In the Fight: Stunning news! Stunning! Four times more journalists identify themselves as liberal than conservative

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Labels: Media

Anonymous said...: One thing in the article I found interesting:

"Most journalists, 53 percent, said they're moderate. 24 percent said they were liberal and eight percent very liberal."

Then the author (a rabid conservative) tells us that a moderate journalist is "really" a liberal.

That's like saying since most Christians really don't follow all the teachings of Jesus they are not really Christians.

Beyond all of this is the question of why so many journalists are liberals. Back in the day before Vietnam and Watergate, there were more conservatives in journalism but less honest reporting.

Since being a conservative means "conserving" the status quo, many public figures got a free pass. We never heard of JFK's Playboy ways or of how J. Edgar Hoover ran the F.B.I. like an American Gestapo. When the government said we were winning Vietnam, we believed it.

When Walter Cronkite went to Vietnam and saw first hand what was going on the tide began to turn. Woodward and Bernstein became the heroes of those who entered journalism in the 1970s.
Young people wanted to use reporting to make the world a better place.

I don’t know if it worked out quite the way they planned because the media has a rather poor public perception. Yet very few people want Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter types as their information source; March 21, 2008 at 10:22 AM