Who Are More Biased: Liberals or Conservatives?
A psychological study comes to a surprising conclusion. The article is a bit long, but interesting.
See chart at link.Recently Jane Mayer (2019) of The New Yorker wrote about the very close relationship between Fox News and President Donald Trump, outlining in great detail how the Murdoch family–owned news outlet functions as a tacit communication operation of the Trump White House and its political agenda. There is a revolving door of former Fox News staff working in the White House and former White House staff working at Fox News, and according to many sources quoted in the article, Fox News has erased the lines of journalistic integrity and is now functioning as a Trump propaganda machine. Mayer argued that with respect to programming, it was often unclear whether Trump controlled Fox News or Fox News controlled Trump.
Meanwhile, the president himself continues to decry the “Fake News Networks,” by which he seems to mean any outlet to the left of Fox News. According to anonymous sources cited in Mayer’s article, President Trump had such animus toward CNN that he attempted to block AT&T’s purchase of Time-Warner, the parent company of CNN. The Trump Administration’s Department of Justice sued to block the merger, but in June a district court judge approved the deal (Ivanova 2018).
Conservatives who, like the President, believe the mainstream media (MSM) have a liberal bias have been supported by evidence that journalists are more likely to identify as Democrats than Republicans. A 1990 poll of forty-nine editors and writers at The Washington Post found only one person, Tony Kornheiser, a sports columnist, was a registered Republican, and he suggested he was a RINO (Republican in name only): “I don’t think the Republican Party would claim me” (Wemple 2017). A 2014 study conducted by the University of Indiana School of Journalism found that 28 percent of journalists surveyed identified as Democrat and 7 percent as Republicans. Fifty percent said they were Independents (Willnat and Weaver 2014).
In recent years, Ad Fontes Media has produced a media bias chart for many of the most popular news sources (see below). The horizontal axis of the chart plots the left or right political bias of the source, and the vertical axis plots the factual nature of the reporting, ranging from “Contains inaccurate/fabricated info” at the bottom to “original fact reporting” at the top. The result is an inverted-U–shaped function with the most politically biased sources on both ends of the spectrum rating low on factual material (e.g., Occupy Democrats, Breitbart News), and the most politically neutral sources tending to be the highest in factual material. For example, the Associated Press, Reuters, and Bloomberg were rated both among the highest in original fact reporting and the lowest in political slant. There are a few media sources that occupy the bottom middle of the chart. For example, the National Enquirer is given only a modest right-ward skew but is also very low on factual information.
Read the rest of the article and its conclusion.Biased Information Processing: Conservatives vs. Liberals
As the foregoing suggests, the media landscape is filled with politically biased information that spans a wide range of viewpoints, but how biased are the people who receive this information? When you ask Republicans or Democrats how biased people of each party are, you get predictable results: Democrats say Republicans are more biased and Republicans say the reverse (see Figure 2). But psychological science cannot rely on the opinions of interested parties for answers. What happens when you put people in an experimental setting where they have a chance to act in a biased or unbiased way?