The Patriot Post® · In Brief: White House Press Corps Is 12 to 1 Democrat
The media is biased! Yeah, yeah, tell us something we don’t know. Well, how about some specific numbers to illustrate? Tristan Justice explains:
Research for a new book out next week reveals an implicit bias present throughout the White House press corps: Reporters attending in-person briefings rank 12:1 Democrat to Republican.
In “Suppression, Deception, Snobbery, and Bias: Why the Press Gets So Much Wrong ― And Just Doesn’t Care,” Fox News Contributor and former Bush White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer unearths the political affiliations of those present at a White House briefing on June 7, 2021.
“Every seat was filled for the first time in over a year as the social distancing rules resulting from the COVID pandemic were relaxed,” Fleischer wrote in an excerpt shared exclusively with The Federalist. “By a ratio of 12:1, the seats were occupied by Democrats!”
Fleischer drew upon research solicited by the D.C.-based investigative firm Delve, which combed through publicly available data.
“I guess the good news is that the ratio wasn’t 24:0, like it was during my encounters with students at Columbia Journalism School. It was only 12:1,” Fleischer wrote. “No matter how you cut it, the White House briefing room does not look, sound, or register to vote like America.”
Of course, we all knew this, and indeed the only surprising thing is that it’s not worse than 12:1. But can you imagine what America would look like politically if the press were even remotely fair? This is a decades-long problem, too.
Towson University tenured Professor Richard Vatz … cited a 1982 survey from the State University of California at Los Angeles which polled 1,000 journalists across 50 daily newspapers and found that only 25 percent of those interviewed voted for then-President Ronald Reagan.
More than a decade later, a 1995 joint study from the University of Colorado’s Media Studies Center and Cornell University’s Roper Center surveyed “Washington-based bureau chiefs and congressional correspondents” and found that 89 percent voted for Bill Clinton in 1992. Only 7 percent reported voting for George H.W. Bush, and 2 percent for Ross Perot. Half identified as Democrats, and only 4 percent Republican.
Of course, the reason this is a problem is that it skews coverage of events. Democrat reporters are not likely to ask Democrat politicians difficult questions. Conversely, they’re more likely to challenge Republicans at every turn and call them names when the stories are written. For example:
While [President Donald] Trump dealt with a hostile press corps that turned daily coronavirus press conferences into sparring matches over whether the term “Chinese coronavirus” was racist, President Joe Biden has enjoyed far friendlier treatment. Biden’s rare press conferences have been full of soft-ball questions from pre-selected reporters who’ve given the White House little grief for keeping the president away from the media. Data from the American Presidency Project show Biden is one of the least accessible presidents in modern American history, having conducted only 16 total press conferences since taking office last year, including nine alone and seven as joint affairs.
Justice concludes with the predictable results among the public:
Trust in the media, meanwhile, has collapsed to a new low, according to Gallup. In its latest survey findings on institutional trust released on Tuesday, Gallup reported that just 16 percent of Americans trust “newspapers” with a 30-point gap between Republicans and Democrats. Thirty-five percent of Democrats said they maintained a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in newspapers, which is still a three percent drop from last year, while only 5 percent of Republicans said the same.