ABSTRACT
Journalists working for news magazines and the wire services in the early 1990s were much more likely to be of the Jewish faith than the population at large, offering some support for Alter’s claim, but this was not true for the other news media. “Real” journalists differed most from Murphy Brown on personal living arrangements. A majority were married, although male journalists were more likely to be married than were female journalists. Stephen Hess found a similar tendency in 1991 for White House reporters, but slightly fewer saying they were liberal and considerably more saying conservative. The cultural elite have been described as being “less connected to conventional standards of morality than most of the public.” Our survey of journalists included some questions about the acceptability of questionable reporting practices that were also asked in public opinion surveys during the 1980s.
