For the past half-century, the major news source for the majority of Americans has been the mainstream media (CBS, ABC, NBC) and metropolitan newspapers (The New York Times, The Washington Post)
Technological inventions have allowed Americans to express their opinions and beliefs in many ways, such as blogging. While most Americans are quick to recognize the conservative media, like Fox News, and conservative radio hosts such Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, few point out the Liberal bias among other news channels and journalists.
The late ABC news anchor Peter Jennings said it best when he said “Historically in the media, it has been more of a liberal persuasion for years. It has taken us a long time, too long in my view, to have vigorous conservative voices heard as widely in the media as they now are.” (Dissecting Liberal Media bias, p. 24)The effort to hire more minorities and women has had the effect of making the media more liberal. Both these groups already tend to be liberal.
There are six firms that dominate all mass media: Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, News Corp, General Electric and Bertelsmann. “Aren’t the owners of these corporations conservatives?”, would be the liberal argument. But, even corporate executives can be liberal. Ted Turner, the owner and former boss of CNN, and a billionaire, is about as liberal as they come. Bill Gates, part owner of MSNBC, is Liberal as well.
Didn’t Dan Rather have bosses at CBS that let him get away with a left-leaning agenda for years? Big corporations, which may own the media, do not write the news. Journalists do.
“In May 2004, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released a survey of 547 journalists and news media executives, including 247 who worked for national news organizations. Pew found that the proportion of liberals in the national media had actually grown over the previous nine years, from 22 percent in 1995 to 34 percent in 2004. Meanwhile, the percentage of conservatives remained minuscule: just four percent in 1995, seven percent in 2004. As for local reporters, liberals outnumbered conservatives by a nearly two-to-one margin (23 to 12 percent).” (http://www.mrc.org/SpecialReports/2004/report063004_p2.asp)
“Where I work at ABC, people say ‘conservative’ the way people say ‘child molester.’” said ABC’s 20/20 co-anchor John Stossel to CNSNews.com reporter Robert Bluey, in a story posted January 28, 2004.
A report came out August 29, 2007 from the Media research center that stated “The networks offered nearly twice as much coverage of the Democrats. More than half of all campaign segments (55%) focused on the Democratic contest, compared with just (29%) devoted to the Republicans. The remaining stories either offered roughly equal discussion of both parties or did not focus on the major parties. All three Democratic frontrunners received more attention than any of the top Republican candidates, with New York Senator Hillary Clinton receiving the most coverage of all. Undeclared liberal candidates such as former Vice President Al Gore and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg received more network TV attention than many of the declared Republican candidates.” (The Media Research Center analysts reviewed all 517 campaign segments on ABC’s Good Morning America, CBS’s The Early Show and NBC’s Today from January 1 through July 31, 2007). http://www.mrc.org/SpecialReports/2007/Riseandshine/report0829_exec.asp
So, with these reports, would anyone like to witness an endangered species? Walk into a news room and ask for a conservative. The small number of them, if any at all, will astound you.
