Electorate is checking its sources

With an election year upon us, Americans -- increasingly convinced political campaign coverage is biased -- appear to be choosing news outlets that match their beliefs, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center. The findings raise the question of whether the US tradition of an objective mainstream press is evolving -- at least in the public's perception -- into the overseas model of more overtly partisan news.

"In an increasingly fragmented news environment, people can gravitate to what pleases them," said the Pew director, Andrew Kohut. "It may mean that we're gravitating to some kind of European situation," in which people "choose a news organization based on its political coloration."

Reflecting a long decline in public confidence in the objectivity of campaign news, the survey of 1,500 adults, released Sunday, found that only 38 percent said coverage of this election cycle was free from any partisan tilt. In a similar survey in 1987, 62 percent of Americans said campaign coverage was free from bias. As recently as 1996, that number was still as high as 53 percent.

The poll also found that charges of bias are increasingly coming from both ends of the political spectrum. Conservatives have long decried a liberal media bias, and 42 percent of the Republicans surveyed said campaign coverage favors the Democrats.

The bigger news may be that 29 percent of Democrats now see political news as favoring the Republicans, compared with only 19 percent in the 2000 election cycle.

"Originally it was conservatives and Republicans who complained about media bias. The Democrats and liberals have now started complaining as well," said S. Robert Lichter, president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a nonpartisan media research organization.

Kohut, for his part, said that Democrats are concerned that "Bush is getting a free ride from the press" and that they're responding to the "emergence of Fox as a news outlet with a more conservative point of view."

The Pew survey also found differences in how Democrats and Republicans choose news outlets. While 29 percent of Republicans cited the Fox News Channel -- which some liberals accuse of conservative bias -- as a main source of campaign news, only 14 percent of Democrats turned to Fox for that function.

The big broadcast networks, particularly ABC and CBS, have generated charges of bias from conservatives over the years. And the poll indicated that only 24 percent of Republicans use those networks as a primary election news source, compared with 40 percent of Democrats.

A higher percentage of Democrats than Republicans -- 27 percent to 20 percent -- said they rely on CNN, a news organization that has been targeted by rival Fox as a bastion of liberal bias.

"I think what's different in the data is the `cafeteria' dimension" of selecting an outlet to fit one's own views, said Thomas Patterson, the Bradlee professor of government and the press at Harvard's Shorenstein Center.

"There's a lot more choices out there, and gravitation to compatible media. . . . If you look at how the public really cuts through information, they come at it from a values perspective," Patterson said.

Lichter said the perception of bias in political news may well be based on the media's performance in recent campaigns. He cited the 1992 election cycle as the "watershed year for political journalism [when] there was a systematic push for journalists to play a more central role at the expense of candidates," which resulted in more aggressive media monitoring of political advertising and rhetoric. "Certainly," he added, "the news coverage has become much more opinionated in recent years."