News Media Still Liberal — Consume Some Conservative Media!
September 26, 2012
The “mainstream” news media are all liberal.
The news media do occasionally conspire—such as at a Romney press conference about the Benghazi killings, when they coordinated to make sure the narrative would be all about criticizing Romney’s response (Right Scoop with the audio; see also News Busters, Hot Air, Breitbart.com, National Review Online), or in 2008 when liberal journalists used the e-mail list “Journolist” to conspire to keep the Reverend Wright story from hurting Obama’s chances in the election (Daily Caller, News Busters, Politico)—but I’m willing to assume that the rest of the time, there is no conspiracy.
There doesn’t have to be.
Forget about the conspiracies. Forget about the studies on liberal bias. When there are four to ten times as many liberals as conservatives in the media, there’s no way that won’t influence what they choose to report and how they report it. Over time, that affects how we think about the world.
(In a 2007 Pew survey of journalists, producers, editors, and executives working in the national print and broadcast news media, 53% identified as moderate, 32% total as liberal, and only 8% total as conservative. These results are fairly similar to those of Pew’s similar surveys in 2004 and 1995. Source: page 19 (55) of this PDF. I suspect that the makeup of the news media is even more skewed than these numbers would indicate. In their world, liberalism is “middle of the road”; so it seems likely that many of those 53% as well, those who consider themselves “moderates”, are significantly left of center. As Mark Steyn observes, “the average American newsroom ostentatiously recruits for diversity of race, sex, sexual orientation, and every other diversity except the only one that matters—diversity of ideas.”)
You are what you eat. If you consume a steady diet of liberal media, it will tend to shape your worldview to be more like theirs, whether you like it or not. Why not get a balanced diet including at least some conservative media?
As a show of good faith, I make this commitment to you now: From now on, I will listen to conservative and Christian talk radio only every other day. On odd-numbered days, any talk radio I listen to will be NPR.
Of course it’s not possible to avoid exposure to the liberal media the way it’s possible to avoid the conservative media. As I’ve observed before, it has often happened that my liberal-media-consuming friends are ignorant of some fact that the liberal media find it convenient not to emphasize, but it almost never happens the other way around. No wonder—the liberal subculture dominates not only the news media but also the entertainment media and the schools, and liberals are always happy to share or preach on Facebook etc. Is it any surprise that, in this liberal sea in which we swim, liberals are so much worse than conservatives at understanding the other side’s point of view?
So, please, if you’re not already somehow (against all odds) a full-spectrum conservative, I’m begging you: Make some conservative media a regular part of your diet. I’m not asking you to give up NPR or the New York Times or whatever it may be; I’m only asking you to get another perspective as well. May I recommend National Review Online?
For your convenience, I also offer this list of some other alternative media sources. I am more and less unfamiliar with many of these; so I can’t vouch for them the way I can for National Review Online. I trust you will use your judgment and not hold it against me or conservatives if you run into something you don’t like.
If you go looking for conservative media on your own, beyond this list, a good rule of thumb is that (these days, in America) anything that does not expressly set out to be conservative or non-liberal will be liberal.
Opinion journals:
Other sites with news and commentary by multiple writers:
Syndicated columnists plus:
News:
News and news aggregator:
Sites specifically about the liberal news media:
- The Media Research Center
- MRC’s News Busters
Related entries:
Enjoyment and Contemplation 
September 27, 2012 at 12:00 PM
Back in college, I once had a girl try to tell me that the mainstream media has a conservative bias. I asked her how many conservatives she knew who were majoring in journalism. She changed the subject.
September 28, 2012 at 2:46 PM
Right! It continues to surprise me how many liberals think the mainstream news media have a conservative bias. The people I grew up around (Quakers and hippies—i.e., pacifists, more or less) often took this view—that the mainstream news media were not sufficiently strongly anti-war, for example. I think a lot of their argument boiled down to, in effect, not The MSM are right of center, relative to the general population of the United States, but The MSM are to the right of me!
September 28, 2012 at 2:53 PM
Incidentally, I also remember a conversation I had with someone in college. He said, Yes, it sure is possible to bias the news! E.g., you’re writing a news report on some policy issue, and you have an opinion on what should be done. You can’t write, in the first person, “I think…” but you can do “man on the street” interviews until you find one who gives you a quote that agrees with you, and then print that.
He’s a liberal, and he was writing for the student newspaper at the time. He hoped to work for newspapers after college and use his position frankly to feed the people propaganda in favor of liberalism.
Sometimes liberals are surprisingly open and straightforward about what they’re doing.
October 1, 2012 at 9:52 AM
Is the Wall Street Journal not “mainstream”?
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/01/business/media/challenging-the-claims-of-media-bias-the-media-equation.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp
September 30, 2012 at 3:54 PM
[…] Did you know that since Benghazi, the Islamists have also destroyed six of our Harrier jets and killed two of our Marines? (More.) Neither does anyone else. See also pro-Obama media bias. […]
October 18, 2012 at 12:00 AM
[…] There is so much more to say about Benghazi and the Obama administration, but unfortunately I simply don’t have the time. All I can say is, Consume some conservative media and inform yourself. […]
January 23, 2013 at 2:37 PM
[…] fall, partly as a show of good faith, I promised to listen to NPR every other day (on odd-numbered days). (Of course I think you should make sure to get a balanced diet including […]
March 1, 2013 at 3:55 PM
[…] and it became clear that there would be no deal, Democrats and the mainstream news media (which are overwhelmingly liberal) called for […]
May 13, 2013 at 11:50 AM
[…] if you only listen to NPR and other liberal media (which you shouldn’t), you might never know that whistleblowers like Gregory Hicks—a formerly high-ranking […]
August 28, 2013 at 11:04 AM
[…] The March for Life is estimated to have had 500,000 participants earlier this year. Do the liberal news media not think that’s worth talking […]
October 16, 2014 at 10:00 AM
[…] We know that the people who work in the news media are overwhelmingly liberal; this example of persuasive writing in action reminds us why and how that makes a difference. […]
June 5, 2016 at 6:06 PM
[…] a good idea for him always to have backup notes in case the Teleprompter breaks). But if the liberal news media wanted to paint Obama as clueless or intellectually second-rate, they have more than enough […]
October 17, 2016 at 11:19 PM
[…] is part of why we’re so annoyed about the liberal news media. (Listen up, those of you who still don’t believe there is such a thing—I know […]
November 8, 2016 at 6:45 AM
[…] I won’t even get into Benghazi here. (If you haven’t heard of it, look it up sometime—and from now on I prescribe for you a balanced diet including at least some conservative media.) […]
February 2, 2017 at 12:27 AM
[…] no matter what you may or may not hear from Senate Democrats or the biased news media in the coming days or […]
May 8, 2017 at 10:06 PM
[…] read Obamacare when they passed it in the first place? (If not, this is a great reminder that everyone should get a balanced diet including at least some conservative and liberal media.) Congressman John Conyers both exemplified this and beautifully encapsulated it in his […]