[Rich10]

Originally Posted by Dad_Scaper

Easy: Your premise is that the media is left-leaning. Your premise is wrong.

I understand why people think the media is (note for pedants: "media" is plural, should be "media are," but people don't write that way so I won't, either) liberal. There are two reasons. First, journalists tend to be liberal. I suspect this is so because they also tend to have advanced degrees, and those with advanced degrees tend to be more liberal. It is one thing, however, to note the personal politics of the journalists, it is another - and an unfair attack, IMHO - to attack the integrity of a person because of that person's personal politics. We all have jobs; we all try to do them responsibly without regard for our own personal politics.

Consider the beating that Trump took, when he suggested a federal judge could not be fair to him because of the judge's Mexican heritage. Aren't we making the same mistake Trump did, by confusing something personal about the professional, when we discount the journalist's work?

Second, it's easy to believe that the media is liberal because there is a large opposition media industry, to its right. Fox and its many smaller siblings and cousins on the right have made an industry out of identifying as "fair and balanced," unlike the "MSM," the liberal media. This myth has been around long enough that it's penetrated the *real* mainstream, by which I mean people have come to think of it as true.

Just because there is an accusation, though, does not mean there is truth behind it. I have a little pet expression that I made up, which is that "given two explanations for a person behaving in a certain way, the better explanation is the one that assumes the person was trying to do his or her job." Let's not assume, without evidence, that the "MSM" is actually liberal. Just because there's a (profitable!) cottage industry built around the suggestion that some people are dishonest, does not mean those people actually are dishonest.

There are liberal media outlets, of course. I count MSNBC, The Guardian, and The New Yorker, as liberal media. Often you will find something there of value, particularly (in my experience) in Mother Jones. Of course, I have also occasionally found valuable nuggets in "alt right" sources, and even cited them on this forum, when appropriate. Though I consider those alt right sources to be much more extreme than, for instance, MSNBC, it doesn't mean they never have anything of value.

Most media outlets aren't actually liberal. It's just an accusation that's been around so long that it's seeped into the groundwater. My 2 cents. It pains me to be so frank in this thread, because some of my friends here seem to be reluctant to move past certain prejudices about the status quo. But there it is.

I wasn't trying to impugn reporters. As you said, "journalists tend to be liberal." This can be supported by Wikipedia (yes, I know that it is dangerous to rely on Wikipedia), "it was revealed that the Democratic Party received a total donation of $1,020,816, given by 1,160 employees of the three major broadcast television networks (NBC, CBS, ABC), while the Republican Party received only $142,863 via 193 donations. Both of these figures represent donations made in 2008."

Certainly different media outlets do have a right or left bias. In my opinion, the New York Times has a left bias; the Wall Street Journal has a right bias. At one point, I read both so that I got a balanced view of the world.

As for actual studies:

• The Media Elite, a 1986 book co-authored by political scientists Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda Lichter.[45] They surveyed journalists at national media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the broadcast networks. The survey found that the large majority of journalists were Democratic voters whose attitudes were well to the left of the general public on a variety of topics.
• Jim A. Kuypers of Dartmouth College investigated the issue of media bias in the 2002 book Press Bias and Politics. In this study of 116 mainstream US papers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle, Kuypers stated that the mainstream press in America tends to favor liberal viewpoints.
• A 2005 study by political scientists Tim Groseclose of UCLA and Jeff Milyo of the University of Missouri at Columbia attempted to quantify bias among news outlets using statistical models, and found a liberal bias. The authors wrote that "all of the news outlets we examine[d], except Fox News' Special Report and the Washington Times, received scores to the left of the average member of Congress."
• A 2014 Gallup poll found that a plurality of Americans believe the media is biased to favor liberal politics.
• A 2008 joint study by the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University and the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that viewers believe a liberal media bias can be found in television news on networks such as CNN.

On the other hand:

• Rupert Murdoch, the CEO of News Corporation (the parent of Fox News), self-identifies as a libertarian. Roy Greenslade of The Guardian, and others, claim that Rupert Murdoch has exerted a strong influence over the media he owns, including Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and The Sun.
• According to former Fox News producer Charlie Reina, unlike the AP, CBS, or ABC, Fox News's editorial policy is set from the top down in the form of a daily memo.
• Progressive media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has argued that accusations of liberal media bias are part of a conservative strategy, noting an article in the August 20, 1992 Washington Post, in which Republican party chair Rich Bond compared journalists to referees in a sporting match.
• A report "Examining the 'Liberal Media' Claim: Journalists' Views on Politics, Economic Policy and Media Coverage" by FAIR's David Croteau, from 1998, calls into question the assumption that journalists' views are to the left of center in America. The findings were that journalists were "mostly centrist in their political orientation" and more conservative than the general public on economic issues (with a minority being more progressive than the general public on social issues).[
• Kenneth Tomlinson, while chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, commissioned a $10,000 government study into Bill Moyers' PBS program, NOW.[76] The results of the study indicated that there was no particular bias on PBS.

So, I guess there's enough data points for either side of this discussion.

Originally Posted by Dad_Scaper

The short answer to your question is, almost 50% of the people in this country are prepared to vote for an unqualified, unprepared, lunatic for President of the United States. I don't know why the journalists & media outlets do what they do, but my guess is that there are decisions made up the chain somewhere to pander or to pussyfoot around, and to pretend as if the true center can be found equidistant from the positions in the current state of politics, instead of where it's always been, anchored to a measurable and findable truth.

I'm really not sure how to find a "measurable and findable truth." And while I won't vote for Trump, and I do think that he's likely unqualified and is certainly unprepared, I wouldn't call him a lunatic.