Left-wing journalists comprise a huge majority of the British media, a major study has revealed.
More than half (53%) of journalists across all outlets and publications consider themselves to be “left of centre”, it found.
The remaining 47% are split between considering themselves exactly in the centre (24%), while the smallest subset (23%) put themselves somewhere “right of centre”.
Right-leaning journalists overwhelmingly said they were moderately centre-right, whereas leftist members of the media were more radical in their beliefs.
The findings emerged in a report on the British journalism industry released this week by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, part of the University of Oxford.
The academics in charge of the report noted that the true strength of right-of-centre feeling could be even less than implied by the results.
Citing a previous study they noted that participants often show “significant bias” towards overstating their conservatism – the overall consequence of which is an even heavier skew towards the left.
New report: Journalists in the UK by @neilthurman @AlessioCornia & @JessicaKunert download: https://t.co/mR90LeZNmW pic.twitter.com/XAoedMzbr5
— Reuters Institute (@risj_oxford) May 9, 2016
The trend was less pronounced among high-ranking staff than reporter-level employees.
But even at the senior manager level, a plurality (42%) say they are left-leaning, compared to 31% who skew right.
The report comes against the backdrop of a UK media market dominated by the BBC (see chart), which a succession of high-profile insiders have admitted has an inescapable liberal-left slant.
And more recently, Facebook has been caught up in allegations that its news curators scrub conservative viewpoints from its “trending topics section” – an allegation presumably as applicable to the UK as the US.
