Is The Anti-Conservative Bias In Media Real?
Conservatives continue to complain of an “anti-conservative bias” in the media. Some complaints come from professional conservatives (politicians and pundits), and some comes from lay conservatives — people I know or otherwise encounter.
In my experience, the truth is almost exactly the opposite, so I wanted to do a little digging. Is the claim true? If it’s not true, why do they keep saying it? If it is true, then why? And: Is it a good or bad thing?
The Claim
“The claim” isn’t just one thing; it only seems like it because of the varying ways we use the word “media”. There are multiple, overlapping complaints, some older than others. The claim that the (1) news media has a liberal bias has been around for decades — I first heard it in the homes of family members and in churches I attended as a youngster. Likewise, (2) entertainment media has long been accused of “pushing liberal ideas”. Today, the dominant claims are about (3) social media — usually that “conservative voices are being silenced”. So:
Even after categorizing the claims by type of media, they can be further subdivided by what kind of bias is alleged. Sometimes the accusation is that a conservative person doesn’t have a fair chance of getting a job in these media industries. Other times, it’s that the overall direction of the industry has a liberal bent, or that the ideas which get the most traction are from a liberal perspective. Today, with social media, the complaint is usually about “censorship”, by which the claimants mean accounts being suspended or posts being removed — but also in manipulating search results or newsfeeds.
Some recent examples:
The president of the United States drafted an executive order to stop the alleged bias online. “Most of Twitter is liberal cesspools of venom”, one White House official claimed. The president claimed “Conservative thinkers” (he listed deranged actor James Woods as an example) are being “banned” from Twitter and Facebook. “It’s getting worse and worse for Conservatives on social media!” He has announced he is “watching Google very closely” and misspelled his own name when complaining that Google “boosted negative stories on Donald Ttump”.
Regular people apparently believe it. A 2018 survey found 58% of registered voters “think that social networks are unfair to conservatives”, though the results were divided along party lines: 85% of Republican voters saw tech companies as biased against conservatives. “Social media has been weaponized”, a Republican strategist claimed.
The National Review claims “Google biases its algorithm”, “they’re cracking down disproportionately on conservative news”, and “our major social-media sites are staffed thoroughly with non-conservatives who have no objective frame of reference when it comes to the news business.” It even complained that Google’s “doodles” (logo overlays) “routinely feature left-wing icons and issues”. A Boston Herald columnist alleged “I’m being discriminated against and censored by social media networks” and said Twitter and Facebook are “run by left-wing activists who despise... conservative values”.
Even The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed complaining big tech exhibits “hostility to conservative voices”. Another conservative writer claims that of “every prominent individual or political party known to have been banned from Twitter since its founding” almost all were conservatives.
Why I’m Skeptical Of The Claim(s)
The claim I’m most skeptical of is that social media companies are silencing/censoring conservatives. And the reason I tend to doubt it is because I’m on social media frequently, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr. I see conservative views all the time. I daily see links to conservative-leaning news sites, not to mention actual people posting their own conservative views without (apparently) any fear of repercussion. In fact, I see an awful lot of conservative viewpoints from so-called liberal outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Further, it does not logically follow that giant companies interested primarily in making money through increased “user engagement” would work to have fewer users. They make more money with more users, using more often. (Kind of like an illegal drug syndicate isn’t going to refuse to sell to X demographic; as long as X demographic has money and wants drugs, they’ll sell.) People who self-identify as conservatives are not a small slice of the U.S.’s (or world’s) population. It simply wouldn’t make sense for dollar-seeking corporations to intentionally alienate 30-40 percent of its possible user base.
A third reason I’m skeptical of the claim is that I have been part of multiple targeted campaigns to remove certain voices from social media, and it is difficult. These efforts are targeted at bigotry and false news, for example the extended effort to get Alex Jones kicked off social media. Some people worked for months, and thousands of us chipped in with thousands of personal messages to these massive social media empires. We reported posts that were racist, sexist, Islamophobic, homophobic, and many that were outright untrue — a few, like the conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook shooting, were outright harmful. ALL the major social media companies hedged for months in the face of these targeted campaigns, going overboard to explain why Alex Jones deserved to stay platformed. Of course, Jones is more of a scam artist and grifter than “traditional conservative”, but the point here is how difficult it was to convince social media companies to dump his toxic brand.
As for the newfeed-sorting claim, I am skeptical because I regularly see conservative views from accounts I don’t even follow. Also, this could be solved by doing what almost everyone wants — giving us a chronological newsfeed.
On the search engine claim, I’m extremely skeptical. I often use search terms indicating a fairly liberal/progressive viewpoint and yet see as many results from conservative sites as I do from liberal sites. On YouTube the political culture — and the “suggested videos” algorithm — is dominated by conservative viewpoints. When reading news from a variety of sites, I see as many stories on conservatives as I do on liberals (if not more), and even allegedly non-political stories often have a conservative slant.
