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Learning to become a liberal (JOHN TIERNEY, 10/18/05, NY Times)

Some academics try to 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 strong incentive not to lose it — presumably an even stronger incentive than any government official regulating their security arrangements. That story 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 exposes 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.

To some extent, this is a problem of self-selection. Journalism attracts people who want to right wrongs, and the generation that’s been running journalism schools and media businesses came of age when government, especially the federal government, was seen as the solution to most wrongs. These executives, like the tenured radicals in law schools and the rest of academia, hired ideological cronies and shaped their institutions to reflect their views.

But those views are no longer dominant outside newsrooms and academia.