MSNBC investigative reporter Bill Dedman had an obvious but interesting story looking at political contributions from journalists. He found that reporters gave to Democrats and liberal causes nine times as frequently as Republican or conservative causes:
MSNBC.com identified 144 journalists who made political contributions from 2004 through the start of the 2008 campaign, according to the public records of the Federal Election Commission. Most of the newsroom checkbooks leaned to the left: 125 journalists gave to Democrats and liberal causes. Only 17 gave to Republicans. Two gave to both parties.
So mainstream media lacks political diversity — this is not news. The article goes on to say that most mainstream news organizations discourage political activism, including marches, bumper stickers and donations. To my knowledge, my newsroom doesn’t restrict political activity and our parking lot was full of bumper stickers during the last election. I have no problem with this. Why should reporters check their citizenship at the door? The test of whether this lack of diversity is a problem is not a listing of statistics about who gave what — it’s whether each reporter’s politics affects the quality of their journalism. I have worked with extremely liberal reporters — socialists, basically — who I would trust to report and write any story out there. A good reporter is a good reporter.
The reporters I worry about are the ones like Linda Greenhouse, The New York Times’ superstar Supreme Court reporter who thinks her extremely liberal views are not opinions but facts. I’ve worked with that kind of reporter, too. The arrogance and ignorance implicit in such an approach is what’s wrong with mainstream media. And reporters are insane if they don’t think readers and viewers pick up on that vibe. In fact, I blame these reporters for the perception that mainstream media are biased toward liberal views more than the fact that, well, the mainstream media are liberal.
Which is why a report like this — that reveals what many casual observers have probably noted for a long time — is a good thing. Transparency is good. And there is nothing wrong with reporters having opinions and political views. The proper response to this report is not to clamp down on political contributions but, if anything, to hire a more diverse work force.
On a separate note, the sentiment that causes media companies to ban political donations reminds me of the one that thinks religious affiliation is a net negative for reporters who want to cover the Godbeat. Why do we want reporters who know nothing about what they’re covering?
New York Times executive editor Bill Keller issued a 2003 memo to his newsroom dealing with some of these issues. He identified religion as a major cause of the perception that his paper is liberally biased. His words are worth revisiting:
Of course, diversifying the range of viewpoints reported — and understood — in our pages is not mainly a matter of hiring a more diverse work force. It calls for a concerted effort by all of us to stretch beyond our predominantly urban, culturally liberal orientation, to cover the full range of our national conversation… .
I also endorse the committee’s recommendation that we cover religion more extensively, but I think the key to that is not to add more reporters who will write about religion as a beat. I think the key is to be more alert to the role religion plays in many stories we cover, stories of politics and policy, national and local, stories of social trends and family life, stories of how we live. This is important to us not because we want to appease believers or pander to conservatives, but because good journalism entails understanding more than just the neighborhood you grew up in.
Back to the MSNBC article — which is really well written, thoroughly researched and balanced. The purpose of GetReligion is to look at how well the mainstream media cover religion. One of the things we’ve noted over the years is the dearth of reporters who get traditional religion and moral conservatism. One of the things the article isn’t able to look into is whether the statistics actually understate the problem with regard to that. Is there anyone in a newsroom who sympathizes with morally conservative types? It doesn’t look like any donations were given to conservative groups, although many were given to groups like MoveOn.org. Besides, the MSNBC study showed only 17 donors to Republicans in general.
The article does have a few interesting details, such as the Democratic-contributing reporter at the National Catholic Reporter. Is that mainstream media? It also lists contributions from employees at the O’Reilly Factory, Rolling Stone and MTV. I’m not sure people have an expectation that people at those institutions aren’t biased. The well-paid New Yorker employees gave over $15,000 to Democrats. Is anyone surprised that employees at The New Yorker sympathize with MoveOn.org? If so, they’re not very observant.
