Many Americans feel the media industry suffers from liberal bias and a new Politico study might have determined why, as most working members of the media live in areas that voted for Hillary Clinton.
Politico’s Tucker Doherty examined labor statistics and cross-referenced them against voting patterns and Census data. The study was designed to figure out what the American media landscape looks like, and how much it has changed in recent years. The results prove that 72 percent of new jobs in media are in counties that Clinton won on Election Day.
When Donald Trump upset Clinton on Election Day, many Americans were shocked, outraged or simply confused. With the exception of a few conservative pundits, most media members had been projecting that Clinton would defeat Trump.
Most major media organizations are in New York and Los Angeles. The diminishing newspaper industry is also taking media jobs out of small towns across America.
“The national media really does work in a bubble, something that wasn’t true as recently as 2008. And the bubble is growing more extreme,” Politico wrote. “Concentrated heavily along the coasts, the bubble is both geographic and political. If you’re a working journalist, odds aren’t just that you work in a pro-Clinton county–odds are that you reside in one of the nation’s most pro-Clinton counties.”
“Not only is the bubble real, but it’s more extreme than you might realize. And it’s driven by deep industry trends,” the Politico report stated.
Many of the jobs vacated by the newspaper industry are being replaced with Internet jobs, but the study points out that “73 percent of all internet publishing jobs are concentrated in either the Boston-New York-Washington-Richmond corridor or the West Coast crescent that runs from Seattle to San Diego and on to Phoenix.”
According to the study, “Nearly 90 percent of all internet publishing employees work in a county where Clinton won, and 75 percent of them work in a county that she won by more than 30 percentage points.”
The report concludes: “Yet everyone acknowledges that Trump’s election really was a bad miss, and if the media doesn’t figure it out, it will miss the next one, too… If the burning humiliation of missing the biggest political story in a generation won’t change newsrooms, nothing will. More than anything, journalists hate getting beat.”