The issue of there being a liberal bias in the media is not something new in our country. This argument that conservatives strongly believe and complain about stretches back decades, but really came to life in the 1970's and 1980's. Of course, on the other side, liberals deny these accusations from the conservatives and believe that most journalists reject this claim of bias. Most liberal journalists insist they report the news with no bias and stay neutral when reporting news facts. Again, conservatives will rebut this by arguing that these very journalists are the ones trying to plug their own liberal ideas into the news they report. In this article in Taking Sides, Bernard Goldberg will emphasize those American journalists who he claims to be liberal all have different ideas and beliefs than the very people they are reporting to. While Jim Hightower's main argument against this inquisition is mostly based on the idea that the big wig executives and owners of these reporting and news agencies are themselves conservative, and that their ideas and beliefs are projected in the media.
Numbers don't lie. The first real argument Goldberg presents is the result from a poll taken by the Freedom Forum and The Roper Center, of 139 Washington Bureau chiefs and congressional correspondents. This survey did have overwhelming evidence to the conservative argument that journalists and the public do not share the same views. For example, 89% of polled journalists voted for Bill Clinton in the 1992 election. This number is substantially higher than the 43% of the non-journalist voting public who voted for Clinton. In the same survey, it is pointed out that of those surveyed, 50% said they were Democrats, and only 4% said they were Republicans. The strongest point of this survey was the amount that characterized their political orientation as "liberal" or "moderate to liberal," which was 61%, compared to only 4% who said they were "conservative" or "moderate to conservative.