Why is the media so liberal? by Rachel Kent

So, two young fish are hanging out in the ocean. An older fish swims by and says, “Water’s great today, isn’t it?” and swims away. One of the young fish turns to the other and says, “What’s water?”

The ideological make-up of pretty much every media organization is overwhelmingly left-of-center. This is true not just of political journalists, but of pretty much everyone in the organization: feature writers, sports reporters, editors, etc. This is borne out by both polling and analysis of political contributions, and is not seriously in doubt.

The question is how things got this way. The answer is that groups tend to self-reinforce their makeup, and become polarized over time. A group that is slightly left-of-center will tend to attract, hire and promote more left-of-center people than right-of-center people.

This is natural: we tend to think that people that agree with us are smarter than the ones who don’t. Conservatives learned that their path to career success does not lead through the newsroom, and self-selected into other areas (think tanks, opinion journals, Fox), while liberals learned the opposite. The result, over the last several decades, has been ideological (and cultural) uniformity in most major news organizations.

So the question becomes: can objective reporting occur in this kind of environment? I think it can, but it’s extremely difficult. The reason is confirmation bias. There is a natural tendency to be less skeptical about a piece of information that confirms our prior beliefs. Most journalists don’t set out to produce biased reporting, but most media is produced in an environment where it’s difficult to be objective.