. Obviously, there are liberal voices and there are conservative voices. But overwhelmingly, media in the United States — television, newspapers, and that sort of thing — the bias shifts towards the right. It’s a center-right media in this country.”

— Former NBC News reporter and New York Times columnist Bob Herbert on MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry, April 27, 2013.

■ “My work has been so cleansed, as I see it, and as I’ve tried, of political opinions over 27 years…. No one gives a rat’s patootie about my opinion, so it’s nice that I don’t have to share it.”

— NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams on Alec Baldwin’s Here’s the Thing New York City radio show, March 4, 2013.

■ “Most of us, do not — you don’t know whether we’re Republicans or Democrats or exhibitionists.”

— Co-host Barbara Walters on ABC’s The View, April 9, 2012.

■ “There may be liberals on TV at MSNBC, but the network is not operating with a political objective.”

— MSNBC 9pm ET host Rachel Maddow in a December 21, 2011 interview posted at Slate.com.

For much, much more, check out the MRC’s “Media Bias 101” section.

NewsBusters – Exposing Liberal Media Bias

Just Updated: MRC"s Collection of Studies Showing Journalists" Liberal Views

Climate Studies Ignoring Faulty Models, Warming Pauses to Push Radical Agendas

Two climate change studies in recent weeks have ignored evidence that greenhouse gas emissions may not be responsible for “warming” because that evidence would reduce the “urgency” for radical policy solutions–such as carbon taxes and other “green” initiatives–environmentalists want to advance.

As Mario Lewis of the Competitive Enterprise Institute noted, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) “published a study by 13 prestigious atmospheric scientists that supposedly provides ‘clear evidence for a discernible human influence on the thermal structure of the atmosphere.’” The United Nations recently released a report that ignored data their scientists collected that found there has been pause in warming over the last 15 years. 

“NAS researchers pointedly echo the famous declaration by the United Nation-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, that the ‘balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate,’” Lewis writes, because ”less warming means smaller climate impacts, and less ostensible need for radical changes in the way we live to deal with them.”

But numerous studies have found that the various climate models these scientists have been using are far from accurate: 

• John Christy, a distinguished climate scientist and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) found that all 73 computer model runs performed by the IPCC as of June 1, 2013 overshoot the observed warming of the tropical atmosphere during the previous 34 years.


• Even though global carbon dioxide emissions are increasing largely due to India and China, “the temperatures recorded by the NASA-supported Remote Sensing Systems shows no warming in the earth’s middle atmosphere, or troposphere, over the past 16-plus years.”


• German climatologist Hans von Storch has found that IPCC climate models project warming trends as low as actual recorded observations only 2% of the time.


• The monthly journal Nature Climate Change reports that over 20 years (1993-2012), the warming trend computed from 117 climate model simulations (0.3°C per decade) is more than twice the observed trend (0.14°C/decade).  Over the most recent 15 years (1998-2012), the computer-simulated trend (0.21°C/decade) is more than four times the observed trend (0.05°C/decade)—a trend that is pretty close to a flat line.

Lewis notes that these are “huge inconsistencies, and they matter because less warming means smaller climate impacts, and less ostensible need for radical changes in the way we live to deal with them.”

Yet, National Academy of Sciences and the United Nations simply “ignore” the numbers that do not allow them to advance their climate change agenda.  

For instance, even the if there is a “human influence” on potential global warming, the NAS study found that it is not due t greenhouse gases. NAS found that the “influence of greenhouse gases” on stratospheric temperatures “is not yet clearly identifiable” and, as Lewis notes, “they have not really found the smoking gun of man-made global warming.”

“Those radical forms of social engineering, it turns out, are the real short-term threat of climate change,” he writes. “And the science-policy community that is pushing them is substituting heated rhetoric for real data that doesn’t support their agenda.”

As Breitbart News reported, a group of 50 international scientists released a comprehensive new report on the science of climate change last week that called out bodies like the United Nations for the same reasons, concluding “that evidence now leans against global warming resulting from human-related greenhouse gas emissions.”

That report cited “thousands of peer-reviewed articles the United Nations-sponsored panel on climate change ignored” and also found that “no empirical evidence exists to substantiate the claim” that even a 2°C of warming would present “a threat to planetary ecologies or environments” that would need to be countered by radical policy solutions.

Breitbart Feed

Climate Studies Ignoring Faulty Models, Warming Pauses to Push Radical Agendas

Bring Back Social Studies

Dyanna Hyde/Flickr

The most obvious and well-reported casualties of the last decade in program-slashing educational policy include traditional elective courses like art, music, and physical education. But these are not the only subjects being squeezed out or eliminated entirely from many public K-12 curriculums.

