In recent months, many have made allegations that ESPN has a liberal bias. Some have made the conclusion that this perception may be impacting ESPN’s ratings, which have been impacted by less households receiving ESPN due to “cord-cutting.”
To respond to this perception, ESPN had May 3-7 Langer Research Associates of New York conduct a survey to try and measure the impact of perceived bias. Here are the results that ESPN has shared:
- Approximately two-thirds (64 percent) of respondents believe ESPN is getting it right in terms of mixing sports news and political issues. Another 10 percent had no opinion … and 8 percent said ESPN does not do enough politics in its programming.
- The proportion of viewers who see political bias in ESPN programming is unchanged since this survey was last conducted in October 2016 (even as recent months have seen a rise in the number of media outlets speculating on this theory).
- Of those who see a bias, 30 percent actually believe ESPN expresses a conservative viewpoint. Most importantly, even those who identify as conservative (or Republican) actually rate ESPN’s overall performance higher than those groups had in October.
- Using a 1-10 scale (with 10 being the best score), strong conservatives rank ESPN at 7.2 and Republicans give a 7.1, both up 0.5 from October. That compares to liberals and Democrats (each at 7.0), and is close to an 8, which is considered “highly rated” (45 percent of the total sample scored ESPN 8-10).
While it is doubtful that this survey will sway people’s perceptions, it does show that ESPN is aware of and is studying this issue.