Following up yesterday's post on Fox News' audience, a snippet about the predilections of America's fourth estate:
On the Hugh Hewitt radio show, former Washington Post reporter Tom Edsall ballparked the ratio of Democrats to Republicans in newsrooms as "15–25 to 1."
Tom Edsall is a liberal, by the way. I once spent a pre-Thanksgiving evening with him when we were both at Hoover for the week as media fellows, and found him to be a very pleasant guy. Another quote from the same interview:
And I agree that whatever you want to call it, mainstream media, presents itself as unbiased, when in fact, there are built into it, many biases, and they are overwhelmingly to the left.
And there's this exchange:
HH: A proposition. The reason talk radio exploded, followed by Fox News, followed by the centre-right blogosphere, is that because folks like you have been the dominant voice in American media for a long time, and you’re a pretty thoroughgoing, Democratic-favouring, agenda journalist for the left, and you’ve been the senior political reporter of the Washington Post for a very long time. And people didn’t trust your news product…not you, personally, but the accumulation of you, throughout the L.A. Times, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and they got sick and tired of being spoon-fed liberal dross, and they went to the radio when an alternative product came along.
TE: To a certain degree, I agree with that.
Now, it goes without saying that right-wing journalists can be just as biased (although in my experience they're more likely to be aware that The Other Side exists). But the sheer weight of numbers makes a difference to what goes into the headlines. Surely?