Zogby Poll: Voters Believe Media Bias is Very Real

Wednesday's Example of Media Bias   —   Posted on March 21, 2007

The “vast majority of American voters believe media bias is alive and well” with 83% seeing bias in the media and of those, “nearly two-thirds (64%)…said the media leans left” while only “slightly more than a quarter of respondents (28%) said they see a conservative bias,” determined a Zogby Interactive survey of 1,757 likely voters nationwide which was released on Wednesday [March 14, 2007].

[The following is] an excerpt from the posted findings for the survey…:

Zogby Poll: Voters Believe Media Bias is Very Real:  Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet/Zogby Poll shows American voters are skeptical 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….

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….

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.

• Go to MRC.org for the original posting.
• For Zogby’s summary of the poll results, go to zogby.com
• For IPDI’s website, go to ipdi.org