(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) A study revealed that the percentage of full-time U.S. journalists who identify as Republicans has dropped significantly over the last decade, while journalists who identified as Democrats and Independents have increased.
As a result, it was found that there is only 3.4% of journalists in 2022 who identified themselves as Republicans, compared with 36.4% of Democrats and 51.7% of Independents in the profession, according to a Syracuse University survey titled “The American Journalist Under Attack.”
A Gallup poll revealed that at the time when the survey was conducted, 28% of Americans considered themselves Republicans, 28% identified themselves as Democrats and 42% viewed themselves as Independents.
It was also discovered by the survey that the percentage of Republicans in the journalism industry has declined substantially over the decades, according to the Epoch Times.
The first survey was conducted back in 1971 when 25.7% of journalists identified themselves as Republicans — an insane figure for today’s realities of the industry. Over the years, the number drastically declined. The number dropped to 18.8% in 1982 and then declined to 16.4% in 1992. In 2002, it increased a little bit to 18% but plummeted to 7.1% in 2013. By 2022, the number dropped to 3.4%.
“Are we supposed to find this surprising?” one of the Times’s readers wrote in the replies to the article.
The survey said that the trend for journalists identifying as Democrats has remained relatively steady at around 35% over the decades. The 2022 figure of 36.4% marked the third-highest percentage of journalists identifying as Democrats since 1971.
“When asked about the ’most important problem facing journalism today,’ the journalists mentioned these issues most often: Declining public trust in the news media (20.8%); shrinking local and community news coverage (12.8%); perceived bias and opinion journalism (12.7%); fake news (9.9%); disrupted business model (9.3%),” the survey said.
The Times reported that the survey is conducted nearly every decade and covers many topics in the journalism industry, which range from using social media in their daily work to job satisfaction, journalists’ age, women in the journalism workplace, comparative pay between biological sexes and educational levels, among others.