In the realm of news media, the claim is outright startling. In cable news, Fox News (conservative) has held the number one ratings spot for a decade or more. On broadcast TV, news shows are more accurately characterized by their shallowness, brevity, and ineptitude than they are by any political slant. (And more TV stations are owned by hard-right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group than by any other conglomerate.) Among newspapers, I couldn’t find statistics to show overall slant, but it looks like (1) the major ones rarely venture far from the center, (2) small town papers rarely exhibit much of a political slant, and (3) to find a hard political slant one must browse the “fringe” or “underground” publications. On the internet, a person can find news from any perspective she can think of. AM radio is overrun with hardline conservative “news” and talk shows, at least in this region of the country.
The only claim I’m reasonably ambivalent about is regarding the entertainment industry. It does look like movies and TV shows skew more liberal than the country’s current politics — or maybe this is due to which media I choose to watch. On the other hand, it’s relatively rare for a movie or show to outright push a liberal viewpoint (one rare exception I can think of is the movie John Q, from 2002, which beats viewers over the head with a need for affordable health care in the U.S). Movies and television continue to glorify capitalism and extreme wealth, regularly promote religion, and seem fairly accepting of war and violence. The industries themselves, while showing some improvement, still aren’t paragons of inclusivity and equality, with white people and men having wildly disproportionate control. The music industry is another thing entirely; conservatives are doing well there: country music (skewing heavily conservative) is number one on the radio, and plenty of conservatives populate the other genres as well.
What About Actual Research?
One big study of Facebook advertising found problems with race and gender stereotyping, but no other bias correlations. Publisher numbers show that conservative-leaning media sites lead “user engagement” on Facebook — including Fox News (#1) and The Daily Mail (#2), with The Daily Wire (founded by ultra-conservative Ben Shapiro) at number four. The rest of the top ten are mostly middle-of-the-road outlets (NBC News, for example), with theguardian barely squeaking in as the only liberal-leaning publisher in the top ten.
Media Matters (an admittedly progressive organization) conducted a 37-week study which found “that left-leaning pages and right-leaning pages are earning similar engagement”, but perhaps more importantly discovered that Facebook pages posting partisan political comment (of any stripe) got more interactions that pages which avoided politics.
In 2019, an exhaustive “bias audit” at Facebook uncovered... basically nothing.
In 2020, yet another study — this one exhaustive — found that yes, journalists tend to self-identify as liberal (significantly higher percentage than the general population), but no, “journalists do not seem to be exhibiting liberal media bias (or conservative media bias) in what they choose to cover... overall, journalists do not display political gatekeeping bias in the stories they choose to cover.” When placing journalists on a political-view scale, the study found that the large majority of journalists were — personally — more liberal than, say, Barack Obama, yet their coverage was of campaigns and topics that interest people of all political viewpoints.
Here is a fairly detailed explanation of how search engines (specifically Google) rank search results, and it has nothing to do with political ideology. But you don’t need a detailed explanation; you can do the study yourself. Step One: Choose a search engine. Step Two: type in a word or phrase that’s bound to get a lot of political hits — like “abortion”, “second amendment”, “free speech”, “global warming”, or “Is Donald Trump the antichrist?” (Okay, that last one was a joke. But still, look at the results. Hilarious.) No matter which of those topics you select for your five-minute experiment, you will notice as you scroll through the results that both conservative and liberal views are presented.
I couldn’t find any research on liberal/conservative views being promoted in movies or television shows. I did find plenty of articles about conservatives feeling unwelcome in Hollywood — like this one in the Los Angeles Times. But even that story admits “no official tally exists”, and further admits that “corporate Hollywood tends to be much more conservative and Republican” — even noting that one big-time executive producer became a member of Trump’s cabinet. The story cites a “prominent” actor who refused to be named, claiming “a conservative producer he works with has been shunned”, but he wouldn’t name names.
So Why Do Conservatives Continue Pushing These Claims?
My number one theory is that it energizes their voter base. If people who generally identify as conservative can be made to believe (and, as noted above, they already do believe) that they’re being minimalized, silenced, censored, ignored, or in some other way marginalized, then they turn out in greater numbers to support the conservative politicians and pundits that started the (bogus) claims in the first place.
But wait. Weren’t there actually some conservatives recently censored or kicked off social media? Didn’t I mention above participating in campaigns to do exactly that? This is where it gets tricky. Some high-profile social media users who identify as “conservative” have seen content removed, profiles deleted, accounts terminated, etc. A few have been banned entirely from some networks.
Conservatives spun this as: they were banned because of conservative views. But it wasn’t that, was it?
When Twitter removed a video posted by Donald J. Trump early in 2019, it wasn’t because the video contained conservative views or because Trump himself leads the country’s conservative party. It was because of copyright infringement — the video contained an audio track from a Warner Brothers movie, used without permission. Exactly the same as the only other time Twitter removed content from Trump’s account: copyright infringement of the R.E.M. song Everybody Hurts earlier the same year. Thousands of other misspelled and nonsensical tweets remain on the president’s timeline.
