> In this specific case, it's mainly just partisanship: some people don't like that Silver's data shows Obama with an ~80% chance of winning, so plug their ears.
News flash: It's no secret that the news media (except for Fox) has a distinct Democratic tilt. I agree with your premise that journalists are closet partisans, but I disagree that they'd be upset at an analysis that favors Obama for partisan reasons.
Honest Q that I hope won't sound too partisan: I think it's pretty accurate that most members of the news media tilt to the Democratic side -- although I think they tend to be much more in the Clinton model rather than the Kucinich model, which is to say about what would have been considered moderate Republican in the 60s (socially fairly liberal but economically rather lassez-faire, save for a few fairly stock Democratic positions like being pro-union).
However, that doesn't necessarily mean the actual news stories are biased. There may be tilts in the sense that, say, a Keynesian and a Hayekian might sincerely intend to write the same story objectively but still reveal a bit of bias in the finished result -- but isn't that qualitatively different from the kind of editorializing we see on Fox (and, since they decided that counter-programming Fox was their ticket to success, MSNBC)?
Michelle Malkin, Jonah Goldberg, David Brooks (debatable), Charles Krauthammer
talk show: Glenn Beck? Rush Limbaugh? Pat Buchanan is on the communist PBS show McLaughlin Group.
Colbert isn't a journalist, but talk radio is 99% conservative or if not outright conservative then advocating "common sense"-y solutions that somehow always come out conservative.
Joe Scarborough quite literally is a republican (6 years in the house from FL-1) and runs three (I think) hours of coverage every morning on the "most liberal" of the cable networks. The whole notion of the "liberal media" as a unified force is itself a creation of the decidedly conservative wing of the media dominated by News Corp. MSNBC has a bunch of coverage that slants left. Fox is actually run by republican partisans. Yet it's the people on the right who complain the loudest, and the reason is precicely that they have their own partisan media to push the message.
Well, yes. So the comment is essentially "journalists lean Democratic if you ignore a huge concentration of Republicans". Which is not much of a statement at all.
On the subject of actual newsroom expenses: Pew Research Center for Excellence in Journalism has an interesting piece on the budgets of major cable news networks. [1]
These charts (from [1] and [2]) are particularly interesting:
In short, when compared to CNN: despite operating few domestic and foreign bureaus, Fox News pulled in more revenue and had nearly as large an audience (as measured by viewers tuning in for 60 minutes or more monthly). Fox also allocates over 70% of its budget to "program expenses" (including salaries for its hosts), whereas CNN's program expenses are about 44%. The difference in staffing figures are also drastic: ~4000 for CNN, 1272 for Fox.
News flash: It's no secret that the news media (except for Fox) has a distinct Democratic tilt. I agree with your premise that journalists are closet partisans, but I disagree that they'd be upset at an analysis that favors Obama for partisan reasons.