Why Left-Leaning Journalists Don’t Want Conservatives To Get Equal Media Coverage

Rather than being a collection of hard-hitting reporters who are hell-bent on seeking out the truth, the class of journalism is becoming increasingly dominated by young and over-credentialed elitists

The vast majority of left-leaning journalists do not believe that opposing viewpoints deserve equal media coverage, according to a new Pew Research Center study.

How unsurprising.

“Journalists in the United States differ markedly from the general public in their views of ‘bothsidesism’ – whether journalists should always strive to give equal coverage to all sides of an issue,” Pew Research explained. “A little more than half of the journalists surveyed (55%) say that every side does not always deserve equal coverage in the news. By contrast, 22% of Americans overall say the same, whereas about three-quarters (76%) say journalists should always strive to give all sides equal coverage.”

Pew Research Center

When we account for political bias, the situation worsens. 69% of journalists who work for self-described left-leaning outlets oppose equal coverage, while 57% of their political counterparts on the right support equal coverage. When accounting for age, 63% of journalists between the ages of 18 and 29 years-old oppose equal coverage, compared to 60% of 30-49 year-olds. Meanwhile, less than 50% of journalists aged at least 50 years-old oppose equal coverage. 

And then, last but not least, when we account for platform, the shift in favor of unequal coverage continues. When television is the “original platform of the organization they work for,” only 44% oppose equal coverage. This rises to 50% for radio, 56% for print media, and 61% for online media.

Of course, none of this is surprising to either the objective onlooker or the conservative consumer, given the change in the very definition of journalism in recent years. Rather than being a collection of hard-hitting reporters who are hell-bent on seeking out the truth, today’s class of journalism is becoming increasingly dominated by young and over-credentialed elitists who view themselves as intellectual activists in pursuit of an objective, rather than in pursuit of truth.

This goes hand-in-hand with another research finding: that “journalists who view misinformation as a very big problem are more likely to say that not every side deserves equal news coverage,” with 59% of these misinformation-wary journalists opposing equal coverage, compared to 46% who believe that misinformation is a less of a problem (or not at all).