Scott Rasmussen's Number of the Day for April 28, 2017
The Number of the Day columns published on Ballotpedia reflect the views of the author.
April 28, 2017: A profound liberal media bias is something most conservatives accept as an undeniable truth and many liberals dismiss completely.
These different perspectives may be explained by the fact that most journalists live in reliably Democratic parts of the country. Ninety percent of internet publishing employees live in counties won by Hillary Clinton in Election 2016. Politico, a publication serving Washington’s political insiders, adds that 75 percent of them live in counties that Clinton won by landslide margins of 30 points or more.
And, for those who still think of online media as a supplement to traditional media coverage, it’s worth noting how much things have changed. A generation ago, there were 16 newspaper employees for every internet publishing employer. But today, there are 197,800 people who work in internet publishing and broadcasting. That’s more than the 183,200 who work for newspapers.[1]
Newspaper employees, by the very nature of local publications, tend to be a bit more dispersed than internet publishing employees. However, even when you add the newspaper employees into the mix, 72 percent live in counties that voted for Clinton.
Wherever you live, you cannot help but be affected by the dominant views of the culture around you. For example, the New York Times thinks of itself as a centrist publication, a notion that is laughable to people in many parts of the country. Politico suggests that the differing views stem from the fact that the paper’s “politics are perfectly centered on the slices of America that look and think the most like Manhattan.”[2]
This creates a coverage problem for publications that want to offer a national perspective. When reporters are surrounded by people who think Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are highly qualified political centrists, they have a difficult time understanding the views of those who oppose such candidates.
These cultural factors help explain why the national media coverage dismissed the possibility of a Trump victory in Election 2016. While many people have blamed faulty polling, the national polls were generally fairly close to the actual results. It was the interpretation and analysis that failed. Despite polling showing a fairly close race with large numbers of undecided voters, many reporters living in Clinton counties ignored the warning signs and saw her victory as a sure thing.
The victory of Donald Trump also showed the limits of media power in the digital era. It appears that as media jobs increasingly concentrated in coastal urban areas, Americans in the rest of the country insulated themselves from being swayed by such narrow perspectives. Millions of people dismissing media stories on social media may have been an even bigger influence than the stories themselves.
The perception gap was emphasized in recent Numbers of the Day showing that 2,226 solid Republican counties voted for the GOP candidate in each of the last three presidential elections. There were also 449 solidly Democratic counties along with 206 Pivot Counties that voted for Obama twice and then Donald Trump in 2016. Many of these Pivot Counties were in the midwest and played a decisive role in Trump’s Electoral College victory.
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- To see other recent numbers, check out the archive.
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Columns published on Ballotpedia reflect the views of the author.
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See also
- Scott Rasmussen's Number of the Day
- Presidential election, 2016
- Pivot Counties: The counties that voted Obama-Obama-Trump from 2008-2016
Footnotes
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