By Dave Workman
Editor-in -Chief
A new Rasmussen survey released Monday reveals that 60 percent of likely U.S. voters “believe the problem of bias in the news media is getting worse – up from 56% who said so in March.”
This is not good for a profession which insists the news is delivered in an unbiased manner.
The survey of 1,080 U.S. Likely Voters was conducted on Dec. 11-13. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence, Rasmussen said.
According to the Washington Examiner, partisan politics “is somewhat at play.” However, the newspaper noted that more Democrats, Republicans and Independents think media bias is “getting worse.”
According to Rasmussen, only 24 percent of survey respondents think the Hunter Biden controversy is getting too much coverage, while 51 percent say the media is not giving enough attention to the unfolding story. Nineteen percent think the news coverage of Biden’s problems is about right.
Breaking it down along party lines, “72 percent of Republicans, 30 percent of Democrats and 53 percent of unaffiliated voters say the media have not given enough coverage of Hunter Biden’s legal problems.”
Back in July, the University of Rochester News Center reported on a study of 1.8 million news headlines from “major U.S. news outlets,” which found stories about domestic politics and social issues are “becoming increasingly polarized along ideological lines.”
That may be no better exhibited than in news coverage of gun rights issues. Increasingly, media reports about gun control refer to the issue as “gun safety” or “gun reform” and refer similarly to the organizations promoting restrictive gun policies. On the other hand, within the firearms media, then term “gun prohibitionists” is frequently used to describe groups which advocate for bans on whole classes of firearms, specifically modern semiautomatic rifles, which are portrayed as “assault rifles” or “weapons of war.”
Rasmussen’s poll revealed that 30 percent of likely voters “rate the quality of news media coverage of the Biden administration as good or excellent, while 43% give the media a poor rating for their coverage.”
Forty-nine percent of Democrats say media coverage of the Biden administration is good to excellent, while 66 percent of Republicans “give the media poor rating for their coverage of Biden, as do 18% of Democrats and 49% of unaffiliated voters.”
Overall, 41 percent of voters under age 40 think the media is doing a “good or excellent” job of covering the Biden administration, but only 25 percent of voters in the 40-65 age group agree, and only 29 percent of voters over age 65 concur.
A whopping 74 percent of Republicans, 63 percent of Independents and 44 percent of Democrats say media bias is getting worse, Rasmussen said.
