On Thursday, conservative YouTube channel PragerU uploaded a brand new “man on the street” video in which Will Witt speaks with people “outside the CNN building in Los Angeles,” and asks them about the biases in mainstream news.
“What news sources do you watch that you feel like are unbiased?” Witt asks several people.
“Um, probably not many,” one woman states. A man carrying a keyboard echoes that sentiment, saying, “Not any that I can name off the top of my head.”
Another man says, “That’s really hard to find. I feel like everything I read has some sort of bias in it.” A man standing next to him suggests “Telemundo.”
Witt then moves on to CNN specifically, asking, “So, we’re outside CNN headquarters right now. Do you feel like CNN is unbiased?”
The man carrying the keyboard flatly states, “No,” adding that CNN “definitely” leans toward the “Left.”
A man wearing a blue t-shirt and blue hat describes what he believes is behind bias in media: “They have to get funded from somewhere. So, obviously, whoever is funding them is gonna have a bias. There is no non-biased news source. So the best thing you [can] do is get both sides, and then come up with your own ideas as to what’s going on.”
“News is like … a gray zone,” says a man with teal highlights in his hair. The man adds that sometimes “you don’t know if they’re saying the truth.”
When a pink-haired woman claims to watch CNN for news, Witt divulges some interesting statistics about journalistic bias:
WITT: What do you think about Fox News? Do you think they’re biased?
PINK HAIR: They’re super biased.
WITT: So, if I told you that 96% of journalists in the 2016 election donated to the Hillary Clinton campaign, would you think there’s kind of a bias there with them being skewed to one way?
PINK HAIR: Yeah, definitely.
WITT: Skewed to the left?
PINK HAIR: Skewed to the left.
WITT: I believe, only 7% of journalists identify themselves as Republicans. Do you find that troubling at all?
PINK HAIR: Not really. It doesn’t affect me.
WITT: Do you think it would be like, then you wouldn’t be getting both sides of the issue because so many journalists already agree with one agenda?
PINK HAIR: Yeah, yeah. Never mind, [I] take that back.
Near the end of the video, a woman wearing a denim jacket says that she believes a major issue with media bias is “journalists identifying themselves as something,” and that their attachment to labels “kind of drives what they’re reporting on, and how they report it.”
According to a 2017 survey conducted by Gallup/Knight Foundation, many Americans seem to lack trust in the media.
65% of those surveyed said that “too much bias in the reporting of news stories that are supposed to be objective” is a “major problem” in media. 61% said that “more news sources reporting from a particular point of view rather than being neutral” is a “major problem.”
64% also said it’s a “major problem” that there is “too much bias in the selection of what stories news organizations cover or don’t cover.”
When it comes to President Trump, the mainstream media are particularly unkind.
The Daily Wire previously reported that “according to the Media Research Center (MRC), from January 2017 through December 2018, 90% of the coverage of President Trump from the major network evening news programs (ABC, CBS, NBC) [was] negative, while just 10% has been positive.”
The impact that such overwhelmingly negative reporting might have on the general public’s trust in the mainstream press is difficult to quantify, although it likely plays some role in conservative distrust of the media.
Another recent study from MRC found that on CNN, Democratic members of Congress are interviewed far more frequently than Republicans. Of the 165 interviews conducted on CNN during the period observed by MRC, 136 were with elected Democrats, while just 29 were with elected Republicans — that’s 82% to 18%.