Jan.02

electoral-vote.com

Dem 51

   

GOP 49

Only 3.4% of Journalists Are Republicans

Every decade or so, Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Communications does a survey of the demographics of America's journalists. The latest version is out (it's 2022 data for a late-2023 release; academics tend to work slowly), and the finding that is getting all the attention is that just 3.4% of journalists are now registered Republicans.

Here are the numbers for the current study as well as the past five iterations:

The trendline is pretty clear when it comes to Republican-registered journalists over the past 50 years.

As you can presumably guess, this is being held out as proof of anti-Republican bias in the media. To take but one example, Fox contributor Kevin Bass complained: "As with most professions, conservatives have been increasingly excluded or purged from the ranks of journalists." Most professions? Really? Seems like there are still plenty of Republican stockbrokers, lawyers, bankers, media moguls, truckers, farmers, etc. That said, journalists are generally hired by other journalists, and people tend to prefer to work with simpatico colleagues, so it's probably true that it's a little harder for a Republican applicant to get hired at, say, The New York Times than it is a Democratic applicant. Probably not THAT much harder, though—it's not like they ask to see your party registration during your interview. Plus, let us recall that many high-profile outlets, including the Times, hire high-profile right-wingers all the time, in the name of "balance."

Anyhow, the truth is that the disparity between Republican and Democratic journalists has many causes, most of them non-conspiratorial. Among them:

• Given that Republican journalists have been in the minority for half a century, it's pretty clear that Republican philosophy meshes a little less well with a journalistic career than Democratic philosophy. The same thing is true in academia. More specifically, Democrats tend to place more value on education, ideas and public service in a non-religious context.
  
  
• Speaking of education, in the last half-century, it's become nearly impossible to get a job as a reporter without a college degree. Democrats are more likely to have degrees than Republicans.
  
  
• Journalists are supposed to value facts and the search for the truth. It's pretty hard to resolve the cognitive dissonance between that and the fantasy world that many Republicans inhabit today.
  
  
• That "independents" column is probably doing a lot of heavy lifting, and a lot of journalists who would otherwise be Republican have jumped there, either out of disdain for the current GOP, or to protect their professional prospects, or to resolve the aforementioned cognitive dissonance ("I'm still conservative; I'm just not a Republican").
  
  
• If someone is looking to be a journalist, and is on board with modern MAGA Republicanism, there are lots of jobs with outlets like Fox, The Daily Wire, WND, The Blaze, etc. There, a person can do writing AND advocacy. But those people aren't journalists anymore and wouldn't be included in the survey. There are fewer left-wing propaganda mills, and the ones that do exist, like the DailyKos, tend to prefer a model built around reader submissions. So, the lefty sites are sucking up fewer would-be journalists so as to turn them into political influencers than the righty sites are.

We think this list is pretty good, but it's also not exhaustive. There are undoubtedly other factors we've overlooked. In any event, there's a very good chance that at some point in the future, you'll hear about this finding. We just wanted to point out the situation is more complicated than MAGA Republicans—who are, after all, America's most oppressed group—make it seem. (Z)