Right-wing Bias in Journalists’ Perceptions of Public Opinion

Abstract

How journalists perceive public opinion is important in democracies. These perceptions help journalists to construct meaningful stories and might influence news content. However, little is known about how accurate journalists' perceptions of public opinion actually are. Using a survey with Belgian (Flemish) political journalists, we analyze their perceptions of public opinion on concrete policy proposals, next to their general political leaning. We combine the estimates from journalists with evidence about 'real' public opinion, collected through a parallel citizen survey. Further, our quantitative survey results are complemented with qualitative explanations offered by journalists themselves. We find that the surveyed political journalists perceive their outlets' audiences' political leaning as more right-wing than their own. Regarding specific policy issues, the political journalists perceive the public almost consistently as being more right-wing than they actually are. Right-wing journalists are better at correctly assessing public opinion. Moreover, the more experienced journalists are, the smaller the right-wing bias in their estimations. Journalists seem to be well aware of their own center-left leaning and overcompensate for, rather than project, their own leaning in their assessment of public opinion. In all, our study shows that looking into journalists' public opinion perceptions is a relevant and promising research track.

Journalists’ Misjudgement of Audience Opinion

“…This present work builds upon and extends the intriguing study by Beckers et al (2021) in several ways. Empirically, their study was based on a smaller sample of 148 political journalists from Flanders in Belgium.…”

“…Hence, analysing these data enables us to see whether the same patterns exist across time and space. Theoretically, the findings reported by Beckers et al (2021) were not in line with their expectations on the drivers of journalists' misjudgement. This calls for additional theory-development on what drives journalists' judgements of public opinion, an endeavour in which additional analyses from a different time and context and based on larger, representative data sets can prove valuable.…”

“…The findings also raise the question as to why we can observe this right-leaning bias in the media's reporting of public opinion. Prior research has highlighted one reason in particular: Journalists judge public opinion to be more right-leaning than it is (Beckers et al 2021;Lewis et al 2004). The study by Martin et al (1972) also showed that journalists' perceptions of the audience influence the way journalists lean in their reporting, and that they have a tendency to overestimate how right-leaning the audience is.…”

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Prior studies have reported a right-leaning bias in the media's reporting of how the public thinks of political issues, raising the question: Why, and to what extent, is this the case? One reason in particular has been discussed in this regard: Journalists judge public opinion to be more right leaning than it actually is (Beckers et al 2021;Lewis et al 2004). This paper therefore studies to what extent journalists misjudge audience opinion.

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“…These findings beg an answer to the question why in the news the appearance of ordinary citizens is imbalanced as favouring the political right. Prior research has suggested that this bias is driven by journalists judging public opinion as being more right leaning than it actually is (Beckers et al 2021;Lewis et al 2004). A number of studies have investigated how journalists perceive their audiences (e.g., Donsbach 1983;Martin et al 1972;Weischenberg et al 2006a), and many journalists' news decisions indeed are about perceptions, conclusions, and judgements (Donsbach 2004); only recently, however, has research embarked on a more systematic investigation of how precisely journalists perceive public political opinion (Beckers et al 2021).…”