Media & the press
Ask most Americans whether the national press leans against Republicans and a majority, in both parties, will say yes. The harder question is why, and whether any one thing explains it. It doesn't. Four separate mechanisms built on top of each other over five decades, and the data behind each one is more specific than "the media is biased."
Who Chooses the Job
The place to start isn't the newsroom, it's who walks in the door wanting the job in the first place. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt's research on ideological imbalance in academia, which runs on the same mechanics as journalism, points to a personality difference: high scorers on "openness" (curiosity, novelty-seeking, comfort with ambiguity) trend more liberal, and openness is also the trait most associated with wanting to do journalism, art, and research for a living. Haidt's point isn't that conservatives are excluded at the door. It's that even with zero discrimination anywhere in the hiring process, a profession built around exactly the personality traits that predict liberalism will end up lopsided just from who applies.
This isn't a new theory invented to explain Trump-era coverage. The first rigorous version of it dates to 1986, when researchers Robert and Linda Lichter and Stanley Rothman surveyed 238 journalists at the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, the newsmagazines, and the three network news divisions. They found a press corps well to the left of the general public on abortion, affirmative action, and gay rights, and further left than a control group of business executives on nearly every question asked. Content analysis of a decade of actual coverage on nuclear power, busing, and the energy crisis found reporting "diverged from expert assessments in the direction of the media elite's own perspective." That study is almost 40 years old. The imbalance it measured has only widened since.
Where the Jobs Are Left
Self-selection explains who wants the job. Structure explains where the surviving jobs actually are. Two changes compounded here.
First, journalism stopped being a trade you learned on the floor of a newsroom and became a credential you earned at a university, a shift that solidified through the 1970s and 80s. That routes every new entrant through higher education, a sector with its own well-documented and much larger ideological imbalance, before they ever file a story.
Second, the economics of local news collapsed. The U.S. had 7,325 newspapers in 2005; it has roughly 4,490 now, a loss of nearly 3,500 papers and more than 270,000 jobs in two decades. Newspaper employment fell from about 365,000 people in 2005 to under 92,000 today. Counties with no reliable local news source, "news deserts", grew from 150 in 2005 to 213 in 2025, leaving an estimated 50 million Americans without meaningful local coverage. The jobs that survived that collapse concentrated disproportionately in national outlets headquartered in New York, Washington, and Los Angeles, three of the most Democratic-voting media markets in the country. A profession that used to have a reporter embedded in every county seat now has its remaining reporters clustered in three zip codes.
What Pays the Bills
The first two mechanisms explain a slow, decades-long drift. They don't explain why coverage tone broke so sharply and so suddenly in 2015 and 2016. The financial incentive does.
The New York Times added 132,000 paid subscriptions in the month after Trump's 2016 election, ten times its normal pace, its largest jump since introducing the paywall in 2011. CNN posted its highest-rated month in eight years. NYT executive editor Dean Baquet credited the surge directly to "strong aggressive coverage." This wasn't hidden or denied, it was the industry's own explanation for its business results. Adversarial Trump coverage was demonstrably, measurably good for revenue, and outlets responded to that signal the way any business responds to a signal.
The cleanest proof this incentive is real, not imagined, showed up in reverse after the 2024 election. The Washington Post lost more than 200,000 digital subscriptions, about 8% of its paid base, largely tied to its Trump-era editorial positioning. MSNBC's primetime audience dropped 54% after Trump's win, from 1.34 million to 661,000; Rachel Maddow's audience fell 43%, Joy Reid's fell 47%. If the audience for anti-Trump coverage had been a fixed, ideologically committed bloc, it wouldn't evaporate the moment the outcome it was anxious about arrived. It behaved instead like an audience that was paying, in attention and subscription dollars, for a specific emotional product, and that product's value depended on the threat feeling live.
What Journalism Decided About Itself
The fourth mechanism is the one that turned an unstated drift into a stated position. In June 2020, journalist Wesley Lowery published a New York Times op-ed arguing that "objectivity-obsessed, both-sides journalism" was "a failed experiment" and that the industry should "rebuild" around "moral clarity" instead. San Francisco Chronicle editor-in-chief Emilio Garcia-Ruiz put the newsroom consensus more bluntly: "objectivity has got to go." A 2023 research project by former Washington Post editor Leonard Downie Jr., built on interviews with more than 75 reporters and newsroom leaders, concluded this wasn't a fringe position but "the beginning of another generational shift in American journalism."
To be clear about what this argument actually claims: its proponents say some factual claims, "systemic racism exists," "the 2020 election wasn't stolen", don't deserve false balance against their opposite, and that pretending otherwise is itself a distortion. Critics, including working journalists who disagree with Lowery and Garcia-Ruiz, argue that "moral clarity" is doing a lot of quiet work to relabel opinion as fact, and that abandoning the both-sides norm is precisely what's driven Republican trust in media to single digits with no floor in sight. Both things can be true at once: the objectivity norm had real, documented flaws, and abandoning it formally is also the moment an implicit lean became an explicit editorial identity.
And Hollywood?
Genuinely associated, not the same institution. Entertainment industry donations ran roughly 8-to-1 Democratic in the 2020 cycle; 99.7% of top Hollywood executives' federal donations went to Democrats in 2018. But this wasn't always the case, Ronald Reagan, a former actor himself, drew serious Hollywood support in the 1980s, so the shift tracks a similar multi-decade arc to journalism's rather than causing it. The real connective tissue is shared geography and corporate ownership: Disney owns ABC News, Comcast owns NBC News, Warner Bros. owned CNN for years. News and entertainment divisions sit inside the same companies and the same coastal culture. That's convergent evolution, not Hollywood directing newsrooms.
The Bottom Line
Four mechanisms, each independently documented, each pointing the same direction: a profession that self-selects for a personality type that leans left, a credentialing and economic collapse that concentrates the survivors in the most left-leaning markets, a business model that got paid to lean harder starting in 2015, and a 2020 internal debate that turned the lean into a stated philosophy. None of it requires a coordinated conspiracy. All four operating for fifty years is a sufficient explanation on its own.
Sources: Syracuse University Newhouse School, "American Journalist" surveys (1971–2022); Gallup, "Americans Remain Distrustful of Mass Media"; Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center, "News Coverage of Donald Trump's First 100 Days" (2017); S. Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman & Linda Lichter, The Media Elite (1986); Medill School, "State of Local News" report (2025); Columbia Journalism Review, "Subscription surges and record audiences follow Trump's election"; CNN Money, "New York Times adds 41,000 subscriptions after Trump's election"; CNBC, "Washington Post loses digital subscriptions" (Oct. 2024); Fox News / AllSides, MSNBC primetime ratings coverage (Nov. 2024); Wesley Lowery, "A Reckoning Over Objectivity, Led by Black Journalists," New York Times (June 2020); Leonard Downie Jr., Arizona State University/Reuters Institute report (2023); Hollywood Reporter, "Top Hollywood Execs Give Overwhelmingly to Democrats" (2018).