It’s a wonder Republicans ever win any election in America.
They run for office on a hopelessly uneven playing field, created by referees (the media) who are openly rooting for the other team.
The good news is that voters seem to recognize and disapprove of the bias, and many do not allow it to sway their decisions when they step into the ballot booth.
Of course the media wields a great deal of power and influence over American public opinion.
It chooses the issues that get news coverage, and frequently presents information in a manner designed to manipulate public reaction.
That’s just the way it is in a free society with a necessarily vigorous and unobstructed media.
And of course reporters are overwhelmingly liberal and tend to work overtime to give Democratic candidates and their issues a boost.
Media types have always denied it, but there’s a mountain of conclusive evidence.
The newly-released results of a 2013 survey of 1,080 television, print and online journalists showed that 28 percent consider themselves Democrats and only seven percent say they are Republicans.
About 50 percent identified themselves as politically “independent,” which is far more appropriate for a journalist, and would be a good sign if it were indeed the truth.
But the percentage of self-identified “independent” journalists increased by a suspiciously high 18 percent since 2002, according to Newsbusters.org.
Perhaps their embarrassingly overt worship of Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign shamed some of them back into the ideological closet, but their preference is still obvious and their bias remains detectable in their work.
A 2010 report from the Media Research Center revealed the following:
A poll of journalists by the American Society of Newspaper editors found that self-identified liberals outnumbered conservatives in newsrooms 61 percent to 15 percent.
More than four-fifths of surveyed journalists said they voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in every election between 1964 and 1976.
In 1992, 88 percent of surveyed D.C. reporters said they voted for Bill Clinton for president. In 2004, the same group said it supported Democrat John Kerry over President George W. Bush by a 12-to-1 margin.
In 2009, a whopping 96 percent of the staff working for the online Slate magazine said they supported Barack Obama for president.
And get this – in the American Society of Newspaper Editors poll, 71 percent of editors admitted that reporters’ opinions “sometimes” or “often” influence their coverage.
“Are reporters biased? There is no doubt that — I’ve worked at the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and worked here at Politico. If I had to guess, if you put all of the reporters that I’ve ever worked with on truth serum, most of them vote Democratic,” said Politico’s Jim VandeHei in 2012.
Given all of this, one might expect the U.S. to be a largely single-party state, with Democrats in control of pretty much everything.
That’s obviously not the case, which is a tribute to the intelligence of the American voter.
According to the Media Research Center report, most voters understand they’re being fed an incomplete picture by liberal journalists.
In every presidential election since 1992, most Americans said the media clearly backed the Democratic candidate.
In 2008, 70 percent of poll respondents perceived the media as being supportive of Obama, compared to 9 percent who said it favored Republican nominee John McCain.
“Nearly nine out of 10 Americans (87 percent) strongly or somewhat agreed that the news media have their own political and public policy positions and attempt to influence public opinion,” the report said.
But here’s a key stat – Only 29 percent of poll respondents think reporters consistently get the facts correct, and only 18 percent said the media is fair.
The message is that most voters take news reports of political campaigns with a grain of salt and still vote the way they believe.
If that weren’t the case, there’s no way the GOP would control the U.S. House. There’s no way 29 out of 50 governors would be Republicans.
And the idea of Republicans regaining the U.S. Senate this year or the White House in 2016 would be laughable.
But those things might very well happen, despite the best efforts of the media.
So here’s to the average American voter, who is obviously smarter than most people think.
That’s probably why we have such a great nation, and the future still holds a great deal of promise.
Authored by Steve Gunn
