It’s likely not that — it’s that reporters are trained not to make themselves the story — or part of it. They are trained not to influence events but to report on them; to get public officials on the record but not influence or coerce what they say.

Also watch for ratings that are based more on how coverage makes their "analysts" feel rather than on substantive issues in the reporting. You may not like what a public official has to say, or the consensus view of experts, but that doesn't mean quoting them in news reports constitutes bias.

Watch out for those that lump opinion pieces (which have no aspiration to be impartial) in with news reports -- and misuse terms like "news" and "coverage" to describe the work of outlets that do no original reporting of their own.

If you relatively recently started studying politics and think you have discovered a simple trick to generate a perpetual majority party and then win elections forever, and a large portion of the world is just too stupid to see it, I would ask you to consider that you might be overconfident.

I know a lot of journalists, but I don’t know one who would claim that they’re immune to messaging. In fact, I think most journalists acutely understand that all humans are vulnerable to these kinds of influences, which is why they need standards & guidelines to minimize their influence in reporting

Finally, frequency is also relevant to the findings about perceptions that the press gives advertisers special treatment. It seems like an understatement to say it's rare in standards-based newsrooms, yet 15% of teens think it happens always/almost always and another 34% think it happens often.

I'd argue the same for verifying facts before publishing them. Again, something reporters & editors do every single day in any legitimate newsroom. Yet only 30% of teens believe this is something journos do "always, almost always, or often." 47% say only "sometimes," 19% "rarely" & 4% "never."

But journalists gather information from multiple sources in the vast majority of their reporting--every single day. At a bare minimum, that's certainly "often." Agree here that single-source stories do get published (& generally shouldn't), but that doesn't make this perception re: frequency right.

Respectfully, I'd still argue these are misperceptions. We didn't ask teens if these things *ever* happen, we asked how often they think they happen.

Only 29% of teens think professional journalists & the orgs they work for "always, almost always or often" gather information from multiple sources.