What liberal bias? My media research suggests it's another right-wing myth

Allegations of media bias are ubiquitous among Republicans. When Donald Trump was asked in June about the federal prosecution against him for illegally retaining classified government documents, he attacked the "fake news" media for their "continuation of the witch hunt" against him "that's been going on for literally seven years." 

Such attacks are hardly new for Trump, who in May reportedly became angry with questions from NBC News reporter Vaughn Hillyard about Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's criminal investigation, tried to grab Hillyard's phone and then told aides to "get him outta here." 

The assault on press freedom is also nothing new for the Republican Party. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, now a presidential candidate, recently endorsed a legislative effort to curtail press freedom by designating anonymous news sources as "false" for legal purposes in defamation cases and eliminating the "journalist's privilege" protection, which shields reporters from having to identify anonymous sources in defamation lawsuits. 

Not to be outdone, Trump weighed in on the question of how to punish journalists, suggesting that reporters who published the leaked Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade should be prosecuted, incarcerated and then raped in prison.

These developments are part of a larger right-wing assault on media freedom and the right of journalists to critically report the news. These attacks are driven by the assumption that the media has a liberal bias, and is responsible for routinely purveying "fake news" and systematically manipulating the public as a result. 

The response from much of the public, including the GOP base, is what one would expect, with rising distrust of the news media. Recent polling finds a majority of Americans agree that "the news media fuels political division," with 61 percent of Republicans, 36 percent of independents and 23 percent of Democrats agreeing that the media are "hurting democracy." Half of Americans think that national news outlets "intend to mislead, misinform, or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting."

These narratives warning of media manipulation and pernicious liberal bias can create a separate reality for much of the public, independent of whether there is evidence of any such pervasive bias in media content and effects. As a scholar of political communication, I've spent the last 20 years studying the question of media bias in politics. My own scholarly work, looking at decades of reporting on various public policy issues, has uncovered little evidence historically of a pervasive liberal or pro-Democratic bias in the news. 

As reporters themselves acknowledge, and as I find in my research, it is more accurate to speak of a pro-official bias in the news, in which reporters privilege whatever party is in power in Washington at a given time. None of this evidence necessarily matters, however, when the prevailing narrative in American political culture — particularly among Republican officials, right-wing pundits and much of the public — is that the media is purveying biased "fake news."

Independent of this heated and incendiary rhetoric, it's worth looking at the facts. For example, in my own research examining more than 160 polling questions between the mid-2000s and the mid-2010s, I found virtually no evidence of liberal media effects for consumption of various outlets such as CNN and MSNBC, which are commonly attacked for their purported bias. 

Consumption of news from MSNBC only had a significant association with liberal political attitudes on various questions 15 percent of the time, and that was true just 10 percent of the time for consumption of news from CNN. Rather, the primary culprit when it came to indoctrination effects was Fox News, with consumption of that channel's news significantly associated with holding right-wing beliefs 60 percent of the time, even after controlling for respondents' partisanship and ideology, among other factors.

These findings undermine claims about a pro-Democratic or liberal media bias in the years before Trump. But what about the period since he was first elected, which has generally been associated with more extreme partisan polarization? I updated my polling analysis to include the years of Trump's presidency — and the findings largely reinforce my previous research. Although there is certainly evidence of increasing polarization "on both sides," such polarization is still primarily a right-wing phenomenon, testifying to highly asymmetrical media effects that appear to favor GOP indoctrination efforts. 

Examining polling from September 2019 and September 2020 from the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center (NORC) and the Pew Research Center, I looked at consumption of various media in relation to public opinion on political questions during the Trump era. I utilized statistical analysis to track how often consumption of CNN, MSNBC and Fox News was associated with respondents forming liberal and conservative political attitudes, after accounting for various factors, including respondents' ideology, partisanship, age, education, race, gender and income. 

