Stunning Knight/Gallup poll shows concerns about the news & free speech

Eighty-six percent of Americans believe there is “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of political bias in the way the media covers news, according to a Knight Foundation/Gallup poll released on Tuesday.

There is a wide partisan gap in perceptions of political bias, which seems to reflect a general interpretation that questions about the news refer primarily to traditional (e.g., not explicitly right-leaning) sources.

Almost three-fourths of Republicans (72%) see “a great deal” of bias in news coverage, versus 28% of Democrats and only about half of independents (53%). However, large majorities in each partisan group — including almost all Republicans (94%) — say there is at least a fair amount of bias in news coverage.

The number of Americans who see bias in the media is up almost 25 percentage points from 62 percent in 2007.

At 49 percent, almost half of Americans now say there’s a great deal of political bias in news coverage.

This next finding is stunning. Republicans are more likely to say there’s a “great deal” of bias, but Democrats more often said there was a “fair amount.” In total, large majorities of both political parties believed that some bias existed: 78 percent of Democrats and 94 percent of Republicans.

Yet Democrats like the media. Almost three-fourths of Republicans (71%) have a “very” or “somewhat” unfavorable opinion of the news media, compared to 22% of Democrats and 52% of independents.

While a majority of Americans across the political spectrum (80%) say the media is under attack politically, they are divided as to whether those attacks are merited. Whereas 70% of Democrats say the media is under attack and those attacks are not justified, 61% of Republicans say such attacks are justified.

They polled 20,000 Americans between November and February.

THIS IS A BAD OMEN FOR THE 1ST AMENDMENT

Four in five Americans (78%) say the spread of misinformation online is “a major problem,” exceeding all other challenges posed by the media environment.

Seventy-three percent of Americans want to see major internet companies find ways to exclude false/hateful information online.

They are worried about hate speech which is a bad omen for the 1st Amendment. That started with Barack Obama who began the war against the right who are online and the 1st Amendment in general.

Many See Media Bias as Intentional

When asked about their views of news organizations they distrust, 79 percent of poll respondents said those outlets were “trying to persuade people to adopt a certain viewpoint.”

When news is inaccurate, 54 percent of Americans think it’s because reporters are “misrepresenting the facts,” while 28 percent assume they’re “making them up entirely.”

And more than 8 in 10 Americans (at 84 percent) assign the media either a great deal (48 percent) or a moderate amount (36 percent) of the blame for political division.

The vast majority of Americans (84%) say that, in general, the news media is “critical” (49%) or “very important” (35%) to democracy.

They know it’s critical or very important and many know they are being lied to, especially Republicans. Democrats don’t seem to think the media is a problem for doing it, but that could be because it’s overwhelmingly against the President.

KNIGHT/GALLUP SUMMARY

“The latest Gallup/Knight American Views survey finds increased concern with media bias in a variety of forms among Americans across the political spectrum. As the country’s partisan divide has intensified, more Americans are losing faith in the media’s objectivity and believe the media is an active participant in the ideology wars. And yet, strong majorities continue to insist that an independent media is “critical” or “very important” to a functioning democracy.”

“As shown in previous Gallup/Knight studies, Americans are more likely to trust local news than national news and to perceive less bias in local reporting than what they see nationally.”

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