Tim Pool on statistics: what the evidence says · JRE #1258
“according to data, I think this is from Pew, most new journalism jobs are in blue districts. So you've got people who only hear the same thing.”
What the evidence says
The specific finding Tim Pool describes -- that a large majority of news jobs are located in counties that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 -- traces to a 2017 Politico analysis by Jack Shafer and Tucker Doherty ("The Media Bubble Is Worse Than You Think"), not to Pew Research Center. That analysis reported that roughly 72% of news jobs were in counties Clinton won, rising to about 90% for internet-publishing jobs specifically. Pew Research Center has published separate reports on U.S. newsroom employment documenting geographic concentration by region and metro area -- for example, that about a quarter of newsroom employees work in the Northeast and roughly a fifth work in the New York, Los Angeles, or Washington, D.C. metro areas -- but Pew's own newsroom-employment reporting does not frame this concentration in terms of Democratic ('blue') versus Republican voting districts or counties. A 2020 NPR interview with media researcher Nikki Usher, discussing journalists clustering into insular professional 'microbubbles,' lends some support to the general 'media bubble' concept Pool invokes, but that piece examines journalist social-network behavior on Twitter, not county-level vote totals, job counts, or any Pew statistic. Overall, the underlying observation about geographic clustering of journalism jobs has some empirical basis, but the claim as stated misattributes a Politico-originated statistic to Pew Research Center, and no Pew report frames newsroom concentration in explicitly partisan 'blue district' terms.