Just one more excerpt from the story, so you can get a flavor of the article. It’s also interesting how so often religious and political views go together, as some of this shows:
Although donations are banned for journalists at Dow Jones — if they would be considered newsworthy, the policy says — several staffers at The Wall Street Journal made donations. Senior special writer Henny Sender said she was just back from Asia and didn’t know the Journal’s rules when she gave $300 to Kerry in 2004. The editor of the Weekend Journal, Eben Shapiro, gave $1,000 to Democratic Victory 2004. He said the donation was actually the purchase of art at a fundraiser, and when he was reminded of the paper’s policy, he got a refund. Credit markets editor Billy Mallard at Dow Jones Newswires gave $200 to MoveOn.org in October and said he “thought MoveOn.org was OK because it wasn’t the Republican Party or Democratic Party.” Once MSNBC.com called, Mallard said, he realized that it was a partisan group and asked for a refund.
The tally of donors doesn’t include a group that gave money to defeat President Bush by paying to hear the Boss. In 2004, Bruce Springsteen and other musicians raised money for MoveOn.org and America Coming Together at a series of 34 concerts billed as “Vote for Change.” The ticket buyers included an MSNBC.com producer and more than 20 other journalists. Although all of the purchase price went to the effort to defeat Bush that fall, the intent may have been entirely musical, so those donors are not on our list unless they made other contributions.
One of the Springsteen fans appears to be a blogging editor at Dow Jones, Samuel J. Favate Jr., who gave $1,036 to America Coming Together in 2004. He didn’t return phone calls. Favate rewrites press releases for Dow Jones Newswires in New Jersey, which may explain his views that corporate America is “really in charge.” On his personal blog, Favate rails against the Iraq war, for gun control and for a tax audit of Christian psychologist James Dobson.
The list of journalists who contributed to various political candidates and causes is also worth reading, in large part because Dedman interviewed them about their contributions and included their explanations and responses.
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Comments (21) |
June 22, 2007, at 2:44 am
This post is more about politics than religion, but still, your bias is shown because you did not mention this very critical fact from the article:
So of the tiny minority who give donations, most give them to left causes versus right causes. And from this you observe that this proves the media has a left tilt. That is an error in logic since there could be other reasons for that imbalance in donations.
In other place it has been observed that the media has a left tilt in some matter and a right tilt in others. So the pattern of donations could be related to that rather than to an overall tilt.
This is not to say that the media does not have a left tilt, but that the article does no more than offer a small piece of evidence based on a tiny minority. Having a small piece of evidence and offering proof are different orders of things.
June 22, 2007, at 5:59 am
Dedman’s story mentions several interesting donations, including a gift to Democrat by a Fox News Channel staffer and one to a Republican by a PBS type. Does that mean Fox News tilts left and PBS right? I don’t think so. What it means is that you better be careful not to read too much into these numbers.
June 22, 2007, at 6:32 am
While it does seem unfair that journalists are banned from exercising their rights as citizens to contribute to the political party or cause of their choice, I can see why it might be a fuzzy area of concern.
Though where do you draw the line? Do you scrutinise charity donations, and screen out those you consider lean left or right? How would you classify donations to, for example, Planned Parenthood?
I think it shouldn’t be banned, on the conditions that these are donations by the people concerned as private citizens and not either using corporate money or their position in the public eye to shill for fundraising or PR.
The big problem is not the donations themselves, but the kind of spite evidenced by calls for tax audits of religious organisations if they dare to express opinions not favoured by the reporter. Why should James Dobson be audited? This intimates that he is corrupt; that he is illegally getting tax exemptions for - well, what? being a religious leader? running a religious organisation? a charity? See, that’s what I don’t quite get - as far as I know, he’s not a minister of religion, so how is he or his church abusing their exemption?
And don’t tell me it’s because they preach the traditional morality from the pulpit. I don’t much like preachers telling their congregations who to vote for; on the other hand, they are entitled to lay out the guidelines for informing one’s conscience according to the denomination concerned. If we’re going to stamp out politicking at church services, we could start not with tax audits but with the photo-ops of white politicians attending services at black churches during campaigns, for a start.
