Whose views skew the news? Media chiefs ready to vote out Labor, while reporters lean left
Most journalists lean left-of-centre, says Folker Hanusch of the University of the Sunshine Coast, in a post first published on The Conversation.
Most Australian journalists describe themselves as left-wing, yet amongst those who wield the real power in the country’s newsrooms, the Coalition holds a winning lead.
But while the media’s political leanings will no doubt be debated in the lead-up to September’s federal election, our study has also found other largely unscrutinised biases remain – particularly whose views disproportionately shape the news.
Conducted between May 2012 and March this year, the University of the Sunshine Coast’s representative survey of 605 journalists around Australia found that more than half (51.0%) describe themselves as holding left-of-centre political views, compared with only 12.9% who consider themselves right-of-centre.
Despite the overwhelmingly left-leaning media, the Labour/Green coalition is going to get slaughtered at the next election. Tells you something about the disillusionment at this Government’s failure to uphold traditional left values. Let’s face it, if you can’t get favourable PR out of a journalist who intends to vote for you, you might as well give up. The main message I take out of the current Government has nothing to do with their policies and everything to do with their people: Slipper, Thompson, Obeid, Macdonald all slithering through the slime while Conroy and Gillard lecture us about misogyny and underpants.
Not overwhelming MM – 51% – barely half. That means 49% are not left-leaning. They are either centre or right leaning. Centre is a good place to be for a journalist. The rest of your post is also self-evident nonsense.
The issue with this is that there’s no consideration of the backgrounds of those surveyed – or at least no mention of it here.
Those who work professionally as journalists at major news organisations in Australia are skewed toward white, middle class and above in comparison to the rest of the population and particularly among management and editors.
I suspect the outcomes would be very different if the above were not the case and, contrary to these findings, it probably would be found to affect the work produced.
But that’s based on nothing more than my suspicion.
@Dan You can’t count.
“When asked about their voting intentions … 43.0% said they would give their first preference vote to Labor; 30.2% would vote for the Coalition; and 19.4% said they would choose the Greens…”
63% is pretty overwhelming.