Do Journalists’ Political Orientations Translate into Partisan News Reporting? The Limits of Bias and the Limits of Counter Mechanisms

Journalists are regularly accused of being strongly left leaning, which critics claim leads to biased reporting. Previous research suggests this assumption may be over-simplistic, but direct empirical tests are rare, suffer from substantial shortcomings, and still need to acknowledge this process’s complexity. Therefore, we theorize the conditional nature of how journalists’ political orientations translate into their news reporting. We assert that journalists’ autonomy within organizational constraints and professional role orientations as an expression of journalism’s institutional logic may act as “correctives” against this translation. Our study combines a quantitative manual content analysis of political news items in Austria (n = 3,539) with a subsequent survey of 160 journalists who authored 626 of those items. We operationalize bias in news coverage via subjective evaluations of journalists, political party composition, and value frame composition in the news content they produce. The findings suggest that the left-right political orientation of journalists affects the use of subjectivity in reporting and political party composition, but in the opposite direction in the latter case, in which journalists seem to overcompensate for their individual views. There is only a tentative impact on value frame composition. Political ideology interacts with journalists’ autonomy and with their professional role orientations, but the mechanisms behind different kinds of bias differ fundamentally. We conclude that balancing out ideological biases is a delicate equilibrium utilizing various mechanisms involving organizational and institutional factors that must be continually renewed in a changing news ecosystem.