Not All Parties are Treated Equally Journalist Perceptions of Partisan News Bias

ABSTRACT

Journalists and news media in Western democracies appear to be under increasing fire for having an alleged partisan bias. This study joins the increasing number of studies on partisan news slant, and focuses on the central actors in the news-making process, namely journalists themselves. Drawing on unique survey evidence on 233 Belgian and Dutch journalists in 2018, this study explores whether and which journalists perceive their news outlets to be biased. Despite their aim to produce impartial coverage, we find that most journalists believe that their news outlet favors some parties over others. In particular, journalists feel that center parties are favored, while parties on the fringes, and especially extreme-right parties, are somewhat disadvantaged. Also, it shows that journalists working for the public broadcaster perceive their outlet to be more impartial than their colleagues working for commercial outlets. Journalists’ political leaning does not seem to influence their perceptions of partisan bias, but journalists do feel that their outlet is biased to accommodate its “imagined audience”. For instance, those who perceive their audience as more right-wing than the general public, feel that their medium advantages right-wing parties too.

KEYWORDS:

• Journalism
• Partisan bias
• Mainstream media
• Imagined audience
• Journalist survey
• Impartiality

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The surveys with journalists were conducted in the framework of the POLPOP project, led by Stefaan Walgrave (University of Antwerp) and Rens Vliegenthart (Wageningen University).

2 In Flanders we,therefore, ask about coverage on the Vlaams Belang (extreme-right), PvdA (communists), Spa (now Vooruit) (socialists), CD&V (christian-democrats), Groen (greens), Open Vld (liberals), and N-VA (right-wing nationalists). In Francophone Belgium, we asked journalists to indicate whether their outlet favored PP (extreme-right), PTB (communists), Cdh (christian-democrats), Défi (regionalists, liberals), Ecolo (greens), MR (liberals) and PS (socialists). In the Netherlands, we included thirteen parties: PVV (right-wing nationalists), DENK (muslim political party), 50plus (elderly party), Groenlinks (greens), D66 (liberals), CU (christian-democrats), PvDA (socialists), VVD (liberals), CDA (christian-democrats), PvdD (animal party), SP (socialists), SGP (Calvinist party) FvD (right-wing populists).

3 Results from a One-way ANOVA with Tukey post-hoc test to test (pairwise) significance of differences.