Open AccessThe left-liberal skew of Western media
Author(s) -
Emil O. W. Kirkegaard,
Jonatan Pallesen,
Emil Elgaard,
Noah Carl
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of psychological research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2630-5143
DOI - 10.30564/jpr.v3i3.3282
Subject(s) - ideology , politics , nationalism , liberal party , liberalism , left wing politics , socialism , population , political science , political economy , sociology , law , demography , communism
We gathered survey data on journalists’ political views in 17 Western countries. We then matched these data to outcomes from national elections, and constructed metrics of journalists’ relative preference for different political parties. Compared to the general population of voters, journalists prefer parties that have more left-wing positions overall (r’s -.47 to -.53, depending on the metric used), and that are associated with certain ideologies, namely environmentalism, feminism, social liberalism, socialism, and support for the European Union. We used Bayesian model averaging to assess the validity of the predictors in multivariate models. We found that, of the ideology tags in our dataset, ‘conservative’ (negative), ‘nationalist’ (negative) and ‘green’ (positive) were the most consistent predictors with nontrivial effect sizes. We also computed estimates of the skew of journalists' political views in different countries. Overall, our results indicate that the Western media has a left-liberal skew.