Media Monitor Not Surprised by Poll Showing Glut of Left-Leaning Journalists
by Chad Groening
May 28, 2004
(AgapePress) - A conservative media watchdog group is not surprised by the results of a recent poll which showed that only a small percentage of national news members consider themselves "conservatives."
The poll was conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which might be described as the liberal version of the Media Research Center (MRC). The survey found that the vast majority of those employed in the national and the local media describe themselves as liberals and moderates, with national media leaning far more toward the liberal side of the scale.
Link to earlier story:
MRC spokesman Tim Graham says the results of the Pew poll are pretty typical. "Thirty-four percent said they were liberal; 7 percent said they were conservative. Fifty-four percent said that they were moderate -- and I think a lot of those moderates are people who don't want to be tagged as liberals, even though they are."
And Graham says another question on the poll exposes the truth about those who chose to describe themselves as moderates.
"If you look at the other numbers in the poll, most precisely 88 percent of national reporters [the same percentages of liberals plus moderates in the survey] think homosexual is acceptable," he points out. "That's a liberal point of view. So when you have 88 percent of the sample give you a liberal point of view on an issue like that, they're not moderates."
Graham says perhaps the most stunning number in the survey is that 55 percent of the national news media actually believe it is not being critical enough of President Bush. "I'm trying to understand how they could be more critical of President Bush," Graham states. "The coverage of Bush and the coverage of the war has been very, very negative for the last two months."
On another question posed by the survey -- whether a belief in God was necessary for a person to be moral -- 91 percent of the national media journalists said such belief was not essential for morality, as did 78 percent of those in local media.
