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Tuesday, October 11, 2005

I blog for free, and this idiot gets paid for this
Posted by Jill | 7:52 AM

Of course he's paid by the same people who employ Judith "Kneepads" Miller, but still -- he gets paid.

In the face of a flagrantly unqualified FEMA head botching the handling of hurricane relief, the parade of unqualified cronies being named to high-level Administration positions, and now the cheapening of a Supreme Court seat by nominating his own personal lawyer, the cronyism of the Bush Administration, in the eyes of New York Times columnist/idiot John Tierney, pales beside the real and present danger of cronyism in .... journalism and law schools.

Yes, you heard it. The biggest threat to America right now is in higher education:

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.

Only one journalism school, the University of Kansas, had a preponderance of Republicans (by 10 to 8). At the rest of the schools, there was a 6-to-1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans. The ratio was 4 to 1 at Northwestern and New York University, 13 to 1 at the University of Southern California, 15 to 1 at Columbia. Horowitz didn't find any Republicans at Berkeley.

Some academics argue that their political ideologies don't affect the way they teach, which to me is proof of how detached they've become from reality in their monocultures. This claim is especially dubious if you're training lawyers and journalists to deal with controversial public policies.

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?

We kicked this idea around until I suggested that companies in the business of transporting cash already had a fairly strong incentive not to lose it - presumably an even stronger incentive than any government official regulating their security arrangements. That story idea died, but not the mind-set that produced it.

The surest way to impress the judges for a journalism prize is to write a series of articles that spur a legislature to right some evil, particularly if it was committed by a corporation. When journalists do exposés of government malfeasance, they usually focus on the need for more regulations and bigger budgets, not on whether the government should be doing the job in the first place.


Now remember, this is a guy who works for a newspaper that printed Judith Miller's bullshit about Iraq weapons of mass destruction, and was one of the first papers out of the gate relentlessly flogging the Whitewater horse. The major networks are all run by conservatives, and John Tierney gets paid for writing a column rehashing the old "liberal trial lawyers and liberal media" meme.

I guess Tierney thinks that journalism prizes should be given for who can suck up the most to the Bush Administration, and who does the best job of spouting verbatim the talking points given to him/her by the Bush Administration.
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