The mainstream media loves to declare how objective they are.
They incessantly push a progressive narrative, even if it doesn’t reflect a majority of the audience.
A recent poll uncovered sharp bias in national sports coverage that unravels the myth of impartiality.
Only six percent of respondents polled identified as Republican.
From Breitbart:
The Big Lead polled 51 members of the sports media, allowing their answers to remain anonymous, to encourage the media to fill out the survey without fear of being “outed” as liberals. The site also polled 312 readers as a control group to see if the media was more, less, or the same politically as the site’s readers.
The poll revealed that most considered themselves Democrats or “independents,” with 58 percent calling themselves Democrats and 37 percent claiming to be “independents.” As to the GOP, well, only three respondents (a measly 6 percent) said they were Republican.
The Big Lead points out that a recent Gallup poll said the breakdown above is far out of whack compared to the general population which sees 31 percent each claiming to be Democrat or Republican and 37 percent claiming to be “independent.”
When the question turned to how they cast their vote in 2016, a whopping 80.4 percent said they voted for 2016 loser Hillary Clinton. While only a few said they cast their ballot for Donald Trump. In fact, more sports reporters said they didn’t vote at all (9.8 percent) than said they voted for Trump.
Gun ownership was also rejected by the sports reporters at a number far higher than that of regular Americans. Of all the reporters asked, only three polled said they owned a gun. Meanwhile, national average for gun ownership in America is 36 percent.
The reporters also self-identified as leftists in other ways. All but one chose left-wing news sources as their main sources of news, 78.4 percent agreed that sports media should be “very liberal,” and 76.5 percent wanted to see pot legalized.
“The sports media clearly leans left. But, it may be a stretch to say that alienates a significant portion of the audience,” Ty Duffy wrote. “The sports media is clustered in major cities and along the coasts because that’s where much of its audience is.”
This makes sense, most sports writers work for big media outfits in places like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
However, this also means that a relatively small community of liberal sports writers in liberal enclaves, are writing for a massive percentage of the country. Which, according to the numbers in this poll, do not hold the same values or opinions. While that has probably always been true in media, to some extent, given that media has always been coastal and liberal. However, one wonders if 50 years ago the ideological gap between scribe and fan was quite this stark.
The coastal bias has worsened as the Democratic Party has slid further and further left. Social justice has become a part of sports reporting, which is partly why ESPN has hemorrhaged viewers.
The network’s purging of conservatives also shows how bias will continue to be pervasive.
Sports are a form of escapism for people. They don’t want it infused with political groupthink dominated by coastal “elites.”