The Pew survey mentioned below was “conducted in association with The Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Committee of Concerned Journalists”; and the report was accompanied by a section called “Commentary: A Crisis of Confidence,” signed by Bill Kovach, chairman of the Committee, and Tom Rosenstiel and Amy Mitchell, director and associate director of the Project. Here’s part of that commentary:
Journalists’ own politics are also harder to analyze than people might think. The fact that journalists — especially national journalists — are more likely than in the past to describe themselves as liberal reinforces the findings of the major academic study on this question, namely that of David H. Weaver and G. Cleveland Wilhoit, in their series of books “The American Journalist.”
But what does liberal mean to journalists? We would be reluctant to infer too much here. The survey includes just four questions probing journalists’ political attitudes, yet the answers to these questions suggest journalists have in mind something other than a classic big government liberalism and something more along the lines of libertarianism. More journalists said they think it is more important for people to be free to pursue their goals without government interference than it is for government to ensure that no one is in need. . . .
The last sentence in the last paragraph is accurate on its own, but it isn’t responsive to the first sentence in that paragraph — “what does liberal mean to journalists?” Of the 28% of journalists who described themselves as liberal (just 10% described themselves as conservative, and the rest said they were moderate or didn’t respond), 61% said they thought it was more important for the government to guarantee that no-one is in need than for people to be free from government interference; 33% said the contrary.
Most journalists describe themselves as moderates; there are many more liberals than conservatives, but self-described moderates exceed both these numbers. But when journalists call themselves liberal, they generally mean standard modern liberal. I wish they meant libertarian, but they don’t.
(Note: The calculations for percentages of conservatives who are liberal and conservative are mine; the only information I saw in the survey was broken down by national, local, and Internet journalists, rather than aggregated, but I did my own aggregation by combining the percentages listed under Q 27 and the Ns listed under Q 1.)
Comments are closed.