Most claims of media bias involve partisan politics or left/right issues. However, with those everyone is aware that there are differences of opinion and there are people and organizations who are recognized as representatives of major tendencies. This puts some limits on bias--a journalist will try to have some balance between Democrats and Republicans, or experts from right-leaning and left-leaning think tanks. With issues that don't fall into classic partisan or ideological terms, there won't be the same tendency to seek balance between different points of view, or even to realize that there are different points of view. So bias may be more likely to occur on issues that aren't closely linked to traditional political divisions.
These thoughts are inspired by the coverage of remote vs. in-person work in the New York Times. The prevailing tone is that remote work is obviously better. Peter Coy says that "bosses are dragging white-collar workers back to the office despite evidence that they’re happier and often more productive when working from home," without linking to any evidence. This piece by Emma Goldberg cites a survey sponsored by "Future Forum, a research group backed by Slack," and then quotes a vice president of "Future Forum, Slack's research consortium."* It offers several accounts of people who strongly favor remote work; it only briefly mentions that there are people who don't, and suggests that their reasons don't deserve to be taken very seriously: "some people wrote to The Times to mourn their bonding conversations with teammates over Dungeons & Dragons, Nintendo and Marvel."
If they aren't going to look for data from established survey organizations that don't have an obvious financial stake in the issue, I'll have to do it myself. Pew surveys in October 2020 and January 2022 asked "would you say that, for the most part, the responsibilities of your job can be done from home, or cannot be done from home?" For those who said that they could (38% in 2020 and 39% in 2021) they asked "Looking ahead to when the coronavirus outbreak is over, if you had a choice, would you want to work from home all of the time, most of the time, some of the time, rarely, or never?" The results:
All Most Some Rarely Never
2020 27% 27% 33% 8% 3%
2022 35% 25% 28% 6% 3%
The 2020 survey also asked questions about how much people worked at home before the coronavirus outbreak and how much they worked at home now--about 70% were working at home more than they had been before--and about how some conditions at work had changed since the beginning of the outbreak. By comparing the people who were working at home more than they had been to those who were not, we can get a sense of how remote work affected specific aspects of work. I'll summarize the results by the difference between positive and negative responses. For example, 21% of those who were working at home more said that they were more satisfied with their job than they had been and 23% were less satisfied (55% said no change), for a balance of -2.
WFH more WFH same/less
Satisfied with job -2 -11
Flexibility in hours +37 +2
Job security -8 -11
Balance work/family +4 -16
Connected co-workers -53 -15
Opportunities to advance -17 -12
Know what supervisor -16 -9
expects
Productive +3 -5
More hours +19 +5
Some of the differences are as expected--people who were working at home more had a gain in flexibility of work hours and work/family balance. They reported a big drop in feeling connected to their co-workers, which isn't surprising, but is sometimes disputed by supporters of remote work. There are also some that are less predictable. One is that people who are working from home report working more hours than before. Another is that they have a larger decline in knowing what the supervisor expects of you. Advocates of remote work sometimes claim that it reduces the role of office politics and personal likes and dislikes (see the Goldberg article), which would suggest that people who were working at home would gain in this department.
The survey also contained the standard demographic variables. I compared the preferences for frequency of remote work (5=all.....1=none). Women were more favorable than men (3.77 vs. 3.61). Blacks were more favorable than non-Hispanic whites (3.9 vs. 3.66). For other ethnic groups, the confidence intervals were large, but the means were closer to the white mean than the black mean (they ranged from 3.6 to 3.73). More educated people were less favorable to remote work--for all categories below a 4-year degree, the means were over 3.8, for a 4-year degree 3.74, and for a graduate degree 3.47. Age, region of country, and living in a metropolitan area didn't make much difference. There were also a few political variables--since so many things have become partisan issues, I figured I should look at those. There was no clear pattern--people who said they were "very conservative" were more favorable to working from home, but there was no association with opinions on the handful of political questions in the survey.
The obvious explanation for the differences in preference by gender is that women are expected to do more in taking care of the home and family, so they value flexibility more. Explanation of the black/white and educational differences is as straightforward--I'll discuss those in my next post.
*If the sampling procedures for the survey were clearly described, I wouldn't discount it just on the basis of its sponsorship. But the description is vague and doesn't suggest that it was conducted by an organization with experience in survey research.
[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]
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