A new study from the Pew Research Center shows American workers in the Midwest and South are severely underrepresented in online journalism. This digital bias is particularly troubling in the age of Big Tech and helps explain the media’s pervasive bias that belittles or ignores the values of conservative Americans from “flyover states.”

Media figures who decry a decline in social capital and civility in public discourse seem blind to the values gap they create and widen each day through content that maligns and represent conservatives on everything from culture and faith to politics. According to Pew, which analyzed U.S. Census Bureau figures covering the period from 2013 to 2017, workers from the South comprise 37% of all American workers but only 21% of Internet news publishing and broadcasting workers. That is just 57% of Southern workers on a proportional basis. Midwestern workers are even less proportionally represented, with Midwest workers comprising 22% of the American workforce overall but just 10% of online journalists — a mere 45% proportional representation.