Even in an age when the leading outlets of the dominant press establishment have fully outed themselves as partisans to the core, the results of a new Pew Research Center poll are astonishing. The culture of rank media bias has become so entrenched that America’s journalists don’t see a need to pay lip service to the pursuit of fair and equal coverage anymore. And they don’t seem to care that the readers and viewers they pretend to serve overwhelmingly disagree with them on the matter.
Pew wrote of its new study on July 13:
“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 – according to a recent Pew Research Center study. 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.”
Young and Slanted
[substack align=”right”]The younger the person, the greater the disdain for fairness.
“Roughly six-in-ten U.S. journalists ages 18 to 29 (63%) [who were surveyed] say every side does not always deserve equal coverage, while 37% of journalists in this age range say journalists should always strive to cover all sides equally – percentages that are very similar to the breakdown among journalists ages 30 to 49. But those numbers change noticeably for journalists 50 and older, who are evenly split between the two viewpoints,” Pew states.
Among those who work for left-leaning organizations, the rejection is even more absolute, Pew found:
“Journalists’ attitudes also vary by the political leaning of their audience. Overall, 57% of those who say their outlet has a right-leaning audience think the profession should strive for equal coverage, while 42% of these journalists say equal coverage is not always deserved. For journalists who say their outlet’s audience leans left, the trend is reversed, with 30% supporting equal coverage for all sides and a large majority (69%) saying it is not always deserved. Those who say their audiences are politically mixed are evenly divided (49% each).”
Donald Trump (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to mainstream reporting since the rise of Donald Trump as a political force in 2015 and his ascendancy to the presidency one year later. Nor can it be denied that so-called “mainstream” outlets have always exhibited a profound progressive ruling establishment bias, going back to the era of Walter Cronkite on television at CBS News and the glory days of the Gray Lady, The New York Times.
But what does it mean that today’s journalists, unlike their not-so-neutral predecessors, don’t feel a need to pretend to oppose media bias in its most malicious forms anymore?
The Pew survey is certainly an indictment of the young generation of reporters, who have been weaned since birth on loaded narratives of “truth” vs “lies” and “right” vs “wrong” that just so happen to correspond with a rigid culturally leftist view of the world.
Yet it is perhaps even more of a warning about how utterly compromised the modern press has become in the Internet Age. The constant search for new revenue streams has led far too many news organizations to accept funding from sources that unequivocally and gravely compromise their professional standing.
Dirty Money Behind the Media Bias
As Liberty Nation noted in June 2021, major brand-name newspapers such as The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and Houston Chronicle have accepted million-dollar payments from a Chinese communist state-run media organization to publish “advertising campaigns” designed to look like news articles.
Bill Gates is the leading promoter of vaccines in the world. He was a driving force in the aggressive push for coronavirus vaccines during the pandemic hysteria of 2020 and 2021. An eye-opening Nov. 2021 report at Mint Press News revealed that numerous prominent dominant outlets have been funded by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation even as they “report” on vaccines. Among the many names are The Atlantic, the BBC [UK], The Daily Telegraph [UK], Der Spiegel [Germany], Education Week, Gannett, The Guardian [UK], Inside Higher Ed, Le Monde [France], National Journal, The Texas Tribune and Univision.
The Guardian is so bold as to openly list the Gates Foundation as a “philanthropic partner” on its news site. The Texas Tribune takes a different tack, typing out a disclaimer acknowledging the funding sources and painting them as a boon for “informed discourse” that of course is totally free from any undue bias:
“Donors and members subscribe to The Texas Tribune’s belief that promoting greater civic engagement and informed discourse is a direct route to a better and more productive Texas. They play no role in guiding the journalism produced by the Tribune or the planning and execution of events.”
One more example: Did you know The Salt Lake Tribune, a rabidly leftist newspaper in culturally conservative Utah, is openly funded by Facebook, JP Morgan Private Bank and, laughably, Paris Hilton?
Here is the main source of the culture rot described in the startling Pew study. America’s journalists don’t care about media bias for the oldest and simplest of reasons: They are bought.
