Web Journalists Maybe Not So Conservative After All

By: Carl Sullivan As part of E&P's August cover story exploring the topic of media bias, I wrote a short piece on the ideology of Web staffs. Noting that there wasn't a lot of research out there, I did find that only 25% of Web journalists in a recent Pew study classified their political thinking as liberal, compared with 36% for national print journalists and 28% for local print.

But a 2002 survey to be published in an upcoming book may conflict with Pew's findings. "Overall, online journalists in our study came across as a bit more liberal and Democratic than fulltime journalists working for traditional mainstream U.S. news media," said David H. Weaver, a journalism professor at Indiana University in Bloomington. "On general political leaning, online journalists were no more likely than journalists in general to consider themselves 'pretty far to the left' (about 10%), but they were more likely (47%) than journalists in general (32%) to consider themselves 'a little to the left.'"

And the Web group was more likely to identify with the Democratic Party (50%) than journalists in general (37%), less likely to affiliate with the Republican Party (6% vs. 19%), and less likely to classify themselves as "independents" (26.5% vs. 33.5%).

These findings and others will be reporting in his forthcoming book, "The American Journalist in the 21st Century," co-authored by Randal Beam, Bonnie Brownlee, Paul Voakes and G. Cleveland Wilhoit (to be published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates in late 2004 or early 2005).

Other comparisons of online journalists with their old-media colleagues found no significant differences in gender, journalism majors, or age (although Web journalists are a bit more likely to be 35-44 than other journalists), Weaver said. "Online journalists are a bit more likely than traditional broadcast to be non-Hispanic whites, and online are notably more likely than broadcast to hold a master's degree and somewhat more likely than print journalists to have a master's," he added.

Here's some good news for the digital crowd: the median income for online journalists is significantly higher than that of traditional print and broadcast, and job satisfaction is higher than print, but about the same as broadcast journalists.

Not surprisingly, online journalists are considerably more likely to get feedback from the public. And new-media scribes may have less independence in the newsroom: "Online journalists are less likely to think that they can follow up on story ideas or select stories to work on than are traditional print and broadcast journalists," Weaver said.

This telephone survey of 1,464 traditional mainstream journalists in the U.S. included 100 online writers and editors. It's the fourth in a series of national surveys, with the preceding versions coming in 1971, 1982 and 1992. The 2002 survey was supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. (More information about the survey can be found at Poynter.org.)

The survey included employees of daily and weekly newspapers, radio and TV stations, wire services, news magazines, and both independent Web sites and those affiliated with traditional media outlets. Pew's survey of 547 journalists in the spring of 2004 surveyed similar groups.