The Press and The Public Are Worlds Apart

    The press and the public remain... "worlds apart."

    This split has been visible ever since a groundbreaking article 23 years ago in AEI's Public Opinion magazine. In it, academics Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman presented results of a careful study of media elites. They discovered that from 1964 to 1976, 81 percent of journalists voted for the Democratic Presidential candidate.

    A later survey by Freedom Forum found that 89 percent of Washington-based reporters voted for Bill Clinton in 1992 and only 7 percent for George H. W. Bush. Meanwhile, 59 percent viewed the 1994 Republican "Contract with America" as a "campaign ploy," while just 3 percent called it a "serious reform proposal." The public disagreed, and the GOP captured the House for the first time in four decades.

    Today, the media and the public are drifting even farther apart. In the new Pew study, 34 percent of national journalists describe themselves as "liberal," compared with 22 percent in 1995. Only 7 percent of reporters say they are conservative at present. For the general public, the results are again reversed: 33 percent of Americans call themselves conservatives; 20 percent, liberals.

    On social issues, the gap is even wider. For example, the national press states by a margin of 91 percent to 6 percent that "belief in God is not necessary to be moral." The general public says, to the contrary, that belief in God is necessary, by a margin of 58 percent to 40 percent.