KEY INSIGHTS

In the World of Worlds of Journalism Study 2.0:

• 65.2% of NZ journalists self-identified their political views as being left of centre (scores 0-4)
• 23.2% as centre (score = 5)
• 11.6% as right of centre (scores 6-10)

Median = 4
Average = 3.7
5.6x more journalists are left-wing than right-wing.

KEY QUESTIONS

1. Which media outlet(s) can we trust the MOST to provide accurate and balanced political coverage?
2. Which media outlet(s) can we trust the LEAST to provide accurate and balanced political coverage?

…

Have your say
LinkedIn

…

Full data analysis
Please contact us if you would like the complete research.

…

Other notes:

• All available information has been published except for 28 responses out of 338 total responses for this question which didn’t give an answer. These are listed as “Missing” in the raw data table provided. There were 310 completed answers for this question.
• You might also be interested in the other 13 data tables/graphs presented on https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/82228004-cb16-4269-a778-c4f1ceeb757a/downloads/Worlds%20of%20Journalism%20Study%202.0.%20Journalists%20in.pdf?ver=1667198828492. For example, 60% of respondents were female, and some ethnicities are underrepresented in the field of journalism.
• Methodology as listed on page 2 of the report:
  • “Journalists from all known media organisations were sent an email invitation to an online survey.”
  • “Approximately 1200 invitations were sent. Of these, 359 completed the full survey, a response rate of 29.9%.”
  • “We estimate we have a confidence interval of 4.56% at the 95% confidence level, giving a margin of error of + or – 2.25%.”
  • “We base this on an estimated population of 1600 full-time print (inc online) and broadcast journalists.”
  • “This is the population as recorded in the most recent NZ Government census (2018), which recorded approximately 1200 print and 400 broadcast journalists.”
• Stuff, NZME (NZ Herald and Newstalk ZB), TVNZ, and RNZ are all cited as examples, so it would be fair to assume that some of their staff took part in the survey.
• Additional information provided:
  • “All NZ media organisations were invited, and we got a reasonabe cross-section from all.”
  • “It [the fieldwork] was done between December 2021 and about April 2022.”
• The report, page 6, has some typos at the time of publishing which we corrected in the updated graph above following our discussions with the researchers:
  • The question asked was “In political matters, people talk of “the left”, “the right”, and the “center”. On a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 is left, 10 is right, and 5 is center, where would you place yourself? 0 … 10″ As such, we:
    • Removed the terms “Extreme left”, “Hard left”, “Left”, “Mild left”, “Middle leftish”, “Middle rightist”, “Mild right”, “Right”, “Hard right”, and “Extreme right”. These were added beyond the question to help audience interpretation, but we felt it was best to present the labels used in the question.
    • Used the terms “Left” for 0, “Centre” for 5, and “Right” for 10 which were asked in the question.
    • Used the British English spelling of “Centre” rather than the US English spelling of “Center”.
  • We changed “.00” to “Left”/the 0 score
  • We changed the highest bar to “Centre”, not “Middle leftish”
• For the colours used in the graph:
  • We chose red to represent left since it is the primary colour of the largest left-wing party in New Zealand at present (Labour) and used 15%, 30%, 45%, 60% transparency fills moving left to right.
  • We chose a 75% transparency purple for the mid-way centre position between left and right (being the colour created when you mix red and blue).
  • We chose blue to represent right since it is the primary colour of the largest right-wing party in New Zealand at present (National) and used 15%, 30%, 45%, 60% transparency fills moving right to left. Some may argue that National is now more centrist, but we opted to go with traditional and popular opinions that Labour/red = left and National/blue = right.
• All numbers are provisional and subject to revision.

Thank you to the Factors who helped pull this together.

…

SOURCE:

• https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/82228004-cb16-4269-a778-c4f1ceeb757a/downloads/Worlds%20of%20Journalism%20Study%202.0.%20Journalists%20in.pdf?ver=1667198828492 and supplementary information provided by the researchers.

Republished with permission.

…

Did we make a mistake, or have you got smarter data?  Let us know.