New York Times columnist John Tierney cited questionable evidence to suggest that Democrats dominate the ranks of the U.S. media. In an October 11 column (subscription only) titled "Where Cronies Dwell," Tierney characterized the American press corps as “heavily Democratic -- more than 80 percent, according to some surveys of Washington journalists.” But Tierney's assertion contradicts a recent poll of U.S. journalists, which shows the proportion of Democrats in the press corps to be nowhere near the 80 percent that Tierney claimed.

As Media Matters for America previously noted, the 2002 American Journalist survey found that 37 percent of journalists called themselves Democrats, while 18.6 percent said they were Republicans, and 33.5 percent called themselves independents.

In asserting that “more than 80 percent” of the American press corps is Democratic, Tierney appears to be citing a 1995 Freedom Forum poll (Kenneth Dautrich and Jennifer Necci Dineen, “Media Bias: What Journalists and the Public Say about It,” Public Perspective, October/November 1996, pages 7-14) which found that 89 percent of Washington bureau chiefs and congressional correspondents who responded to the poll voted for Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential election. This study is problematic for at least two reasons. First, a survey of how American journalists voted in a single election over a decade ago says little about the party affiliations of journalists today. Second, according to media critic Eric Alterman in his book What Liberal Media?: The Truth About Bias and the News (Basic Books, 2003), only 139 of the 323 journalists asked to participate in the Freedom Forum study actually did, “a response rate so low that most social scientists would reject it as inadequately representative.”