PrintA brave man
John Tierney writes a brave New York Times column today on the topic of left wing cronyism, as revealed by journalism school professorships and his own experience in 6 different newspapers. Unless you pay for the "Times Select" access to NYT pundits, you can't read the full article. But here are soime excerpts within fair use copyright limitations:
Journalists and legal scholars have been decrying "cronyism" and calling for "mainstream" values when picking a Supreme Court justice. But how do they go about picking the professors to train the next generation of journalists and lawyers?
David Horowitz, the conservative who is president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, analyzed the political affiliations of the faculty at 18 elite journalism and law schools. By checking all the party registrations he could find, he concluded that Democrats outnumber Republicans by 8 to 1 at the law schools, with the ratio ranging from 3 to 1 at Penn to 28 to 1 at Stanford.
A favorable reference to David Horowitz in the second graf of a NYT piece? I pinched myself to awaken from a dream. Then I noticed at the bottom that was an actual hyperlink to frontpagemagazine.com And it worked, so I must not be dreaming.
I realize, from experience at six newspapers, that most journalists try not to impose their prejudices on their work. When I did stories whose facts challenged liberal orthodoxies, editors were glad to run them. When liberal reporters wrote stories, they tried to present the conservative perspective.
The problem isn't so much the stories that appear as the ones that no one thinks to do. Journalists naturally tend to pursue questions that interest them. So when you have a press corps that's heavily Democratic — more than 80 percent, according to some surveys of Washington journalists — they tend to do stories that reflect Democrats' interests.
When they see a problem, their instinct is to ask what the government can do to solve it. I once sat in on a newspaper story conference the day after an armored—car company was robbed of millions of dollars bound for banks. The first idea that came up for a follow—up story was: Does this robbery show the need for stricter regulation of armored—car companies?
Hat tip: Ed Lasky
Thomas Lifson 10 11 05
