April 2, 2026
If there is one thing that sets my teeth on edge these days it’s the phrase “the left-wing mainstream media.”
I hear it from right-wing voices, both those I respect and those I don’t.
It’s as if the centre just fell out public life and disappeared with the wave of a magic wand. It suggests a world that does not exist.
Is it possible to move a discussion of newsroom culture, values and that hackneyed B-word, “bias,” from the realm of opinion to numbers?
Well buried in a recent scholarly article about harassment of US journalists is some supporting demographic data collected from nearly 15,000 journalists.
In 2022, US journalists expressed their “partisanship” (how they voted or were registered to vote) as:
- Independent – 51%
- Democrat – 35.4%
- Republican – 3.4%
- No Preference – 10.2%
The Republican numbers kind of pop out, don’t they?
A generation ago the Republican-leaning cohort among journalists was closer to 20%. It began to change quickly during the oughts, so this is not about Trump. Some would argue it’s about changing newsroom hiring preferences (in favour of college grads) but I’m not sure that’s true and I suggest we don’t step into that rabbit hole just now.
My point is that the voting preferences are a reasonable proxy for “left, centre and right” wing values among journalists. In the US, it’s decidedly centre-left within the prevailing spectrum of political values.
What about in Canada?
An in-depth study of Canadian journalists’ self-perception of their occupational role was published in 2019 with data collected between 2014 and 2016 and correlated to an ongoing global study.
The Canadian response rate of 342 (out of potentially 12,000 journalists) was not ideal, but you can’t blame the study authors for that.
Above all, the study demonstrates that Canadian journalists cleave to the dryly described “monitorial” role (I call it the “watchdog ideology”):
- Be a detached observer
- Report things as they are
- Monitor and scrutinize politics and business
- Provide analysis of current affairs
- Tell stories about the world
- Educate the audience.
They identified less with “the interventionist journalist role,” although they were dead-centre in the agree/disagree spectrum over “advocating for social change.”
They tended to be in stronger agreement with an assigned role for journalists to “promote tolerance and cultural diversity.”
As for “political stance” of these Canadian journalists, on a scale of 1 (Left) to 10 (Right) the mean average of self-identification was 4.22. Narrowly, centre-left. The authors noted that “60.5% of journalists who stated their political stance identified themselves in the centre-most range of 4, 5 and 6.”
If you insist upon data of their voting preferences, and why not, the data came back this way, covering the 2011 and 2015 federal elections:
- Liberals – 27.1%
- NDP – 23.7%
- Conservatives – 13.5%
- Bloc, Green, other – 13.5%
- Did not vote – 4.8%
(And 22% of those surveyed ignored this question).
The actual outcome in the 2015 election was Liberals (39%), Conservatives (32%), NDP (20%), Bloc (4.7%) and Green (3.4%), numbers that are relevant to sketching out our own Canadian political spectrum of “left to right.”
Altogether, I read these numbers supporting the notion that the Canadian cohort of journalists is centre-left, although how much “left” is a little hard to say.
Now we’ve settled that, the next step is a discussion about how well Canadian journalists, hailing from various places on the political spectrum, practice the professional detachment of journalism; an imperfect but essential pursuit of The Truth.
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This blog post is copyrighted by Howard Law, all rights reserved. 2026.
MediaPolicy.ca 
The political leanings of journalists at large (in 2019) doesn’t really tell us very much. Can they be applied to opinion columnists and broadcast journalists anchoring political news? What do they tell us about the political content of the National Post or the Walrus or community newspapers? If the suggestion is that Canadian media reflects the biases of the “centre-left”, there is a rather large disconnect with actual lived experience. However, it is a good entry point to a much needed debate about the political gaps and deserts in our media landscape that is driving many of us into the substack and podcast wilderness.
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