One of the evergreen issues among the political class is the role of journalism in modern society. From the conservative perspective, the Fourth Estate has become a radical left-wing propaganda machine – politically benefiting Democrats. On the other side of the philosophic divide, we have progressives bemoaning the very existence of right-wing media platforms that benefit Republicans.
Conservative media will have large Republican staffs. At FOX News, for example, the personnel are overwhelmingly Republican – specifically 93 percent according to Statistics. But that is an outlier among the so-called mainstream media.
What can be empirically established is that most of the major media is controlled and populated by Democrats who lean to the far left. A Syracuse University/Newhouse poll in December of 2023 showed that only 3.4 percent of working journalists are Republicans.
While the broadcast networks are more balanced, Democrats still dominate in numbers and especially in influential positions. At ABC the ratio is 53 percent Democrat to 44 percent Republican … CBS has 55 percent Democrats to 41 percent Republican … and at NBC it is 57 percent Democrat and 38 percent Republican. More importantly, virtually all the on-air personalities and behind-the-scenes producers and editors are Democrats.
The cable news networks, other than FOX, are overwhelming progressive Democrats – many on the radical fringe. At CNN, the ratio is 79 percent Democrat and 19 Republican. NPR tops that with 87 percent Democrat and 12 Republican. And it should come as no surprise that the granddaddy of bias in news reports is … drum roll, please … MSNBC with 95 percent Democrat and a paltry 5 percent Republican – and many of those are GOP apostates like former Republican Chairman Michael Steele.
The highly vaunted “newspaper of record,” the New York Times, has a ratio of 91 percent Democrat staffers to 7 percent Republican.
The Newhouse School of Public Communication at Syracuse University has been tracking this question for more than 50 years. During that time, Republican presence in mainstream news has dwindled from 18 percent in 2002 and 26 percent in 1971.
That latter figure is significant since it was in that era that journalism began to transform from basic reporting – with opinion clearly reserved to the editorial department. That is when many of America’s leading J-schools introduced “advocacy journalism.” Frontline reporters were empowered to abandon the “who, what, where, when, why and how” tradition of objective and balanced reporting in favor of injecting opinion in news articles. The impenetrable wall between editorial and news reporting was beginning to be disassembled – and mostly for the benefit of the left.
The trend did not go unnoticed by old-school journalism and journalism professors. One of them was Sam Archibald, professor of Journalism and the University of Missouri. I know the story because I was deeply involved.
Archibald’s concern came to the attention of Sears, Roebuck & Co. He proposed the establishment of a congressional internship program focusing on J-school students interested in political and public affairs reporting. The purpose was to give them insight into the working of government and seminar session teaching professional standards and ethics – the importance of unbiased reporting. It was a direct pushback against the growing left-wing advocacy journalism movement.
I was keenly aware of the growing problem in journalism because, at the time, I was part of a two-man communications team in the Sears’ Washington office – which had primary responsibility for working with Archibald in administering the program. Each year, we would select approximately 30 J-school students to come to Washington to intern in various House and Senate offices. Archibald selected the students, and I helped select the congressional offices based on their requests.
I mention this program to show just how far back goes the concern over institutional bias in news reporting. The current situation sadly suggests that our best-intentioned efforts were not very effective in stopping the evolutionary corruption of journalism – from a reporting function to partisan advocacy.
While the radical left is winning the war in the newsrooms, traditional conservative journalism is winning over the public. That can be seen in ratings. FOX New has been on top of the cable news profession for the past 39 months – garnering more prime time and key demographic viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined.
Unlike television, radio talk shows have been dominated by Republican content and hosts. Left-wing attempts to compete for viewers failed miserably. That was that Air America network that crashed and burned. There was a failed effort to bring back the Phil Donahue Show. Also failed was the short-lived program that brought together former New York Governor Mario Cuomo and former Texas Governor Ann Richards.
Virtually everyone agrees that a free press is essential to a free society. It is not just being free from government control (suggesting that NPR should be privatized), but also free from established political and philosophic biases.
The current imbalance in terms is party affiliation is exacerbated by the preponderance of the hard left within that demographic and the intensity of the advocacy journalism.
It took a long time for American journalism to descend into the depth of contemporary propaganda – and it will not be easy to bring back the traditional ethical standards of journalism. But it is a worthwhile and perhaps existential endeavor.
So, there ‘tis.