Journalists' partisan leanings in Sweden & SVT

I'm currently waiting on the data from Journalist '05, a regular (every five years) survey of Swedish journalists, which are as I write being turned into book form by Prof. Kent Asp and colleagues. In the meantime, here are some results from the 2000 survey:

	Public	Journalists	SVT Journalists
Left	15	31	33
Social Democrats	32	27	23
Centre	4	3	2
People's Party	5	14	17
Moderates	25	10	6
Greens	6	10	14
Christian Democrats	13	5	5

Journalists in general are more left-libertarian than the general population, being twice as likely to support the Left party, and almost twice as likely to support the Green party. Journalists with public broadcaster SVT are not markedly more left-wing than journalists in general: although they are more likely to support the Left, they are less likely to support the Social Democrats. In being three-times more likely to support the Folkpartei and more than twice as likely to support the Greens as the general population, they seem to favour the kind of well-meaning, intellectual borderline left positions taken on in the UK by the Liberal Democrats.

Worst. Minister. Ever

One can tell something about Italian journalism by the way in which Italian newspapers and television news bulletins treat editorials from the Financial Times and the Economist, two papers with deserved reputations for straight-talking. Yet when these editorials reach Italy, they quickly become sensationalized. And so, when the Financial Times published on its website a ranking of Eurozone finance ministers, putting Tomasso Padoa Schioppa at the bottom of the list, it quickly made the headlines and led to a ridiculous poll on TgLa7 ("Padoa-Schioppa is the worst member of the government: yes or no?").

Like many of these rankings, the devil is in the details - more specifically, in who is polled. In the case of the FT's three-star ranking of finance ministers, it seems to have been a quick series of phone calls around the office ("Each finance minister has also been ranked out of three by FT correspondents according to their political effectiveness"). The dangers of group-think are considerable. In sum, a pleasant game, but the FT's considered judgement - "has upset business and resorted to budget tricks but will probably succeed in cutting the deficit" - doesn't tell us much we didn't know before.