MEDIA CULTURE
More on MSNBC Study of Journalists' Political Giving [Stephen Spruiell]
Here's the full list of the 144 journalists included in MSNBC's study. A couple of points here:
- The study suffers from self-selection bias. It's entirely possible that, for whatever reason, whether a journalist makes a political contribution is correlated with that journalist's party affliation. Perhaps Republican journalists feel the need to be more discrete and limit their political activity to voting. It's not a truly random sample.
- The time period also matters. MSNBC studied contributions from 2004-2008 campaign cycles. It could be that their profound dislike for George W. Bush motivated a greater percentage of Democratic journalists to donate than their Republican colleagues. But of course, if that's the case, that's an equally important finding with implications for the last four years of coverage.
- Those caveats aside, the list of contributions from wire-service reporters creates the biggest cause for concern. A lot of journalists in the MSNBC study write for magazines or work for networks from which we've come to expect a certain amount of opinion. (Two writers for Salon gave to Democrats? Did you need CSI for that one?) But the wires are supposed to be the true standard-bearers for the journalistic notion of objectivity. All 13 on the list gave to Democrats. (No AP reporters — the AP strictly forbids any political giving.)
It's important to keep in mind that, standing on its own, this study doesn't have a lot of statistical reliability. But in the context of the many other studies that have found the same trends, it does tend to confirm the likelihood that a majority of mainstream journalists lean to the left. I mean, 9 to 1. C'mon.
06/21 10:46 AM
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