There’s No Liberal Bias in What the Media Chooses to Cover
By Hans Hassell, John Holbein, Matthew Miles
The media is President Trump’s favorite punching bag. He and his allies frequently deride it for both how it covers his administration and which stories it chooses to cover. In the past few months alone, President Trump has lambasted the media for:
not covering his political party’s electoral victories;
giving little attention to the “BIGGEST TRADE DEAL EVER MADE”;
not covering the (until recently) roaring economy;
paying little attention to Joe Biden and his family’s background; and
not covering his press conferences during the coronavirus outbreak.
Is President Trump right that the media is biased against him and other conservatives with respect to which stories the media chooses to cover?
Though social scientists have done a lot of research on how the media covers various stories, they have done little research on whether ideological bias comes into play in what stories get journalists’ attention and written about. This is unfortunate because the media has a great deal of power in setting the agenda.
Studying what we term “gatekeeping bias”—i.e., the bias in what potential news stories get covered—is inherently tricky because identifying the full gamut of stories that journalists could write about is hard. Often, we view only the final product (i.e., a published article), and therefore, we do not observe the full set of stories that might have been available when journalists went to write an article. Perhaps, as Stephen Colbert once put it, “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”
Testing Whether the Media Really Is Biased in the Stories They Cover
Our new research set out to see how accurate Trump and his allies’ claims are about whether the media is ideologically biased in its role as political gatekeepers.
To do so, we did three things.
First, we sent a survey out to the approximately 15,000 political journalists that write for newspapers in the United States. In the survey, we asked journalists about their own ideological leanings. Then we asked them to make decisions about hypothetical news stories about either a liberal or a conservative running for office (in what social scientists call a “conjoint experiment design”).
Second, we collected information on the types of accounts journalists choose to follow on Twitter. This allowed us to map a broad network of voices with which journalists interact online.
Finally, we ran a real-world correspondence experiment of journalists’ actual choices to either cover or not cover a potential news story. In this experiment, we created an email account and sent an email to print journalists from a purported candidate running for the state legislature and requested an interview about the candidate’s campaign. We randomly assigned journalists to either get an email from a liberal or conservative candidate. We sent the email to roughly 15,000 journalists, in total.
Our Findings
In our survey data, we found that journalists in the United States are overwhelmingly liberal. We found that eight in ten journalists who identify with a political party said that they were Democrats. The figure below shows the ideological and partisan breakdowns of journalists who identify with a political side. The left-hand side looks at breakdown according to ideology and the right-hand side looks at the breakdown by partisan identification.
Political Journalists Are Overwhelmingly Liberal
However, the survey data left us with a pretty big problem: many journalists reported to be independent. Are “independent” journalists really independent, or do they lean one way or the other ideologically and simply want to convey a false degree of impartiality?
To get past this hurdle, we collected information on who journalists choose to follow on Twitter, and determined how liberal or conservative they were. This method is remarkably good at identifying individuals’ political leanings. The test rests on this idea that if someone follows accounts that tend to be followed by liberals and not conservatives, that person's probably more liberal.
By using this test which analyzes one’s twitter followers, we found that most journalists are, indeed, very liberal. The modal journalist is far to the left of the average Twitter user and even to the left of prominent liberal politicians, like President Obama. (Politicians also can be placed on the ideological spectrum using this test).
However, simply being liberal does not mean that journalists will be biased in what stories they choose to cover.
In both our survey experiment and our correspondence experiment of journalist behavior in the real world, we found that journalists are just as likely to cover conservative stories as they are to cover liberal stories. The figure below shows our results from our correspondence experiment with journalists. (The black lines are confidence intervals, which are like the margin for error in polls.) As can be seen, journalists were just as likely to respond regardless of whether the candidate was very conservative or very progressive.
Political Journalists Responded Equally to Liberal and Conservative News Stories
In short, despite being overwhelmingly liberal on a personal level, journalists show a great deal of impartiality in the types of candidates that they choose to write about.
Our findings are vitally important in the current political climate, where journalists face harsh criticism from the president and his allies as well as increased violence worldwide.
Our work suggests that this hostility is unwarranted. Those accusing the media of bias in what they choose to cover are wrong. The media is not biased in the stories they choose to cover.
Hans Hassell (@hjghassell) is an assistant professor of political science at Florida State University.
John Holbein (@johnholbein1) is an assistant professor of public policy at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia.
Matthew Miles (@mrm32) is a professor of political science at Brigham Young University–Idaho.