This whole 'more journalists identify as democrats' is used as a lie about the media.
First, a few journalists in America have very disproportionate influence - it doesn't matter if 10 local reporters with very small audiences are Democrats for each of the big national journalists who put out right-wing news. It'd be like using a statistic for 'all US business heads' on something where there are many small business/sole proprietership are at odds with Fortune 500 CEOs.
More importantly, the reporters are not the ones who determine the coverage. They don't go out and pick what stories to cover, and how to cover them, except a few.
The fact is, the US media is almost entirely owned by 4 or 5 mega corporations, and generally, they have a corporate bias.
It's the EMPLOYERS, the PUBLISHERS, who set the tone for the content, hiring and directing the editors who do what they want, who hire and direct the reporters.
And this OWNERSHIP has a RIGHT-WING bias, reflected in the news.
There are books and easy cases to be made showing the news is right-wing except for minor outlets, but you can't get anywhere with facts with the righties here.
The only major ideologically driven media ownership in the US is News Corp; a minor example is the Washington Times.
And even News Corp is right-wing for business reasons, recognizing that he could create a market for right-wing lies and therefore own that market, instead of being just one more player in the 'mainstream' market competing with the same type of product already well filled by competitors. He paid to build that audience (after the first attempt failed), and it's worked. 90% of talk radio is right-wing, too.
The 90% of reporters statistic, from one poll long ago, takes advantage of some people's ignorance about how the media works - ignoring the right-wing orientation of the owners or the actual, measured slant in the news. The facts clearly show the lie of the right-wing bias - which is so widely parroted it only further reinforces the real slant of the media, spreading the myth that serves the right-wing media.
Usually I'd provide some link to more info for the people who want to get a little informed; I have before on this, and it's a waste of time IMO, they don't want facts.
The most influential media figure in recent years has been Matt Drudge, who has a strongly right-wing bias and often false or even made-up stories, but has dominated the national media's story agenda, who have a huge appetite for gossipy, personality, attack stories the right specializes in.
(63% of stories (in national media, not Drudge) covered the 'horse race' issues; 1% covered candidates' records).
One example might help serve to show the real 'bias', because it's typical.
Leading up to the 2008 election, someone noticed John Edwards got a $400 haircut - which fit the media's narrative of attacking Democrats as 'feminine' (or 'fags').
Drudge linked the story and pushed it - and it was very widely repeated by the national media, who did their usual routine of covering it, covering the 'story' about the media covering, justifying coverage by other media covering it, and doing stories about how it was getting too much airtime.
Soon after, there was a second story about Mitt Romney having a $300 makeup expense - a very similar story that did not fit the media 'feminine Democrat' narrative.
The Edwards story, pushed by Drudge, had 2,372 stories in the media; the Romney story, ignored by Drudge (and Romney's communications director was a longtime Drudge source for headlines, so Drudge was biased not to report the story against his source's candidate) had 21.
As one article in New York Magazine reported:
"[Matt Drudge's web site] is America's bulletin board, and much more than that," NBC's Brian Williams said recently. "Matt Drudge is just about the most powerful journalist in America", said Pat Buchanan...
In 2000, he helped defeat Al Gore by turning up the volume on such stories as Al Gore's fund-raising appearance at a Buddhist temple. IN 2004, he did more than anyone to upend Kerry by playing up a small ad buy by the Swift Boat Veterans. In this campaign season, he has made a virus of the John Edwards $400 haircut...
His audience is decidely right-wing... the audience is 78 percent male... only 8 percent Democratic.
Politico was closely linked to Drudge, often linking its stories; in their eighth story in two weeks on the haircut, they said they were 'reluctantly' covering the story that was getting way too much coverage again, with information justifying the high amount of coverage:
This is bad. When you go to Google and enter "Edwards haircut", the first item that comes up is a story by Bill Wundram in the Quad-City Daily Times of Davenport, Iowa...
The article got 324 comments from readers. When people inside the beltway are talking about your haircut, it doesn't matter much.
When people in Iowa are talking about your haircut, you may have a problem.
As Glenn Greenwald tells this story in "Great American Hypocrites", about how Politico used the Iowa 324 responses to say it HAD to cover it, but didn't want to:
But what Simon omitted is that the reason the item in the Iowa newspaper received so many comments is that Drudge had linked to it, just as he linked to Politico's stories on this "issue." That sent hundreds of thousands of right-wing Drudge fanatics to the Iowa article, producing hundreds of comments."
The media's bias is first the 'corporate' bias - from protecting a pro-corporate ideology, to the low cost of 'fluffy' stories over real issues, especially gossipy attacks the Republican political operatives specialize in; and where is is 'right' of 'left' bias, it follows the OWNERS and PUBLISHERS, to the right far more than the left, with only small outlets for 'the left', such as The Nation, or some MSNBC hosts the last few years (after copying Fox didn't go too well), or single-digit percent of talk radio.
Of course the right has no problem with the conflict between claiming the media is 'left-wing', yet also saying the low representation for the left shows 'the market doesn't want left-wing media', ignoring the facts about the reasons, including all the money that has subsidized the right-wing media.
The constant parroting of the old poll about reporters is nothing but a highly misleading attempt to say something false about 'media bias'.
This thread is about Breitbart, and shouldn't get derailed to 'media bias', but it's almost inevitable for some to make that false attack, so there's this response.
It is telling, though, how the people on the right here are failing to condemn Breitbart as they rush to try to parrot the 'liberal media' talking points.
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