At Mainstream Media High School, Democrats are the cool "in crowd" and Republicans are always the pocket-protector geeks in thick glasses. But don't take my word for it. That comes from a source that media liberals idolize as the star quarterback of experts: a Harvard study.A recent survey by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press found: Network evening news shows are twice as positive about Democrats as Republicans - and twice as negative about Republicans.
Ditto for newspapers, which were almost 60 percent positive about Democrats, while attacking Republicans four times more often than Democrats.
CNN won the gold medal in the bias Olympics; Fox was most critical of Democrats (36 percent); and taxpayer funded "NPR Morning Edition" was 33 percent more positive about Democrats and nearly four times as negative about Republicans.
Media heroes are Barack Obama (70 percent positive) and Hillary Clinton (61 percent), who doesn't need to plant questions with coverage like that.
A few days after the Harvard study was released and enthusiastically ignored by most of the media Editor & Publisher reported newspaper circulation declines: "Many top papers take big hits."
Of course, we all know bias is completely unrelated to shrinking ratings and circulation. We know because 12 out of 10 journalists insist bias exists only at Fox News.
But some of us wonder. Such as former White House Press Secretary, columnist and Cincinnatian Tony Snow. "Why are the nation's newspapers hemorrhaging readers?" he asked in a recent speech. "Why are the television networks losing viewers? Why has cable news suddenly hit still water? What is going on? Don't Americans care about the news? Well, of course they do: The problem is, they don't think they're getting news - and they're right."
He blames "sheer smugness."...
Read the rest of Peter Bronson's refreshing op/ed column in the Cincinnati Enquirer right here.