June 22, 2007, at 7:16 am
The survey is interesting and builds on earlier reports. However, if misses another key fact: Just because someone is a Republican doesn’t make him a conservative on moral/religious issues — the key issues that keep showing up in bias studies, the key issues that even the left (Alterman) admits are consistently covered in a liberal manner in mainstream newsrooms.
The study went after a small sample in ELITE media. The assumption is that the elite influence the rest of the country. That may or may not be true. But I certainly agree with MZ that cutting into the rights of reporters is not the answer. Seeking newsrooms that look like America is the answer.
June 22, 2007, at 7:18 am
BTW, about the art…
I have that slogan on a bumper sticker in my office, a gift from a conservative student. I put it up — but crossed at the word “the.”
Saying THE media are liberal is way too simplistic. Liberal on some issues, yes, Consistently liberal, no. Especially not with a classic definition of liberalism.
June 22, 2007, at 8:17 am
The story’s interesting, but I echo others in saying it shouldn’t be used to draw too many general conclusions about news coverage in America. To begin with, the sample size is tiny, and as tmatt noted, we’re mostly talking about the elite media here.
The other thing is, take a look at the list of journalists and their jobs: sports writers, graphics editors, fashion writers, film critics, columnist, editorial cartoonist (does anyone expect editorial cartoonists to be unbiased?), automobile critic, food writer, photographer, etc. Does anyone worry that the fashion editor is driving the front page news coverage?
Also, I think the definition of “mainstream media” is a little loose here. The New Yorker is mainstream, but I don’t know if anyone expects from it the same things they expect from a daily newspaper or nightly newscast. Ditto for Vanity Fair and - come on! - Rolling Stone.
This doesn’t really tell us much about the media - as tmatt points out, just because someone gives money to a Republican doesn’t mean they’re conservative (and vice versa with the Dems and liberals). I think there’s a definite liberal skew in the press corps on some issues, the most glaring being abortion and homosexuality. But I don’t think this kind of thing is the way to address that.
June 22, 2007, at 8:37 am
The most dramatic way the study was unrepresentative was that in order to get identified as a contributor, you had to give $250 or more to a candidate or political cause.
Most reporters I know don’t make enough money to be throwing around such funds.
But I love people trying to spin this as anything other than the obvious. Why do we fear admitting the media are so personally liberal? We are! On myriad issues.
Being personally liberal by a factor of 9:1 is something that doesn’t dictate liberal bias shows up in the media but it sure doesn’t help newsrooms cover stories in a balanced way.
Another thing I love about this story is how differently it would be covered in the media if it were about any group other than the media or if such dramatic imbalances were found in another group.
June 22, 2007, at 8:58 am
I was thinking of a minor scandal caused a few years ago by the presence of a Bush bumper sticker in our newsroom parking lot. There were dozens of Kerry stickers and even more for Jim Webb — one of our editors actually left to work on his campaign — but this one Bush sticker was a problem. Who did it belong to? Well, it turned out it belonged to the Korean-immigrant family who operate a deli in our building. Crisis averted.
None of my colleagues’ political views were registered by this political donation survey (we’re all too poor, I think!) but that doesn’t mean they don’t engage in political activism.
Again, I’d trust some of the most personally liberal folks to write a story about anything and do it well.
June 22, 2007, at 9:48 am
Jerry, while I agree that this post is more about politics than religion, I disagree that Mollie shows bias in her post just because she didn’t stress that those who donated may not be a representative sampling of all who work in newsrooms. Knowing that this was not a scientific survey, Mollie provides a framework by sharing her experiences in newsrooms, experiences that are consistent with those of countless other people who work in newsrooms. This report is simply more evidence of a pattern. No one is trying to establish a pattern based on this report alone.
Imagine how this story would have reported and how people would have reacted if the 9:1 ratio had been in the other direction. The ho-hum, almost yawning reaction is telling.
Mollie is gracious enough to reiterate that she trusts personally liberal folks to write good, balanced stories. Her more liberal colleagues on this board often do not extend conservatives the same courtesy.
