Why Most Journalists Are Democrats: A View from the Soviet Socialist Trenches

psychologytoday.com ^ | Aug 3 2009 | By Barbara Oakley, Ph.D., P.E.

[Bob Eimiller]

(SNIP) As it turns out, the preponderance of journalists are Democrats. And socialism, with its idyllic, “progressive” programs, has formed an increasingly important role in Democratic policies. Who wants to investigate a possible dark side of your own party’s plank?

(SNIP)

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.

Harry Stein, former ethics editor of Esquire, once said: "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. (SNIP)

[Bob Eimiller]

Great piece and right on.

[mel]

I am having a real tough time understanding how journalists think that loss of freedoms, abortion, euthanesia, etc are helping people. Go figure.

[gthog61]

BS journalists are liberals for self-serving purposes. If everyone has to turn to a centralized government for everything, then the people reporting on that concentrated power have more power themselves. If power was dispersed no one reporter would ever have a really big story to report.

[Kackikat]

Those far left journalists are the cowards, who fear reprisal, so go along with crowd....

[InterceptPoint]

Link to the Article

[umgud]

When you combinne journalism, academia and entertainment, all dominated by the far left, it’s a true wonder there are any right thinking people.

[sauropod]

read

[OrangeHoof]

I agree. Many journalists go into the field to “make the world better” and then get sucked into environmentalism and socialism nonsense because *the sources* they interview are also sucked into it.

In the old days, editors often told the writers what angle to write and would sent it back if it didn’t reach their level of satisfaction. These editors would reject stories that put conservatives in a good light or put liberals in a bad light so the writer learned to slant their stories in a way that the editor wouldn’t reject it.

Another aspect to this is that, without sources, journalists don’t have a story. To get in to interview leading Democrat liberals, they have to adapt the same talking points or the Democrat will leave them sitting in the waiting room all day. So journalists learn that they have to write in liberal terms to be approved by other liberals in order to have access to liberal sources.

In many cases, the reporters don’t need to be talked into putting a liberal slant on things but, if they don’t, they soon find themselves excluded and made outcasts.

Ask Cal Thomas how that works. He was once a straight-up reporter who found out the hard way that you have to adapt the liberal viewpoint if you expect to get any acceptance or advancement in the newsroom.

[hadit2here]

"[The press] has defended official criminals, on party pretexts, until it has created a United States Senate whose members are incapable of determining what crime against law and the dignity of their own body is, they are so morally blind, and [the press] has made light of dishonesty till we have as a result a Congress which contracts to work for a certain sum and then deliberately steals additional wages out of the public pocket and is pained and surprised that anybody would worry about a little thing like that. . . That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditchdigging and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse."
--Mark Twain, License of the Press, A Talk Before the Monday Evening Club, Hartford

The "profession" certainly hasn't changed much since Twain's day, huh? And for that matter, neither has Congress.

[Jeff Gordon]

Why do liberals howl like stuck pigs when they are called socialists? Why is so hard for them to look at themselves realistically?

[beef]

Excellent article. I think the biggest difference between guys like Cronkite and today's crop of propagandists is that, with varying degrees of success, Walt and his contemporaries made an honest effort to set aside their biases. Today, it's only about disguising them.

[marron]

Socialism is an attractive heresy that assumes that smart brainy people like you and me should rule those other guys.

And when it doesn’t work, it assumes that its because we didn’t have enough power to make those other guys do what we know is good for them.

[Robert A Cook PE]

Ref for later reading.

[ought-six]

“I think the biggest difference between guys like Cronkite and today’s crop of propagandists is that, with varying degrees of success, Walt and his contemporaries made an honest effort to set aside their biases.”

You’re joking, right? Cronkite was so biased it poured out of his ears and his nose. After he had retired, he was interviewed and asked what he missed most of being a “newsman.” His answer? He said he missed shaping the agenda (and he meant the POLITICAL agenda).

[nathanbedford]

Sometimes it is instructive as an analytical device to play the what-if game. What if there had been freedom of the press in Soviet Russia at the time of, say, the Soviet show trials of the 1930s, or at the time of the Ukrainian genocide? What would have been the overall profile of the press?

Extrapolating from the behavior of the press during the Obama administration, I judge that there would not have been a righteous indignation across the board. I think the Soviet press would behave exactly as Walter Duranty behaved during his visits to the Soviet union when he failed utterly to see, or at least report, the Holocaust in Ukraine. The was a representative of one of the world's most prestigious newspapers, be operated in a free society and yet he was incapable of recognizing or reporting news that would be harmful to the regime.

Would there have been a Fox News and the Soviet Union? I think so if there was also a capitalist system with the profit motive. Another problem with the Soviet system is that it did not create incentives to add readership. To a degree that is also true even today in the American system. If MSNBC is run in a manner to reduce rather than increase its ratings, it is operating on a system other than a capitalist model. I conclude that it is running on a farm- the -government -model on behalf of General Electric, its parent company. The other news organizations have managed to erect a barrier between the editor and the publisher to the degree that the reportorial arm of the media is indifferent to the economic consequences of its editorial posture.

It is of course necessary to isolate the editorial content of the media from the influence of its advertisers but that is a different matter from alienating the editorial content of a newspaper from the views of its subscribers.

It is instructive to note that the success of Fox has not been copied by competitors. That reveals a lot about the culture of the news business it's tenacity and it's isolation and immunity from the profit motive. Even in our capitalist system where the profit motive is dominant, it cannot penetrate the culture.

The media in America today has shown that it is quite capable of turning a blind eye to the sins of the Obama administration. What would rouse them to a frenzy of indignation had it occurred in the Nixon administration, raises no eyebrow today. The culture, I suppose this author would say, "the psychology," of the newsroom favors statism. One could ascribe a good motive to this frame of mind and say that journalists have a sense of decency and want to help the less advantaged. Alternatively, one could say that journalists, like all leftists, are egoists and want to arrange the world to their liking. The best tool for ordering society according to your predilections is government.

Perhaps a psychologist could comment on the irony of people in the persuasion business favoring the politics of government coercion.

[Ronin]

It starts earlier than that. Tenured professors are almost all liberals and have assumed inquisitors’ authority in vetting journalism students.

Any conservative student has to spout the liberal dogma religiouly in his work or risk being outed and hounded out of the class — if not out of the university itself.

It’s just not worth the hassle, especially when they think about a work environment that is going to be pure torture should they eventually graduate and somehow get hired.