These Three Charts Confirm Conservatives' Worst Fears About American Culture

It turns out there is quantitative proof academia, Hollywood, and the media actually are dominated by liberals.

In a data set provided to Business Insider, the non-partisan political analytics firm Crowdpac used information about federal campaign contributions dating back to 1980 to determine the political biases of various professions. Crowdpac found the entertainment industry, news media, and academia were among the most liberal professions in America.

Crowdpac CEO and co-founder Steve Hilton noted this data matches with perceptions about Hollywood and the media.

"In compiling all this data, and building these tools, we have the opportunity to shine some light on the political system and reveal some interesting insights and trends," Hilton said. "For example, our real data conforms with the claims that have been circulated about the extremely liberal profile of the entertainment and media sectors."

Indeed, a Gallup poll released in September found trust in the US news media is at an all-time low and 44% of Americans believe it is too liberal.

Crowdpac's data analysis technique gives a good objective measure of ideology. Rather than relying on self-reported views and opinions from surveys, the company looks at how individuals put their money where their mouth is by analyzing what kinds of candidates they give money to. Hilton said Crowdpac's overall goal is to provide people "good objective, non-partisan information about the candidates on their ballot" in order to "boost the number of small donors and reduce the influence of big money in politics."

Here's Crowdpac's results showing the number of donors working in newspapers and print media falling in each ideology score. The blue bars to the left indicate people in each industry who are more liberal, and the red bars to the right show those who are more conservative:

Liberal donors absolutely dominate conservative donors in the newspaper and print media industry. Crowdpac's data set, which includes donor records going back to 2004, includes 1,743 donors to the right of center, compared to 8,976 donors to the left of center. The liberal donors are also strongly concentrated on the far left of Crowdpac's spectrum.

The entertainment industry, if anything, is skewed even more to the left than the print media:

And academia shows, once again, a nearly identical strong liberal skew: