Newsroom Ideological Diversity and the Ideological Sorting of Journalists †

Abstract

In efforts to curb ideological bias in the news, citizens, academics, and journalists have highlighted the importance of newsroom ideological diversity. Using a large-scale survey of newspaper political journalists in the United States, we examine the diversity of ideological perspectives of political journalists across newspapers and communities and how ideological misalignments with the newsroom and the local community relate to those journalists’ employment decisions. We find political newspaper reporters regularly work for newspapers and in communities that do not mirror their own ideological perspectives. However, by following newspaper political journalists’ employment decisions over a three-year period, we also find that the ideological differences between those journalists and the newsroom where they work (but not ideological difference with the local community) are related to an increase in journalists’ desire to change jobs and in the likelihood they will actually seek other employment, either within journalism or outside of the profession.