Hans J.G. Hassell, Ph.D., an Associate Professor of Political Science at Florida State University, was the lead author on the article “Newsroom Ideological Diversity and the Ideological Sorting of Journalists” published in Political Research Quarterly. The following summary was written by Keira Jackson (M.S. Integrated Marketing Communications ‘24).
Hans J.G. Hassell, Ph.D. – an Associate Professor of Political Science at FSU – was the lead author on the article “Newsroom Ideological Diversity and the Ideological Sorting of Journalists” published in Political Research Quarterly with Matthew R. Miles, of Brigham Young University – Idaho; and Breanna Morecraft, a former FSU undergraduate and law student at FSU’s College of Law.
The authors found that many newspaper political journalists work in newsrooms and in communities with ideological preferences that do not align with their own. However, the authors found that journalists who feel that they do not fit in ideologically with the news outlet where they work are more likely to say they want to change jobs and to actually change employment.
“Ideological diversity in a newsroom shapes what news is covered and how it is reported; helping to expand perspectives, avoid groupthink, and eliminate clear ideological biases,” Dr. Hassell said. “Our work documents the challenges news organizations face in attempting to foster ideological diversity that will create better news coverage.”
In 2017, the authors surveyed over 15,000 newspaper political journalists. The journalists answered questions about their own political ideology as well as their perceptions of the ideology of the newspaper outlet where they worked; their career goals over the next ten years; and whether they hoped to stay at their current place of employment or wanted to seek employment elsewhere (either within or outside of journalism).
In the spring of 2020, the authors followed up to identify where survey respondents were working to see whether they were still employed at the same location and, if they were not, whether they were still working in journalism. The authors then looked to see whether ideological alignment with the newsroom were related to journalists’ employment decisions.
The authors hope that by identifying these patterns of behavior among journalists, future work, both scholarly and practical can be done to identify potential ways to counter those pressures and foster increased ideological diversity within newsrooms through helping news organizations retain in the newsroom and encourage those reporters and journalists who provide greater ideological diversity.
To learn more about Dr. Hassell and his work, click here, or to learn more about the Department of Political Science, visit coss.fsu.edu/polisci.
Hassell, H. J. G., Miles, M. R., & Morecraft, B. (2023). Newsroom Ideological Diversity and the Ideological Sorting of Journalists. Political Research Quarterly, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/10659129231182145