Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA.
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22903, USA.
Sci Adv. 2020 Apr 1;6(14):eaay9344. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aay9344. eCollection 2020 Apr.
Is the media biased against conservatives? Although a dominant majority of journalists identify as liberals/Democrats and many Americans and public officials frequently decry supposedly high and increasing levels of media bias, little compelling evidence exists as to (i) the ideological or partisan leanings of the many journalists who fail to answer surveys and/or identify as independents and (ii) whether journalists' political leanings bleed into the choice of which stories to cover that Americans ultimately consume. Using a unique combination of a large-scale survey of political journalists, data from journalists' Twitter networks, election returns, a large-scale correspondence experiment, and a conjoint survey experiment, we show definitively that the media exhibits no bias against conservatives (or liberals for that matter) in what news that they choose to cover. This shows that journalists' individual ideological leanings have unexpectedly little effect on the vitally important, but, up to this point, unexplored, early stage of political news generation.
媒体是否对保守派存在偏见?尽管绝大多数记者自认为是自由派/民主党人,许多美国人和政府官员经常谴责媒体据称存在的高度和不断增加的偏见,但几乎没有确凿的证据表明:(i)没有回答调查或自认为是独立人士的许多记者的意识形态或党派倾向;以及(ii)记者的政治倾向是否会影响他们选择报道哪些美国人最终会关注的新闻。我们利用对政治记者的大规模调查、记者的 Twitter 网络数据、选举结果、大规模的对应实验以及联合调查实验的独特组合,明确表明媒体在选择报道的新闻中对保守派(或自由派)没有偏见。这表明,记者的个人意识形态倾向对政治新闻制作至关重要但尚未得到充分探索的早期阶段几乎没有影响。