Newsrooms do skew a little left, if only because journalists require some degree of empathy to do their job properly, but it's never as bad as most might think, because getting news people to agree on ideological terms is fucking hard. Getting them to agree on anything is fucking hard.
Newsrooms are full of commies, and hardcore capitalists, and vague anarchists, just like any slice of society. Most people have surprisingly complex views on politics, and don't always fit into easy identifiable boxes.
There will still be weird little bias, and sometimes it can be unconscious. Any journo who has spent a significant proportion of their day transcribing the garbled nonsense that spilled out of the mouth of John Key when he was Prime Minister, and then trying to make sense of it, might be a little harsher on Mr Key when it comes to polishing up the story. And good reporters will always have some kind of inherent distrust of anybody in power, and will react accordingly.
But in general, journos don't care about your ideology. Stories don't get spiked because they don't fit a certain viewpoint, they get spiked because they're boring, or stupid, or just don't stack up. And if any politician does something truly incompetent or corrupt, and it gets discovered, they're going to have the spotlight on them. It doesn't matter if they're National or Labour, or the Greens, or NZ First, or the Legalise Cannabis goons, they are going to be exposed.
Opinion and column writers have a lot more leeway, and can ramble on about fucking anything, and show their real colours, but they're usually not part the the general news team. The newsroom is just full of regular people, with their own fucked-up ideologies and political views.
In the end, journos can only tell they are doing their job correctly because everybody, on all sides of the political spectrum, start moaning about it. A single article can get the same extreme reaction from both the left and the right, with both sides left frothing at the mouth, and that's when they know they're on the right track.
Bias is almost always in the eye of the beholder. News people that say mean things about your political party are always totally biased, and probably in the pay of the opposition. News people that say nice things about your political party are nobly exposing the truth. It can't possibly be any more nuanced than that.
But the world is significantly more complex than any political ideology ever fully covers, and an individual human being – and their political views - is more complex still. Looking for some easy explanation for why the media are picking on your guy is a fool's errand.
- Katherine Grant
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