First of all, there is definitely reason for concern about "both sides" when it comes to the rise of echo chambers in American media. Clearly. liberals and Democrats are gravitating toward certain news sources, and conservatives and Republicans toward others. In the NORC survey, Democrats were significantly more likely to say they consumed CNN and MSNBC regularly, while Republicans were more likely to say they relied heavily on Fox News. Twenty-nine percent of Democrats said they relied "a lot" on MSNBC for their news, compared to just 3 percent of Republicans. Similarly, 36 percent of Democrats relied a lot on CNN, compared to 6 percent of Republicans. Alternatively, 44 percent of Republicans relied a lot on Fox News, compared to just 7 percent of Democrats. None of these trends are encouraging in a country that considers itself a democracy — at least if democracy requires an informed citizenry willing to consider different sources of information and views contrary to those they already hold.

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Beyond the echo-chamber question, there's the matter of whether consuming these venues has an indoctrination effect on viewers. Here the evidence suggests that Americans should primarily be concerned about the power of right-wing outlets like Fox News. Looking at both the NORC and Pew polls, I analyzed media consumption in relation to a battery of political questions. For the Pew poll, I examined attitudes about how well Trump responded to the COVID-19 crisis; opinions about how truthful Trump was in relation to conveying information about COVID; attitudes about the pro-Trump extremist movement QAnon; and attitudes about alleged mass voter fraud in U.S. elections. 

The NORC survey fielded other political questions, including opinions about the overturning of Roe v. Wade; about efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act; about laws barring employment discrimination based on sexual orientation; about government financial support for religious schools; about support for Second Amendment gun ownership rights and a ban on semiautomatic rifles; about whether business owners should be able to refuse services to LGBTQ+ individuals for religious (or "free speech") reasons; about whether Trump should have ended DACA protections for unauthorized immigrants; about same-sex marriage; about affirmative action in college admissions; about Trump's travel ban against immigrants from Muslim-majority countries; about private companies denying birth control to employees based on religious objections; about corporations and unions spending unlimited money in U.S. elections; about federal court decisions on partisan gerrymandering disputes; about Trump's job approval rating during the COVID crisis; and about voting preferences between Trump and Joe Biden in the 2020 election. With such a large set of questions, whatever pattern is uncovered should tell us a lot about alleged partisan indoctrination in the media.

What we see here, in fact, is dramatic evidence of partisan indoctrination in the news — and it's primarily a right-wing phenomenon. In just four of the 20 survey questions was consumption of CNN associated with forming liberal political attitudes, after statistically taking into account viewers' partisan and ideological predispositions. The findings were stronger for MSNBC, with consumption associated with holding liberal attitudes for nine of the 20 questions. This is certainly evidence of indoctrination in favor of liberal values, significantly more than I found in the previous decade.

But far and away the strongest evidence of indoctrination was observed among consumers of conservative media. Consumption of Fox News was associated with holding conservative opinions an overwhelming 90 percent of the time — in 18 of the 20 questions surveyed. That was a far higher rate than during the decade preceding Trump, when Fox News viewership was correlated with forming conservative attitudes 60 percent of the time. These results tell us that partisan indoctrination has become overwhelmingly asymmetrical in the Trump era.

If we are concerned about ideological and partisan echo chambers, we should reorient the national discussion about media bias to focus first and foremost on the primary culprits: right-wing media outlets such as Fox News. The evidence explored here calls into question Republican claims that the "liberal media" is the leading indoctrination force in American politics and communication today. That role is reserved for the GOP's primary arm of mass communication, Fox News, which is crucial in mobilizing the party base to support conservative political causes. 

But we shouldn't only be concerned about indoctrination. There's also the question of rising support for authoritarianism, and of public outrage being stoked against specific media outlets seen as overly critical of Trump. That rising anger is what fuels the Republican attack on press freedom, an assault that should be deeply concerning to anyone with a basic commitment to freedom of expression and constitutional democracy.