There is no liberal media bias in which news stories political journalists choose to cover

Abstract

Is the media biased against conservatives? Although a dominant majority of journalists identify as liberals/Democrats and many Americans and public officials frequently decry supposedly high and increasing levels of media bias, little compelling evidence exists as to (i) the ideological or partisan leanings of the many journalists who fail to answer surveys and/or identify as independents and (ii) whether journalists’ political leanings bleed into the choice of which stories to cover that Americans ultimately consume. Using a unique combination of a large-scale survey of political journalists, data from journalists’ Twitter networks, election returns, a large-scale correspondence experiment, and a conjoint survey experiment, we show definitively that the media exhibits no bias against conservatives (or liberals for that matter) in what news that they choose to cover. This shows that journalists’ individual ideological leanings have unexpectedly little effect on the vitally important, but, up to this point, unexplored, early stage of political news generation.

Conservatives’ susceptibility to political misperceptions

“…Conservatives are more often fooled by bots purporting to share their ideology than liberals (21). Some scholars also contend that established news organizations, which are an influential source of factually accurate information, favor news coverage promoting liberal values, although this characterization is disputed (31)(32)(33). In such an environment, symmetrical motivations to believe claims reinforcing a preferred worldview would promote both liberal accuracy and conservative inaccuracy.…”

The left-liberal skew of Western media

“…This kind of bias has been termed gatekeeping or selectivity in the previous literature [22] . Although note that a recent US study found no evidence of a liberal bias in which news stories political journalists choose to cover [6] 1 .…”

“…We chose the weighted mean and median as our estimators. 6 Figure 9 shows the results for the logRR metric.…”

“…It is widely claimed that the media leans left or is biased against non-left-wing views [1][2][3][4] . However, such claims have been disputed by others [5,6] . One significant limitation of the empirical literature on media bias is that it is narrowly focused on the United States [7] , a problem with quantitative media research generally [8] .…”

(Mis)perception of bias in print media: How depth of content evaluation affects the perception of hostile bias in an objective news report

“…A meta-analysis, published in 2000, of 59 quantitative studies concluded that negligible bias existed in news coverage of presidential election campaigns since 1948 [ 8 ]. While accusations of bias in the news, fueled by an extremely polarized political climate, seem to have increased in recent years, a paper published in 2020 again found no evidence of liberal bias in political news coverage [ 9 ].…”