Newsrooms will keep losing their conservative audiences

The hard question isn’t how journalists should cover Trump, but how they should relate to Trump voters. Now that the furor of the election has died down, perhaps political coverage might be perceived as a little less partisan. And perhaps there’s an opening for conservative audiences to return to the news, if they’re not worried about journalists shilling for Biden or Harris.

Perhaps, but unlikely. Inviting conservative audiences back into the fold would require major changes to the way newsrooms operate, and I just don’t think we’ll see that in 2025.

If you’re any sort of media watcher, you’re probably aware that most major newsrooms now serve mostly liberal audiences. Here are the self-identified politics of those who say they got political and election news from each source as of 2019, according to Pew Research.

Conservative readers of The Washington Post had declined to “single digits” by 2018, with over 80% of readers identifying as “liberal” or “very liberal.” This year we learned that NPR’s conservative audience had declined to 11%.

There are different ways to react to this. Do conservative audience losses mean that news publishers are biased? I don’t think that’s the right place to start. Instead, we should ask about the mission of the newsroom. Who, exactly, do journalists hope to serve?

It’s okay if a newsroom decides it only exists to serve liberal audiences, just as it’s okay if it only serves conservatives. If the idea of media pluralism means anything, it means that. But there is also a long tradition of journalism as a shared resource, a unifier, providing high quality information for all. It would be interesting and probably useful for newsroom leadership to take a stand: either recommit to the principle of serving all Americans regardless of their politics, or admit that it just isn’t interesting anymore to keep conservatives engaged.

If your news organization is one of those who wants to serve all citizens, there are ways you can learn how. Tangle is a small but rapidly growing newsletter that has a truly bipartisan format — and an audience to match. Trusting News has extensive advice and trainings for newsrooms who want to connect with audiences of all types, including specific advice for connecting with conservatives. Ground News is a paid news aggregator which curates stories that are not being reported by one side.

But it grieves me to predict that even the newsrooms who say they want to serve all Americans won’t do any of this. At best, they’ll mostly continue to ignore the problem. At worst, some journalists will blame the audience. If you’ve been around the professional journalism scene over the last decade you know what I mean. You’ve heard the comments in bars in D.C., or dinner parties in New York, or the hallways of journalism conferences. They don’t actually value the truth. They are uneducated. They are racist. Anyway, why would we bother trying to inform people who hate us?

There’s a grain of truth to all of these criticisms. There really is more misinformation on the conservative side — as judged by conservatives! (But then again, there is a dearth of quality conservative news outlets.) Republican voters really do tend to be less educated. (Meanwhile, Democrats have become the party of wealthy voters and donors.) And yes, conservatives score slightly higher on social scientists’ measures of racism. (But available data suggests racism isn’t what put Trump back in office.)

And while there certainly are extremists out there, most conservatives aren’t. As Joy Meyer of Trusting News put it: “It is reasonable for journalists to feel defeated by people with a deeply entrenched view that journalists are the enemy. But it is dangerous (and inaccurate) to assume that means distrust in the news is always connected to belief in extreme political views.”

If you’re reading this, you probably have liberal politics. Nothing wrong with that. The problem is, pretty much everyone in journalism also has liberal politics. Journalists as a whole are significantly more liberal than average. By some estimates, most are more liberal than Democratic politicians like Barack Obama and even Bernie Sanders. Here’s one estimate of journalists’ political ideology based on their Twitter networks, which previous research showed accurately predicts partisan self-identification:

This is an issue because we all tend to stereotype people who are politically different as more extreme than they actually are. This is called the perception gap and holds across many different political issues. To make matters worse, the most extreme politicians receive a wildly disproportionate share of coverage, further skewing our everyday perception of the other side. Journalists bear some responsibility for this, of course.

These attitudes and misperceptions aren’t going to change without sustained cultural work within the newsroom. It would require trainings, editorial guidance on language, a different approach to editorial transparency, perhaps sensitivity readers — ironically, all of the apparatus of inclusiveness that newsrooms have already built.

I am sure that what I am suggesting will be interpreted by some as arguing for false balance, or letting lies go unchallenged. That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m saying the fundamental reason that newsrooms are having trouble keeping conservative audiences is that conservatives are other. Newsrooms tend to stereotype them unintentionally, not pay enough attention to the stories that matter to them, and generally signal disinterest or even disrespect. That isn’t good journalism by anyone’s book.

The hard question is not how journalists should cover Trump, but how they should relate to Trump voters. If there’s one bright spot in all of this, it’s that genuine empathy across differences is exactly the kind of thing that journalists are trained to do.