The Media Elite

The Media Elite: America's New Powerbrokers is a non-fiction book written by S. Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda Lichter, published in 1986. It details a social scientific study of the ideological commitments of elite journalists in the United States, and the consequences of those commitments on both the reporting itself and on its reception by the public. The book states that because of the political opinions of journalists, the elite media has a liberal media bias. The conservative Media Research Center contends that The Media Elite is "the most widely quoted media study of the 1980s and remains a landmark today."

The book is based on a survey, completed in 1980, of 238 journalists randomly selected from America's most influential news organizations: ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. Content analysis and audience reception studies were used to determine if deviations between the views held by journalists and those held by the general public had any effect on the way the news gets reported and the resulting beliefs held by the public.

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