Order Cheap Ativan Online - Discount Online Pharmacy

The question of whether the personal opinions of journalists make their reporting biased is an old one – perhaps most commonly framed as an accusation of left-wing bias. A recent research report from my alma mater, the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden provides a partial answer to this question: Swedish journalists are clearly more left-wing than the general public, with Green Party, Left Party and Liberal Party voters being over-represented compared to the voters at large. In their stance on specific political issues, Swedish journalists also seem more left-wing than the general population: 49 per cent of Swedes want to reduce the number of refugees received by Sweden, whereas only 11 per cent of journalists want to do the same. The research is solid and there is no reason to doubt the results, but let’s untangle the whole issue a bit. First, most journalists would probably respond that while they may have particular individual political sympathies, those sympathies do not affect the content they produce – journalistic norms of objectivity, fact-checking etc safeguard against individual opinions colouring the coverage. Collective professionalism overrides individual opinion - at least that would be the journalist's point of view. But this is not the full story. For example, earlier studies from the same long-term research project also showed that Swedish journalists were more positive to the EU than the population at large (according to studies made after the 1994 EU membership referendum in Sweden) – a standpoint that was at the time clearly not associated with the Left and Green parties in Sweden. Another study (in Swedish – though check out the table on p 22, you may be able to decipher it), looking specifically at Swedish financial/economy correspondents found that the majority (42 per cent) of these correspondents were Liberal party voters, and overall strongly committed to liberal ideas about finance and economy. In the general population, 13 per cent were Liberal party voters in the last election. And, according to the above-mentioned data, 61 per cent of journalists in general are either Social democratic, Left or Green party voters (i.e. broadly ‘left wing’). So there are clearly differences between different types of journalists. However, the question remains as to what extent these party affiliations affect reporting (Martin Moore of the Media Standards trust made an interesting observation on this in his blog recently – though by no means based on a scientific sample) – something notoriously more difficult to study. The deconstruction of journalistic professionalism done by researchers and media scholars over the past 25 years certainly would raise some doubts as to whether ‘professionalism’ actually acts as a check on individual opinion. So maybe there is something to the old (right-wing) critique that journalism favours the left? Well, I haven’t even begun to discuss the potential issue of ownerinfluence (media owners are possibly as right-wing as journalists are left-wing) on news decisions yet. And if journalists are essentially passive reporters of what sources say (see previous post), then wouldn’t the individual political preferences of journalists be largely meaningless? Stay tuned for further discussion. Please do post your own comments, and feel free to accuse me of Left/Right/Centre-wing bias!