Shocka!

Here's a real shocker: Americans think the media is biased. Moreover, almost 2/3 of Americans think that bias is hard over to the left. What a surprise.

The vast majority of American voters believe media bias is alive and well – 83% of likely voters said the media is biased in one direction or another, while just 11% believe the media doesn’t take political sides, a recent IPDI/Zogby Interactive poll shows.

The Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet is based at George Washington University in Washington D.C.

Nearly two-thirds of those online respondents who detected bias in the media (64%) said the media leans left, while slightly more than a quarter of respondents (28%) said they see a conservative bias on their TV sets and in their column inches. The survey, which focuses on perceptions of the “old” and “new” media, will be released today at the PoliticsOnline Conference 2007 at GWU. It is also featured in the March issue of Zogby’s Real America newsletter, now available on zogby.com.

In other words, the smokescreen isn't working. People see the bias. Well, let me rephrase that, the smokescreen is alive and well and living in the minority who see a bias to the right. But that has more to do with the internal biases of those folks than with reality.