Rasmussen media bias poll: Roughly one-third of the American people believe major news nets have liberal bias
You can read the results of the poll here. Captain Ed has a numbers breakdown here at the end of his post, and notes that slightly more people believe those news nets are ‘objective.’
An unsettling result from a related poll shows that Americans are “evenly divided” over whether or not the Fairness Doctrine should be restored. This is troubling, and let’s me know that concerned citizens from the average workaday Joe to our representatives in Washington, DC need to work extra hard at getting the word out about what the Fairness Doctrine means, and why it’s wrong for America and, in fact, unconstitutional. Not only that, but the fact that more people find those media outlets ‘objective’ than not tells me that we’ve also got a lot of work to do in explaining to people what media bias is and how to recognize it when it’s happening.
Don Surber, a member of the MSM himself, had these thoughtful comments to share on the poll’s results:
My pet theory is that as they rise in stature and income, the muckedy-mucks at AP start attending more upscale parties, where the Old Money Socialists and the Scholarly Professors push a political agenda that holds since American institutions are not perfect, they must be replaced.
A colleague has a simpler explanation: Television.
TV is a medium that favors feelings over facts. Recall all those Reagan “cuts” which in reality were merely slowing down the growth of socialist programs.
I’d say both TV and print media tend to favor feelings over facts. TV just regurgitates them more, in part, because the 24-7 news nets have to have something to run. Let’s also not forget that sensationalizing a minor issue also helps the mediots rake in more advertisting bucks (in addition to helping out their Democrat pals, depending on the story), so the more something can be overhyped, the more newspapers sell and the more people tune in to watch the stories.
But the bottom line is that the media trends left because the media in general has a leftist mindset and has so at least since the era of Vietnam, if not earlier. Since that time they haven’t felt that their jobs have been simply to ‘inform’ the public, but to create a scandal oftentimes where none is there (like pLamegate), while at the same time whitewashing some that should be bigger (think race-baiting Democrats, for example).