June 22, 2007, at 10:21 am
Right, so instead of responding to specific criticisms of the MSNBC article, it’s better to say people “fear” admitting there are liberals in the media, and to hint that there is a sinister conspiracy at work in which the media is deliberately ignoring the story.
The MSNBC story is flawed. Among other problems:
It assumes “Democrat” is synonymous with “liberal” and “Republican” with “conservative.”
It bases its conclusions on an unrepresentative sample size (144 out of how many journalists in the country?).
Its definition of outlets in the “mainstream media” is questionable at best; lumping Rolling Stone and Salon in with local network affiliates seems a particularly scattershot way of defining “mainstream.”
Again, I don’t think anyone seriously questions that a lot of liberals work in journalism. The problem is, this story doesn’t tell us a whole lot about that situation.
Also, what does this have to do with religion, again?
June 22, 2007, at 10:32 am
The best thing I’ve seen written on this subject his here
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/
If you are familar with the Blogosphere, you will be rolling on the floor laughing from the inside jokes, if not you will still get some of the quips.
In any case, I think it would be wise to avoid splitting hairs and debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin in regards to this MSNBC story. The viewers/readers of the media are not doing that… they are simply leaving in droves.
June 22, 2007, at 10:44 am
Wonderful little story on this subject from The Onion: Irrelevant Pop Stars Unite Against Bush.
June 22, 2007, at 10:46 am
Dennis,
In the actual post I wrote, in which I defended the right of reporters to make political contributions, challenged the notion that personal liberal bias is equivalent to professional bias, and praised the transparency of the report, I also criticized it for including what I deemed non-mainstream outlets. I’m the one who raised the Rolling Stone inclusion before you did.
Not that reading my post is required before commenting …
Anyway, what is your specific problem with identifying MoveOn.org, which funds Democrats and fights Republicans, as synonymous with Democrats — at least for the purpose of this story?
Again, many many many more journalists contribute to political causes through activism or even donations — but this report only caught those whose giving requires a paper trail of some kind — the bigger donors.
In my post, I fleshed out some of the religious angles to this story. I’ll repeat them for those who didn’t read it:
1) Bill Keller, NYT executive editor claimed that ignorance of religion was a major reason for the perceived liberal bias in newsrooms.
2) The same people who say that reporters should hide their political affiliations are the ones who come up with ideas like it’s better to have no religious affiliation or knowledge if you’re covering the Godbeat.
3) Some of these Democratic/liberal donors have some religious views worth noting. I didn’t quote the NYT columnist Randy Cohen, but I did quote the guy from the Dow Jones company saying what he thought of James Dobson. He’s also quoted in the story as saying he hated George Bush, Pat Robertson, the Christian Coalition, the NRA and corporate America.
June 22, 2007, at 12:23 pm
“One of the things the article isn’t able to look into is whether the statistics actually understate the problem with regard to that. Is there anyone in a newsroom who sympathizes with morally conservative types?”
I’m glad this was mentioned. Too often, opinions about liberal bias have disparate effects in the minds of readers. One sees it as criticism of things Republican, while another thinks specifically about cultural libertinism. Party hack types are able to dovetail the latter sentiment to their advantage, and they get away with that opportunism much too often.
June 22, 2007, at 12:55 pm
Mollie,
I’m sorry if my comments gave the impression that I didn’t read your post. In fact, I’ve read it several times, and I think my questions are still valid.
As to your question about identifying MoveOn with the Democrats, I have no problem with that. But high up in the MSNBC story, we’re told that most of the people in this tiny and inadequate study gave to Democratic candidates and “liberal causes.” That seems a little vague to me. Is MoveOn really a “cause”? How about “pressure group” or, less controversially “lobby”?
Furthemore, the religion links you cite are pretty tenuous. The incessantly-quoted Bill Keller memo, the contention that vague, unspecified “people” who don’t think it’s a good idea for reporters to contribute to political causes are the same who think reporters shouldn’t know about their beats, and finally, the insight that some people who give to Democratic candidates have opinions about religion.
