Biased Journalists... Who Would Have Thought It?

You might imagine that the media is increasingly biased against Republicans. We are not talking about editorials or opinion journalism. We are thinking about the way it presents the facts. If former Times editor Jill Abramson could aver that the Times slants news coverage to make Trump look bad, you know that the problem has moved beyond the realm of reasonable doubt.

But, what good is speculation when we can have a research study. Performed by University of British Columbia doctoral candidate Eric Merkley, the new study focuses on the way the mainstream media reported on economic news. News about unemployment, productivity and GDP. 

The story was published in an academic journal, entitled American Politics Research. Eric Dolan provided a summary on PsyPost, a go-to source for psycho news.

What did Merkley find? Dolan reports:

He found that the tone of economic news coverage was more positive during Democratic presidencies, even after controlling for the economic performance.

“Journalists broadly lean to the political left and this has become increasingly true over time. These findings suggest there is a real possibility that journalists subtly frame news content in ways that serve their partisan interests,” Merkley told PsyPost.

“The key word is subtly. This study provides no evidence that mainstream media deliberately manufacturers false or misleading content to harm Republican presidents. Rather, the findings are consistent with confirmation bias. Journalists appropriately reduce tone in economic news in response to worsening economic conditions under Republican presidents, but are problematically more charitable during Democratic administrations.”

“This shouldn’t be a huge surprise. Being objective and impartial is darn near impossible for journalists and all citizens when our cognitive hard-wiring is oriented towards supporting our social group identities when we see and interpret information in the political world.”

Why do journalists report highlight economic news that makes Democrats look good while downplaying economic news that makes Republicans look good? Merkley suggests that confirmation bias plays an important part. That means, for the uninitiated, that people tend to select out facts that confirm their beliefs while ignoring facts that tend to disprove them. And he is correct to add that anyone who belongs to a group that thinks a certain way will tend to think the same way… the better to maintain his standing in the group.

Fair points. They affirm what we had all suspected. And they help us to suppress our tendency to ascribe malevolent motives to those we disagree with.