I noted about a year ago that I had moved away from Politico as a prime source of news because of it’s anti-Palin, anti-Tea Party bias. That bias has been confirmed by the shoddy reporting of the accusations against Herman Cain, and its current obsession with Newt.
I still link to Politico because it is a source of reporting, but it’s not a source I look to first. I still like reading Ben Smith and I contribute from time to time to The Arena, including voicing criticism of Politico’s handling of Cain. But I have a problem with Politico’s news operation.
So I can’t say this is a surprise, via The Daily Caller, Under assault for liberal bias, Politico’s traffic dives:
Internet traffic and Web search measurement tools from several sources indicate that despite massive promotion efforts on MSNBC and in other venues, Politico.com is rapidly losing readers, especially outside of Washington, D.C.
Measurements of U.S. Web traffic provided to The Daily Caller by Compete, Inc. indicate that the number of total monthly visits to Politico.com dropped by 31.8 percent during the 18-month period that ended on October 31.
During that same period, and perhaps not coincidentally, Politico has come under sustained criticism from many observers, including Fox News Channel anchors and several prominent radio hosts, for exhibiting liberal bias in its news stories.
Other third-party traffic measurements also indicate a recent traffic decline for Politico.
I’m sure Politico does not agree with assessments of bias. Any more so than do the executives at MSNBC.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
They’ll never learn.
They deserve to go down the tube. Any news outlet that can’t or won’t print the news as it is doesn’t deserve to be in business or have a following. Conservatives don’t want the news to skew in their favor. They want the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Liberals will never understand this mainly because they wnt the exact opposite.
I have to agree with the Professor. Politico used to be on my “morning reading” list even though it leaned liberal. But after a while, the bias was turned up to such a volume that it just wasn’t worth the effort to stop by each morning. I think I dropped it off my list the day they did a feature on Michelle Obama being the “most” stylish First Lady ever. Gag!
I do think that Politico began to skew left not long after it was launched. While that doubtless has a lot to do with its beginning to lose audience in 2009, I think the decline also has to do with poor editing and a surprising lack of exclusives and news breaking.
— Poor editing – Nearly everyone who follows politics closely enough to bother with a site called Politico also reads or watches other sources — the NYT, WaPo, WSJ, Fox, MSNBC, Drudge, HuffPost, a hundred bloggers, etc. When you go to Politico, you are faced with a jumble of recent stories about just about everything. Since you probably already got a fix on the day’s news, why would you want to wade through 5, 10, 15 stories about all the same stuff. Politico tries to counter reader resistence by headlining one story and changing it three or fours times a day, but regular readers quickly learn that trick and understand that they are not likely to find anything you don’t already know in the headlined stories. After a while, you realize there is nothing useful about going to Politico after all.
Once you have a handle on news, a political junkie wants to spend available time reading or watching or listening to interesting commentary. In short, Politico cannot compete with primary news sources and for whatever reason, it does not carry much interesting commentary. If they published a dozen columnist contributors — half left and half right — they would have simething worthwhile. Maybe it’s too expensive for their business model.
— Lack of exclusives or newsbreakers – This is an obvious subset of the above. I find it astonishing that a news site devoted entirely to politics and a couple of dozen staffers cannot after four years come up with much in this category. Sources still orefer to go elsewhere. This is probably the reason why they bet so much on the Herman Cain stories.
Bottom line, regardless of party: if it’s biased, it ain’t news. The only allowance I’ll make is that it is difficult for humans to maintain objectivity in any field, but particularly from a standpoint of liberalism, of which so much is emotionally driven.
I used to listen to Dennis Miller’s radio show a lot (unable to listen to it much now as the broadcast time changed).
He had a few of the Politico reporters on all the time. Then, a few months ago when I happened to catch his show, he was talking to someone and he mentioned how he didn’t invite them on anymore. He felt they were too biased and unwilling to acknowledge it. He said they’d get prickly when he’d ask them legitimate questions critical of Obama and the Dems.
Dennis is a pretty straight shooter and I trust his opinion.
I don’t want news that just fits my worldview. I want an honest appraisal of what’s happening. I just find that people who share my worldview are honest appraisers 🙂
The entire industry is in decline. Why accelerate the crash?
Most of the writiers on Politico are Journolisters.
Remember that scandal?
Maybe not, because the MSM never talked about how these journOlists colluded to get Obama elected.
Frauds, all of them.
I too, cannot bring myself to go to Politico anymore. I knew it leaned left, but I wanted to understand the left point of view. The blatant abuse of Sarah Palin, and the way they would swoooooon over anything Obama did, made an ex-reader out of me. I will not click on even if I am interested in a story line.
Unlike the prof, I severed all ties to politico several weeks ago as my time is limited. I’ll tap a few offside pieces from the WAPO or NTY on occasion just to see what the opposition is up to.
Clearly Politico’s role is diminished and deservedly so. Maybe there’s hope for a political reversal in 2012 after all.
When you consider the dismal and declining ratings of virtually every liberally-biased outlet in print, broadcast, and internet, you wonder at what point they get it.
Never. That’s the problem and why the liberal outlets are going extinct. They’re blinded to economics by their ideology, much like the socialists are blinded to the “free rider” problem of their philosophy.