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The longstanding question of liberal media bias was brought into the limelight again with the recent Republican debate sponsored by CNBC.
Many of the complaints about the debate centered on John Harwood, a reporter for CNBC and the New York Times who moderated the debate. Harwood has in the past authored pieces about how Republicans are bad for the economy.
In the debate, Harwood asked Donald Trump if he was running a “comic book version of a presidential campaign.”
Republican National Committee chairman Reince Preibus decided to suspend future debates with NBC, following the mass complaints about the debate.
Now, a recently released study by Lars Willnat and David Weaver, professors of journalism at Indiana University, could help bolster claims by conservatives that the media has a liberal bias.
According to the study, self-professed Democratic journalists outnumber self-professed Republican journalists by a whopping 4 to 1 ratio. 28 percent of journalists label themselves as Democrats, while only 7 percent call themselves Republicans. The vast majority of the remainder identify as independents.
Washington correspondents dominate the national political coverage, so their numbers are even more important. According to Tim Groseclose, the author of Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind, more than 90 percent of DC journalists vote Democratic.
The media is not the only culture center conservatives have complained about repeatedly. They have also complained about liberal bias in academia and Hollywood.
A 2007 survey by sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons found that 80 percent of psychology professors at elite and non-elite universities identified as Democrats.
According to the non-partisan political analytics firm Crowdpac, the news media, academia, and the entertainment industry are greatly skewed toward the left. The bias was measured using campaign contributions from people in those respective industries.
A 2014 Gallup poll found Americans’ trust in the media had returned to the previous all time low of 40%. According to the poll, 44% of Americans think the media is “too liberal.”
What do you think about the new study showing that Democrats outnumber Republicans by a 4 to 1 margin in journalism?