KneelforAnne
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ORIGINAL: FirmhandKY
Why Most Journalists Are Democrats
By Barbara Oakley, Ph.D., P.E.
Created Aug 3 2009 - 2:49pm
Psychology Today
quote:
Unsurprisingly, self-selection plays an important role in choosing a job. People choosing to do work related to prisons, for example, commonly show quite different characteristics than those who volunteer for work in helping disadvantaged youths. Academicians have very different characteristics than CEOs—or politicians, for that matter. ... "Journalism, like social work, tends to attract individuals with a keen interest in bettering the world.” In other words, journalists self-select based on a desire to help others. Socialism, with its “spread the wealth” mentality intended to help society’s underdogs, sounds ideal.
...
Instead, because of their ideological biases, professors often emphasize that corporations are the bad guys, while unions and the government—at least the type of government that supports higher paychecks for social science professors and jobs for their students—are good. This type of teaching makes the Democratic Party and its increasingly socialist ideals seem naturally desirable, and criticism about how those ideals will supposedly be met less likely.
...
Journalists sometimes say conservatives and political independents don’t go into journalism because they’re more interested in money. The unspoken message, of course, is that conservatives are greedy bastards who don’t have a social conscience. But many conservatives go through college to become stay-at-home housewives—they’re hardly Gordon Geckos. More likely, conservatives are turned off by the propaganda dished out in their social science classes.
...
Professors in the humanities and social sciences are taken aback by the kinds of claims I’m making here. How could there possibly be such problems within a discipline—or multiple disciplines—without most academicians being aware of them? But, having worked among the Soviets, I know that large groups of very intelligent people can fall into a collective delusion that what they are doing in certain areas is the right thing, when it's actually not the right thing at all.
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As far as investigating the dark side of the Major Issues, there’s a critically important concept that students of journalism are rarely taught. It’s easy to find any number of targets to write about in capitalist societies with an open press. But totalitarian governments are journalistic black holes. Journalists can tickle their self-righteous neurocircuitry every day (and many do), by exposing easy-to-find faults in democratic societies. But beyond their event horizon is the bigger story that often remains untold as it occurs—the horrific deaths of millions in totalitarian regimes like the former Soviet Union, Communist China, North Korea and, yes, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
...
If you’re a journalist, want to help people and want to tell the truth, what truth are you going to tell? Why, the truth you think helps people, of course!
Technically, that’s the truth.
But it’s very different than the truth.
Interesting read, although a bit short. The links in the original article give a lot more substance to the author's arguments.
I think that many people will claim that "news" today is about corporatism, since most of the news agencies are owned by large corporations, and I think there is some truth to that.
However, on just about every bit of reporting there is, a reporter is going to include his own biases, and beliefs. It's almost impossible not to do so.
Which is where the "liberal bias" that we on the right so talk about, and that the left so loudly disclaims comes from.
Firm
~FR~
No one exists in a vacuum. Everyone has an opinion, however, if it's too openly biased in one direction or another then the "news" is questionable.
For instance, when I cared, I did not watch FOX News because I knew that we had vastly differing opinions and I would simply end up yelling at the television. Highly un-productive.
I would venture to say that journalists are better versed in the small nuances that cause ripple effects in larger issues, thus small things that seem insignificant (to the general public) are actually more than pebbles in the puddle.
I tend to think that journalists favor (a bit) the party that is out of power, just to create (false?) conflict so that viewers tune in to see the verbal scuffles.
That said, I no longer watch TV except for smut like LOST and Grey's Anatomy.
*grins*
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