Jay Caspian Kang, a staff writer for The New Yorker, ascribed media bias not to a conspiracy among journalists, but to the fact that the overwhelming majority of journalists are left-leaning.
Kang wrote a piece for The New Yorker, “How Biased Is the Media, Really?” in response to a recent Gallup poll showing that Americans’ trust in mass media remains not only historically low, but consistently abysmal for the third year in a row.
He responded by addressing multiple common critiques from Americans on both sides of the political spectrum, including the accusation that “Every news organization that feigns objectivity is actually heavily slanted toward the left. Not only that; the media is actively working with the Democrats to defeat Donald Trump.”
“The most obvious explanation for this impression is that the press corps is mostly made up of liberals,” he wrote in the piece, adding that “At prestige outlets—many of which do don the armor of impartiality—the imbalance skews a lot further to the left than what many outsiders might imagine.”
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He recalled Uri Berliner emerging as a whistleblower against NPR and the rise of progressive identity-politics, but argued the effect of such politics on journalism is ultimately “negligible compared with the effect of the fact that nearly everyone who works [in the media]” are “college-educated Democratic voters from middle- to upper-middle-class families. I have mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: in the course of a fifteen-year career that has included stints at radio shows, print outlets, digital media and television, I have yet to meet a Trump supporter at work.”
He recalled a specific quote about how journalists being an overwhelmingly liberal crowd isn’t a secret, but an obvious fact of life.
“The basic ideological homogeneity of the press corps isn’t some secret that’s tightly guarded by journalists or even the people who run news organizations,” he said. “In a 2023 interview in this magazine, A. G. Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, said, ‘Almost everyone who works at the New York Times lives in the big city and graduated from college. That alone makes our staff unrepresentative. It means that we’re going to under-index in gun ownership, under-index in church attendance.’”
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He responded to the quote by arguing, “As Sulzberger intimated, it’s difficult to believe that a press corps mostly made up of one type of person who votes one type of way would not be influenced by both their prior beliefs and their gaps in knowledge.”
He then argued that the New York Times is a prime example of this trend.
“And, indeed, the Times—who bears the brunt of media criticism across all political spectrums—has, nor do they have a columnist or editorial writer who openly supports Trump. The situation is largely the same at the big network-news shows and most newspapers,” he wrote. “So, yes, there is a liberal bias to the news.”
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