Kerby Anderson

There’s a scene in The Blues Brother movie where Elwood asks the waitress at Bob’s Country Bunker, “What kind of music do you got here?” She answers, “Oh, we got both kinds, country and western.” Professor Tim Groseclose says in his book, Left Turn, that if the waitress were to describe a newsroom, she might say, “Oh, we got both kinds of political views: liberal and progressive.” You may have noticed that the Washington press corps covers the Biden administration differently than they covered the Trump administration. Donald Trump may have made himself an easy target of the press corps because he constantly accused them of disseminating “fake news.” But this animosity to Republicans goes back decades. Consider that only 7 percent of all Washington correspondents voted for George H.W. Bush in 1992. Go back even further to 1972 when Richard Nixon won nearly every state in the Electoral College. A writer for the New Yorker proclaimed, “I can’t believe it. I don’t know a single person who voted for him.” When he was at UCLA, Professor Groseclose documented in his research articles and book the liberal bias of the media. He constructed a measure of media bias known as the “Political Quotient,” often called PQ for short. That allowed him to measure the political perspective of reporters. In one of his papers in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, he comes to this surprising conclusion. “Washington correspondents, as a group, are more liberal than almost any congressional district in the country.” If you look at their vote for president, these reporters are more liberal than the citizens in the ninth California district (which includes Berkeley) and even more liberal than the citizens in the eighth Massachusetts district (which includes Cambridge). No wonder we see media bias in the press coverage.