Saturday - March 17, 2007

Recent Poll Says Media is Biased

 Or Tell Us Something We Don't Know

A Zogby Poll finds that a majority of Americans think the mass media is biased in favor of leftist causes.  Of interest is that even independents see that news outlets cover events from a leftist perspective.

The vast majority of American voters detect the presence of political bias in the mainstream news media, according to a Zogby poll released yesterday in conjunction with the George Washington University Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet.

Sentiment is strong: 83 percent of likely voters think bias is "alive and well." Of that number, 64 percent said the press leans left, while slightly more than a quarter -- 28 percent -- said there was a conservative bias.

Naturally, there's a partisan divide, and a pronounced one. Among Republican respondents, 97 percent said the press was liberal. Two-thirds of political independents agreed with them, with less than a quarter of the independents -- 23 percent -- saying there was a conservative bias.

Democratic respondents revealed a spectrum of perceptions.

"Democrats, while much more likely to perceive a conservative bias than any other group, were not nearly as sure the media was against them as were the Republicans," the survey said. "While Republicans were unified in their perception of left-wing media, just two-thirds of Democrats were certain the media skewed right -- and 17 percent said the bias favored the left."