Should Newspapers Hire More Rightwingers?

Last week, Washington Post ombudsperson Deborah Howell could be found arguing that the Post needed less intellectual honesty in its opinion pages, noting that the Post centrist columnists had a more favorable attitude to Barack Obama than to John McCain, and that one of its conservatives was cool on McCain. Rather than saying that this configuration of opinions reflected larger trends in American society, she saw it as an example of unfair treatment of the right. This week, Steve Benen finds her arguing that the Post needs affirmative action for conservatives in the newsroom. In addition to the points Steve raises against this proposal, note that as with the right’s notion that there’s a need for affirmative action for non-liberal professors there’s a substantial issue of where all these people are supposed to come from.

After all, I think we understand that most businesspeople are Republicans. In part that’s self-interest and in part that’s self-selection. But Republicans don’t tell their friends they’re “selling out” when they go corporate. They valorize the role of the businessman in society. Of course there are Democrats in the business world, but it’s a minority. Meanwhile, the disproportionate premise of Democrats in the arts, academia, and the media is the mirror image of that phenomenon. Some journalists make it rich, but in general writing for a newspaper is going to be a lot less lucrative than working in corporate PR and similar skillsets are involved. The group of people who prefer newspapering aren’t going to be ideologically identical to the general population. You can see this in part in the fact that the elements of the media that are the most politically relevant are the ones with the most conservatives. If you want to see a bunch of big liberals, forget about political reporters and look at the assembled food writers or movie critics of the United States. Politics is something conservative are interested in, so you see some conservatives in the news pages, more on the op-ed pages, and then total domination on broadcast media.

Arguably this is all bad for America, and if corporate executives were 50-50 liberal-conservative and so were newspaper and magazine writers some good consequences would flow forward. Certainly you could tell a story like that. But you can’t really tell a story about how we would get there.