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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (46710)	5/25/2004 8:28:45 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 793896

lends support to my interpretation that "moderate" and even "conservative" in the newsroom are far to the left of "moderate" and "conservative" in the general public Maybe, maybe not. Those are both strictly social issues. There is no question in my mind that major news people are not only socially liberal, themselves, but their perspective on where the broader society is on that is skewed because they don't know people who aren't socially liberal. The perspective from which I argue this is that I identify with these major news people. They are like me and like my crowd. I don't personally know anyone who doesn't accept homosexuality. The most negative person I know on that subject would add the caveat, as long as they don't hit on him. That's the most conservative view of homosexuality to be found in my crowd. Conversely, my crowd doesn't identify one bit with Bush. There is nothing about him that is comfortable and familiar. The people who like Bush because he's "their kind of people" aren't even on the radar of my crowd, which I think is the same crowd that is prominent in major news rooms. That doesn't mean that my crowd is liberal. Some of my crowd are liberal and others are conservative. Mostly they're pretty moderate. I don't know anyone who would adopt the label, conservative, because of the risk of being taken for a social conservative, which carries a stigma. It carries a stigma partly because social conservatives are bewilderingly alien and partly because they are thought to be fascists for wanting to impose their social tabus on the rest of us through law. So the conservatives in my crowd call themselves "libertarian," as do I, or "moderate" because moderate is an average of socially liberal and otherwise conservative, IOW, a wash. Thus I identify with the practices of the journalists in this regard and that's why I argue this point. Nadine, I don't think you can tell from the answers to those two questions where the journalists stand on free trade or balanced budgets or welfare or the justice system or health care or foreign relations or education or any of the other issues of governance. You can infer where they stand on the purely social issues that seem to have crowded out more legitimate matters of governance. And you can probably infer how comfortable they are with Bush. But you cannot assume that they are any more liberal than the general population on other than social issues. People who call themselves "conservatives" either are both socially and otherwise conservative or they are libertarian conservatives who either discount or are ambivalent about the social issues in the interests of advancing their otherwise conservative agenda. The libertarian conservatives in my crowd, the ones who would choke on the conservative label, are too alienated by creationists to do that, but that doesn't mean that they are liberal. From the report: Journalists’ own politics are also harder to analyze than people might think. The fact that journalists—especially national journalists—are more likely than in the past to describe themselves as liberal reinforces the findings of the major academic study on this question, namely that of David H. Weaver and G. Cleveland Wilhoit, in their series of books “The American Journalist.” But what does liberal mean to journalists? We would be reluctant to infer too much here. The survey includes just four questions probing journalists’ political attitudes, yet the answers to these questions suggest journalists have in mind something other than a classic big government liberalism and something more along the lines of libertarianism. More journalists said they think it is more important for people to be free to pursue their goals without government interference than it is for government to ensure that no one is in need. This libertarian strain is particularly strong among local journalists, who are also more likely to describe themselves as moderate. More research here is probably useful. The debate over press ideology is fraught with difficulty. Some of the research done in the past has been, frankly, poor, and on the other side, some journalists would rather not face the question at all. Neither of these approaches is satisfactory. But there is something here for journalists to be concerned about.