Social studies–a category that includes courses in history, geography, and civics–has also found itself on the chopping block. Whereas in the 1993-1994 school year students spent 9.5 percent of their time in social studies, by 2003-2004 that percentage had dropped to 7.6, despite an increase of total instructional time.

Why has a traditionally “core subject”, which was ranked in the same academic hierarchy as English, science, and math for decades, been sidelined in thousands of American classrooms?

The shift in curriculum began in the early years of the Cold War. While U.S. military and technological innovation brought World War II to a close, it was a later use of technology–the Soviet launching of Sputnik in 1957–that historian Thomas A. Bailey called the equivalent of a “psychological Pearl Harbor” for many Americans. It created deep feelings of inadequacy and a belief that the U.S. was falling behind in developing new technology and weapons, which led to the passage of the 1958 National Defense Education Act. This legislation pumped $ 1 billion over four years into math and science programs in both K-12 schools and universities.

Despite this extra focus on math and science, social studies managed to make it through the end of the Cold War relatively unscathed (in fact, the number of classroom hours dedicated to teaching social studies in grades 1-4 peaked in the 1993-1994 school year at 3 hours a week). But drastic change came a decade later with the passage of President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind legislation.

No Child Left Behind was signed into law in an attempt to address the growing achievement gap between affluent and low-income students. It was a controversial piece of legislation from the start, mainly because of its “one size fits all’” approach: It uses annual standardized tests to determine how well students are performing in reading and math and then uses those scores to determine the amounts of federal funding schools receive.

Besides the obvious criticism that low-performing schools–arguably the ones that need the most increase in funding–are disproportionally punished for their low scores, critics also believe that No Child Left Behind has narrowed the curriculum. Since the standardized tests focus exclusively on English and math, and those scores determine the bulk of a school’s federal funding, schools have been forced to increase time and resources in these subjects at the expense of all others, including social studies.

A 2007 study from the Center of Education Policy supports this allegation: 62 percent of elementary schools, and more than 20 percent of middle schools, increased time for English language arts and/or math since No Child Left Behind passed.  At the same time, 36 percent of schools decreased the time allocated to the social studies. According to a study from the National Center for Education Statistics, this adds up to a net loss of four weeks of social studies instruction per academic year.

This devaluation of social studies as a core subject in the K-12 curriculum has troubling economic, political, and social implications. For one, social studies at all grade levels encourages students to develop skills in critical thinking–one of the top traits employers look for in a candidate. It also requires students become strong written and oral communicators who know how to structure and articulate their opinions. Unfortunately, a survey of employers done by the Chronicle of Higher Education found that these are the exact skills today’s entry-level workers are lacking. Without the skills gained from social studies, students are less attractive to employers.

Perhaps even more troubling, however, is that reducing students’ exposure to a solid curriculum in social studies leads to what a growing number of experts are calling a “civic achievement gap”. Closely related to the general achievement gap between affluent, mostly white students and low-income minority students, the civic achievement gap has made it increasingly difficult for those who grow up in low-income households to participate in civic affairs. According to data from Associate Professor Meira Levinson of Harvard University, people living in families with incomes under $ 15,000 voted at just over half the rate of those living in families with incomes over $ 75,000.

Many experts agree that a stronger curriculum in social studies could help close this gap.  A study from the Carnegie Corporation of New York found that students who receive effective education in social studies are more likely to vote, four times more likely to volunteer and work on community issues, and are generally more confident in their ability to communicate ideas with their elected representatives.

Fortunately, policymakers have begun to acknowledge the shortcomings of the recent decade of educational policy. “President Obama and I reject the notion that the social studies is a peripheral offering that can be cut from schools to meet [Adequate Yearly Progress] or to satisfy those wanting to save money during a fiscal crunch,” wrote U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in 2011 in Social Education, a journal published by the National Council for Social Studies. “Today more than ever, the social studies are not a luxury, but a necessity. We need to fix [No Child Left Behind] so that school leaders do not feel forced to ignore the vital components of a good education.”

While the Obama Administration has pledged to revisit certain components of No Child Left Behind, it has kept its fundamental model of high-stakes standardized testing with new programs such as Race to the Top and the Common Core State Standard Initiative. Like No Child Left Behind, both of these programs focus primarily on English and math–there are still no Common Core standards for social studies. Unlike No Child Left Behind, however, they are voluntary, giving states and individual schools more flexibility as to how to incorporate them into their curriculums.

It’s clear that something has to change when only one-third of Americans can name all three branches of government; when only 23 percent know the First Amendment supports freedom of religion; and when students think President Abraham Lincoln’s significance can be traced back to his beard. Social studies should reclaim its spot as one of the core subjects in the K-12 curriculum.

Master Feed : The Atlantic

Bring Back Social Studies