Is This Why Most Journalists Are Left Biased?

[Mac1958]

Better than most. All that Joe Scarborough time reduces their credibility, but that's necessary in the name of balance.

(I hope you don't now descend into cherrypicking fallacies.)

No, just curious.

I wouldn't try to change your mind on anything.

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[jasonnfree]

Robert Nozick looked at the question of why so many academics are leftists and his analysis applies to journalists, kind of.

For academics, the problem was that they were always the smart kids in class and they have trouble accepting that the kids they surpassed in high school and college are now earning more than them. They feel that the universe is out of kilter because the economy doesn't reward them for their smarts like schools rewarded them.

What they miss is that high earners are rewarded by OTHER PEOPLE for providing a valuable service and most people in the public don't believe that a wymyn's studies professor actually provides a service that is more valuable than what a McDonald's restaurant manager provides.

For journalists, they're not as smart as academics but the see themselves as being smart and using their positions to inform the public. They believe that they should be rewarded well for this and that because they're smarter (in their own liberal haughty self-deluded way) than an engineer, that the market should pay them higher. That it doesn't is proof that the system is wrong and the Marxist version of politics is more sound.

Secondly, as already noted by someone else, there is a self-selection at work too. Like with teaching, journalism draws a lot of people who want to be social revolutionaries, in their own small way. The actual craft of being an impartial journalist isn't that important. There is no pride felt from readers not being able to discern one's political slant. Instead they want to change the world and want to use their writing as the vehicle to do so.

Or it could be that the average journalist is more intelligent than the average right wing working schmuck who thinks that republican politicians, rush, hannity, and of course the multibillionaires who they represent, are their good buddies. Keep it up guys, call hannity up and he'll call you a great american as long as you agree with everything he says.