This is not a religion story. You can tie religion into it through various ways, but you can tie religion into basically anything in America. This is the kind of story that conservatives like because it seems to confirm their prejudices about people in the media.
As I have said - speaking of not reading comments - I don’t doubt that plenty of people - most people even - in the media are liberal on some issues. But this story doesn’t provide us with the kind of data we need to make broad generalizations about journalists in general.
June 22, 2007, at 1:00 pm
And another thing…
The suggestion that people who have a more-or-less traditional understanding of how journalists should express themselves politically are the same people who think religion reporters shouldn’t know about religion is questionable at best.
I have never worked in a newsroom where public expressions of political views are acceptable. Everyone seems to bring up bumper stickers - I worked with a reporter who put a Bush-Cheney bumper sticker on her care and was told to remove it - by an editor with pictures of Ronald Reagan in his cubicle. The difference was that the public doesn’t see the editor’s cubicle.
I don’t actually want to know what a journalist’s political views are. Ideally, a good journalist is someone whose work will never give any clue as to what they think about politics. I completely disagree with the idea that journalism somehow suffers because reporters are discouraged from being politically active.
June 22, 2007, at 5:23 pm
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. The poll reprised many of the questions asked by the same group (then called the Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press) back in 1995.
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).
June 22, 2007, at 10:55 pm
What bothers me most about stories like this that, again like virtually every other fair, independent survey small or large, shows how elite media personnel are 90% liberal —and 90% anti-or non-religious—is the employment question. How did it get so massively lopsided???
When it comes to race issues, business employment issues, and union issues the liberal elite media overall has had no doubt:: deliberate, conscious discrimination and prejudice has created racial imbalance in virtually every institution they decide to investigate along these lines.
So we are supposed to believe the liberal bigshots in the media weren’t also doing the same thing in filling job openings with regard to the liberal-conservative, religious—anti-religious split:: deliberate and conscious discrimination. And don’t give me that horsesh-t that the media draws liberal, anti-religious types and that creates the imbalance. I have known too many young, talented people over the years who were traditional and religious and who ran up against the liberal, bigoted wall that lets few such people into the media. I have seen comments sent to some by potential employers critiquing their portfolios of work or resumes—comments based on ideology not based on skill of writing. I have seen how shabbily the liberal media treats conservative writers even when they publish something they have written (like making them beg for months for the payment they were entitled to get upon publication).
June 23, 2007, at 9:14 pm
Deacon John:
One of the major causes of the imbalance?
Conservative institutions that genuinely hate journalism, that’s what. Leading to their colleges and universities doing almost nothing to produce young journalists committed to working in mainstream journalism.
And again, this is not strictly a POLITICAL left vs. right thing. It’s about a diversity of cultural points of view, a diversity of life experiences.
June 23, 2007, at 9:16 pm
Deacon John:
Name me a conservative Catholic school with a strong journalism program? For that matter, name the strong Protestant schools with strong programs (this is a bit of a test, since there are some and that number is on the rise).
June 24, 2007, at 3:28 am
As Matthew Yglesias points out, media companies donate more to Republicans than to Democrats. (And not just when Republicans run Washington, look at the stats for the 2000 campaign when nobody knew which party would be in charge) If it is news that 143 individual journalists donated money to Republicans, then surely it is just as noteworthy that the companies who employ those journalists donate more to Republicans. That seems to undercut Deacon John’s assertion that those who control the media discriminate on the basis of political ideology.
It seems to me that there are various biases in the media. If you look at business coverage, it tends to be conservative. If you look at so-called “moral” issues, it tends to be liberal. If you look at political commentary, it tends to be conservative (Think of the Sunday morning talk shows or how often a show seeking “balanced” commentary will pair a conservative pundit with a neutral reporter.) I agree with tmatt that the solution is a newsroom that looks more like America, and having conservatives get off their obsession with the media being out to get them might help.