Zogby Poll Sees Massive Media Bias to Left---Duh!

The Zogby Poll coincides with a different survey in size and scope of 20 news outlets over three years by UCLA/U. of Missouri journalism schools last year determined that,employing the ADA scale where above 50 is liberal, the twenty outlets averaged 70 on the ADA. Fox News was at the 50 level, all other media outlets were much higher, including even the Wall Street Journal and DrudgeReport.

Now a Zogby poll of over 1700 Americans indicates that the vast majority regard American media as biased toward the left. I have found the Zogby poll itself a bit biased leftward, so this study is interesting in that regard for me personally.

Also recall that a recent AP/Ipsos Poll sponsored by Gallup recorded the conservative bent of the American people as to their basic beliefs and predilections. I first came across these numbers in an article in the New Yorker by Jeff Goldberg which cited a study that said Americans defined themselves as 34$ Conservative and 21% Liberral---in a New Yorker piece showing how afraid the Dems are of getting the "masses" agitated in the Middle West, an quintessentially Conservative Heartland. The recent Gallup effort has 41% of Americans considering themselves conservative or tending conservative, and only 21 % as liberal or tending liberal. [Of course, this does not necessarily mean that over 40% consider themselves Republicans.]

Here are excerpts from the Zogby effort released March 14th:

Zogby Poll: Voters Believe Media Bias is Very Real

The Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet/Zogby Poll shows American voters are skeptical that political motivation may be behind blogs run by mainstream news organizations

The vast majority of American voters believe media bias is alive and well – 83% of likely voters said the media is biased in one direction or another, while just 11% believe the media doesn’t take political sides, a recent IPDI/Zogby Interactive poll shows.

The Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet is based at George Washington University in Washington D.C.

Nearly two-thirds of those online respondents who detected bias in the media (64%) said the media leans left, while slightly more than a quarter of respondents (28%) said they see a conservative bias on their TV sets and in their column inches. The survey, which focuses on perceptions of the "old" and "new" media, will be released today at the PoliticsOnline Conference 2007 at GWU. It is also featured in the March issue of Zogby’s Real America newsletter, now available on www.zogby.com.

Fritz Wenzel, Zogby’s Director of Communications, will also discuss with conference–goers the results of the first interactive survey to include video clips from presidential candidates. The video poll is the latest step in Zogby’s cutting–edge leadership in online polling, and revealed important respondent sentiment toward the candidates after viewing clips online of recent speeches and interviews. Zogby International’s Jonathan Zogby, Director of Domestic Business Development, has also published an article in the conference magazine about the emergence of Internet polling as an important survey research tool, particularly in light of the increasing difficulty of telephone polling.

The IPDI PoliticsOnline conference is one of the most important annual national conferences focusing on how the Internet has affected American politics.

While 97% of Republicans surveyed said the media are liberal, two-thirds of political independents feel the same, but fewer than one in four independents (23%) said they saw a conservative bias. Democrats, while much more likely to perceive a conservative bias than other groups, were not nearly as sure the media was against them as were the Republicans. While Republicans were unified in their perception of a left-wing media, just two-thirds of Democrats were certain the media skewed right – and 17% said the bias favored the left.

The Zogby Interactive survey of 1,757 likely voters nationwide was conducted Feb. 20-26, 2007, and has a margin of error of +/- 2.4 percentage points.

As the influence of blogs has risen, mainstream news organizations have attempted to get in on the action by creating their own blogs to counter those run by private citizens and those not in the news business. But American voters remain skeptical of major news outlets diving in to the blog pool – 26% speculated that the reason news organizations are placing blogs on their Web sites is that “blogs give news organizations a chance to promote a political agenda they could not promote in their regular broadcasts, cablecasts, or publications.”

It's great to see the common sense and political equilibrium of the country has not tilted as a result of the UCLA/Mizzou study's conclusion that the MSM is 70 ADA. [CBS and the NYT are far above 70, almost reaching Teddy Kennedy levels of glowing in the dark.]

Now if righty bloggers could only drum up grassroots networking like the [Kos]triches and the mad Marxists of MoveOn.org!