You're about to hear a lot of whining and high-pitched indignation about this paragraph from an Editor & Publisher survey:
Asked who they voted for in the past election, the journalists reported picking Kerry over Bush by 68% to 25%. In this sample of 300 journalists, from both newspapers and TV, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 3 to 1 -- but about half claim to be Independent. As in previous polls, a majority (53%) called their political orientation "moderate," versus 28% liberal and 10% conservative.
Okay kids, listen close and listen quick: if the majority of the folks spending day after day and night after night observing, analyzing, and judging politics are breaking heavily Democratic, that's not prima facie evidence of bias. Indeed, it may be evidence that the facts of contemporary politics break down in such a way that most rational observers in command of all, or almost all, of the relevant information find voting Republican an irrational thing to do.
The right appears to believe that on any two-sided issue where they support a side, bias is proved when too few folks in this or that industry don't support that side as well. In that way, opinions are a statistical concept, the byproduct product of some divine distribution of arguments rather than the fruit of logical thought and analysis. If journalists don't vote as they do, they're biased, not right. If teachers don't mistrust evolution as they do, they're biased, not learned. If scientists don't doubt global warming as they do, they're biased, not informed. It is, oddly enough, a complete embrace of relativism and a complete rejection of the concept that there can be Truth, two things no self-respecting conservative would be caught dead doing. But I'll stop there, I'm beginning to sound biased.
Also in the survey are these legitimately disturbing results:
In one finding, 43% of the public says the press has too much freedom, while only 3% of journalists agree. And just 14% of the public can name "freedom of the press" as a guarantee in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, in the major poll conducted by the University of Connecticut Department of Public Policy.
Six in ten among the public feel the media show bias in reporting the news, and 22% say the government should be allowed to censor the press.
This country? Not on such a good path. See Kevin Drum for more.
