Press feels it's gone easy on Bush

A press corps that is growing increasingly liberal is inclined to believe that President Bush has gotten an easy ride from the news media, according to a poll released yesterday.

The poll, conducted by the Pew Research Center in collaboration with the Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Committee of Concerned Journalists, surveyed more than 500 national and local reporters, editors, and news executives. Most of the respondents declared themselves political moderates, but the percentage of national journalists who described themselves as liberal rose from 22 percent in 1995 to 34 percent in 2004, while the ranks of liberal local journalists jumped from 14 percent to 23 percent. Only 7 percent of national journalists and 12 percent of local journalists described themselves as conservative.

"What you're seeing is a profession that is majority moderate, but more liberal than conservative. What's different here is that the trend line is more liberal," says Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. "We clearly need to think about getting more conservatives in the newsroom."

"It confirms our fears that the mainstream media are not getting less liberal," said Brent Baker, vice president of the Media Research Center, a conservative watchdog group. One explanation, Baker added, is that journalism "inherently attracts people unhappy with society's . . . status quo [who] still see the news media as a vehicle to change society."

While the poll may fuel longstanding conservative claims that there is a liberal bias in the media, it also found strong sentiment among journalists that their profession has been too soft on Bush.

Fifty-five percent of the national press corps and 37 percent of local journalists said coverage of the president has not been critical enough; 8 percent of the national press and 19 percent of local journalists said the media have been too critical. That stands in stark contrast with the general public's assessment -- 34 percent of Americans say the media have been too critical of the president, and only 24 percent say they have not been tough enough.

Rosenstiel says journalists' perception that Bush has not received sufficient scrutiny may be a product of tensions between the press and a White House with a tight-fisted approach to news management, or it could reflect a concern -- given the chaos in Iraq -- that the media did not take a hard enough look at the administration's rationale for going to war.

"It's hard to know whether the increase in the number of liberal journalists accounts for the sense that we haven't been hard enough on Bush," Rosenstiel said.

In the survey, journalists were also asked to name a news outlet that struck them as particularly liberal or conservative. Among those who identified a liberal outlet, The New York Times was most frequently mentioned -- by 20 percent of national news respondents and 17 percent of local journalists.

The clear leader for those who identified an especially conservative outlet was the Fox News Channel, which was cited by 69 percent of the national journalists and 42 percent of their local colleagues.