When self-described “hardcore, card carrying Tennessee conservative” congressperson Marsha Blackburn had a campaign ad blocked on Twitter, was it because the views were conservative? No. The official reason was the “inflammatory” language (“the sale of baby body parts”) in the video ad. An even better reason Twitter should have given would have been “verified as untrue” (except Twitter still doesn’t remove content for being untrue). Either way, Blackburn never lost her account and the ad in question was reinstated.
When right-wing YouTube stars “Diamond” (Lynette Hardaway) and “Silk” (Rochelle Richardson) testified before U.S. Congress to claim Google had been censoring them, their major assertion was that Google-owned YouTube had “demonetized” their videos. Notably, the videos are still on YouTube, most with tens of thousands of views, and the channel has a quarter of a million subscribers. In other words, not censored AT ALL.
When Milo Yiannopoulos was suspended from Twitter, was it because of his conservative views? No. It was for inciting racist and sexist harassment against actor Leslie Jones. What about James Woods? Despite claims that he was “banned” from Twitter, his verified account is still there; it was apparently “locked” due to an incindiary tweet including the hashtag “#HangThemAll”. (He apparently ran afoul of Twitter’s guidelines regularly.)
Who else? Oh yes, Alex Jones. Do conservatives still want to claim him? He was indeed banned from several social media services, for child endangerment and hate speech (YouTube), bullying and hate speech (Facebook), discriminatory and hateful content (Vimeo), hate speech (Apple), and more.
So yes, several prominent conservatives have been “censored” by social media: accounts have been suspended, posts deleted, etc. But notably, I can’t find a single one that was attacked for being conservative, or for holding conservative views.
What Are ‘Conservative Views’?
Just what are “conservative views”? Much like liberal or progressive views, conservative opinions differ by person and region, and not every conservative will share the same views. But some major bullet points of conservative views in the U.S. typically include favoring laissez-faire economics, deregulation, Christian prayer in public schools, more military spending, and lower tax rates; while opposing labor movements, the social safety net, gay marriage, abortion rights, restrictions on gun ownership, and most immigration.
Notably, no social media company has suspended or banned users for holding or promoting any of these views. No search engine has ever conspired to hide any site or service that promotes or holds these views.
The Sleight-Of-Hand
The root of the entire argument is that there was some sleight-of-hand between what actually happened and what people end up believing. What happened was that quite a few celebrities known as “conservatives” ran afoul of social media guidelines, some repeatedly, and after many reports from other users the social media companies finally began to act against the offending accounts. When that happened, some of those conservative public figures — and their supporters — began complaining of the bias against conservatives. And people fell for it, due to the longtime belief that many of these companies are liberally biased.
I’m convinced that very few of the big-name pundits actually believe their public claims, but it profits them to promote the lie. Several conservative politicians, including Ted Cruz, Marsha Blackburn, and Donald Trump, get a lot of traction and publicity from their claims — harden and energize their voter base, generate campaign contributions and press events, and enjoy the impression that they are a beleaguered political minority.
But their supporters often actually believe it. Dozens, if not hundreds, of conservative-leaning websites, and thousands of conservative individuals, make the claim with regularity and it looks like they think it’s true. Very little motivates voters like the thought of “they’re coming for me”.
How To Confront The Lie
If you do run across the claim “conservative voices are being silenced” or “social media discriminates against conservatives”, I suggest asking for specifics.
Check the claims. I’ve followed this topic for a few years, and performed several extensive searches before writing this entry, and I failed to find a single instance of someone actually being kicked off a social network for expressing or holding conservative views. In many cases, the alleged “victim” wasn’t silenced or censored or banned at all; they’re still on the sites in question. They still have thousands of followers and generate tons of interactions each day. In the relatively few cases in which conservative figures were actually removed from a site, it was never for expressing a “conservative view”.
In all cases I could find, the actual reason was one (or more) of the following: (1) inciting violence or harassment, (2) bullying, (3) hate speech — typically racism, sexism, and homophobia, or (4) repeatedly posting fake news. Are any of those “conservative views”? The claimant will adamantly state that none of those are conservative views. Then you’ve caught them.
Because only one can be true. Either (1) bullying, hate speech, harassment, and advocating violence are in fact conservative views, or (2) no one was banned or censored for holding conservative views.
Conclusion
If I was a conservative today, I would not claim that conservative voices are being silenced — because it would be a tacit admission that conservative ideology includes those horrible behaviors that actually led to the bans, content removal, etc.
Since I’m not a conservative, I’m left to wonderingly shake my head at the kinds of things they’ll believe without evidence. And, if the opportunity presents itself, perhaps I can offer a differing, more reasonable view.
Note: I updated this entry in early 2020 to include “yet another study”, this one reported in Salon.
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