Via Steve Benen, Deborah Howell, The Washington Post‘s ombudsman suggested that the paper consider ideological leanings when considering prospective hires:
Are there ways to tackle this? More conservatives in newsrooms and rigorous editing would be two. The first is not easy: Editors hire not on the basis of beliefs but on talent in reporting, photography and editing, and hiring is at a standstill because of the economy. But newspapers have hired more minorities and women, so it can be done.
[Tom Rosenstiel, a former political reporter who directs the Project for Excellence in Journalism] said, “There should be more intellectual diversity among journalists. More conservatives in newsrooms will bring about better journalism.”
Howell doesn’t offer any actual evidence that conservatives are less likely to be hired on the basis of being conservatives — nevertheless she argues that since the Post has hired “more minorities and women,” there’s nothing wrong with sifting through the political leanings of their reporters before they hire them. There are just so many things wrong with this; first of all, you can’t change your gender or race the way you can change your ideology. And conservatives have controlled all three branches of government for most of the last ten years. How is that even remotely comparable to social forces of discrimination faced by minorities and women? The comparison is a joke, part of the long-running self-parody that is the conservative culture of grievance and self-pity.
Eric Boehlert added:
To that, our response is simple: Who’s stopping conservatives from being hired in newsrooms? Honestly. If Newsbusters can document how scores of qualified College Republican grads were passed over by local newspapers to poorly paying jobs to cover local zoning commission jobs simply because the applicants were conservative, we’d love to hear about it. Because right now there’s nothing stopping young conservatives from joining newsrooms and working their way up from the bottom just like everybody else in media does. They just don’t want to do it.
It’s incredible that after the press spent years selling the Iraq war to the American people, complete with “independent military analysts” sent straight from the Pentagon, showing a seamlessness between the message of a conservative Administration and the press that would turn Putin green with envy [GETTING A LITTLE HYPERBOLIC HERE — IF YOU TONE IT DOWN TO A MORE REASONABLE LEVEL IT’LL BE MORE CONVINCING], we’re seriously considering that the “media” has a meaningful liberal bias. To paraphrase Bob Somerby [LINK?], we have a front-running [I DON’T KNOW WHAT FRONT-RUNNING MEANS IN THIS CONTEXT] media that likes winners and cuddles up to those in power. This is incredibly bad for the country — a press that tailors its sensibilities to the interests of the powerful rather than those it is ostensibly meant to serve [SOMETHING IS OUT OF ORDER HERE, RIGHT NOW THIS SENTENCE SAYS THAT THE COUNTRY IS A PRESS THAT TAILORS ETC…], but it’s also a problem that’s really difficult to unravel given the way political news is reported and so our media critics would rather regurgitate conventional wisdom about “liberal bias.”
The fact that Democrats won a few elections during a plummeting economy and an unpopular war is not evidence of “liberal bias.” But as Benen pointed out, conservatives seem less concerned with the actual number of conservatives working at news organizations than the feeling that media outlets don’t repeat conservative talking points with adequate fealty.
But if Howell wants a model for institutions that hire based on ideology rather than ability there are plenty available. After all, who wouldn’t want a newspaper that worked just like the Bush Administration’s Justice Department?
–A. Serwer
