Like this is news:

Novak blamed liberal discrimination which he said forces young conservatives to remain "in the closet" if they hope to have a career in media.

"One of the big differences in 50 years is that the liberals have now filtered into the executive ranks of journalism. And so if you go into journalism now not in the closet but out in the open as a conservative, you're going to have a hard time getting a job, believe me."

Conservatives also don't like journalism as a profession, Novak added, saying that when he goes to various colleges and universities, the young conservatives and libertarians he runs into rarely have any interest in journalism.

The syndicated columnist fit these trends into what he said was a general decline in the journalism business, despite the fact that it has become more professionalized:

"Journalism is a hard thing to gauge. When I set out with my first paper in the summer of 1948, for the Joliet Herald-News there were in the newsroom there about two or three people who had ever been to college. Journalism was not an educated person's game. So we're much better educated, we're sophisticated, we have people with graduate degrees—they know a lot more but are they better reporters than the others? I rather doubt.

I rather doubt too, given the state of the academy, and journalism schools. And I'm not sure that they know that much more. Or maybe they do, but a lot of what they know is wrong.

And if you think it's tough to be a conservative journalist, just try being a libertarian one...

I thought this was why Rupert Murdoch invented the FOX network. Ain't no lefties there.

As for libertarian? I agree.

BOTH parties have pretty much said "Adios!" to that segment of society.

"I thought this was why Rupert Murdoch invented the FOX network. Ain't no lefties there"

LOL! You ain't lookin' very hard

Could it be that conservative students want a "valuable" degree that will translate into a long term career, with upward mobility? If so, and the students are very smart at all, journalism will go on the trash heap first as a career. Low money to start with, no room for advancement due to your personal political beliefs and a constant fight to get printed would turn off many people I'm sure.

It hasn't been that many years ago that Ted Turner seeing his employees wearing ashes on their forehead after attending Mass on Ash Wednesday, ridiculed them by saying, "What are you, a bunch of Jesus freaks? You ought to be working for Fox."

This is people working at CNN, not known to be exactly a bastion of conservative thought. So he even went after his liberal Christian employees. Why would you go to college, work hard for your degree, go through all the job selection, interviewing pain and suffering to put up with that and worse for a paycheck?

Too many other industries where your politics don't count between 9 and 5 to deal with that.

I thought this was why Rupert Murdoch invented the FOX network. Ain't no lefties there.

Juan Williams, Eleanor Clift, Susan Estrich, Geraldine Ferraro, Alan Colmes, Greta Van Susteren, and Geraldo Rivera are not leftie enough for you, Bill?

Talk about a distorted worldview.

The Watergate-Nixon impeachment incident enflamed the passions of young lefties everywhere to go into journalism. The job may s*ck, but you can be your own little propaganda group and "make a difference". That appeals to some people more than money.

Has anyone else noticed that even Aviation week authors are slipping in a few unnesscessary "Global Warming" stories/comments from time to time? The day Av week goes left is the day I cancel a 35 year subscription.

The wing-nuttery of Sean Hannity tends to drown everyone else out . . .

The wing-nuttery of Sean Hannity tends to drown everyone else out . . .

Somehow, I doubt Sean Hannity has the power to drown out Geraldo and Greta on their own shows. Especially since he doesn't even appear on those shows. (You must be using Puckett's "artistic license.")

If you're upset because Fox News allows Sean Hannity to speak on his own show, why didn't you say so?

There's a difference between allowing "lefties" to speak and allowing *only* lefties to speak.

"There's a difference between allowing "lefties" to speak and allowing *only* lefties to speak."

No truer words ever written, thanks Ed. The later is what the left wants, they miss the good old days when they controlled all the major media.

"You must be using Puckett's "artistic license."

Ed, get over yourself.

The fundamentals of journalism are Who, What, When, Where, and Why. The first four of those are expensive -- keeping a reporter in the field costs quite a lot. Keeping a good reporter in the field costs a lot more. But "why" is opinion. It's said that opinions are like a*holes: everybody has one. More correctly, opinions are like turds: any a*hole can squeeze one out. By simple supply and demand, opinions are cheap -- look at us all, for instance.

Posing upon a crag of omniscience, crushing the Little People with blazing bolts of wisdom, is fun, and finding ways to give yourself the opportunity isn't unusual. Corporate, with its interest in the bottom line, has seduced journalists into thinking it's also what their job really is, because filling the paper and/or news program with opinion is cheaper than laboriously digging out facts. The two forces form a positive feedback couple, with the result that we shouldn't be using the word "reporter" any more except in very rare cases. To a close first approximation there aren't any reporters any more, especially at the major "news" organizations. None of them regard collecting facts as a worthwhile enterprise; the only purpose of "fact" is to provide a framework to hang opinion on.

Having all the opinions come from one side of the philosophical debate is a secondary effect. The "news" would be just as useless if we were getting opinions from all sides. What we're supposed to do is form our own opinions, and for that we need facts, and "the news" abandoned fact as a criterion long ago. They're happy and proud to assert their superiority by telling us Why. Digging out Who, What, When, and Where is for grubby peons, sneered at by their social superiors.

Regards,
Ric

The wing-nuttery of Sean Hannity tends to drown everyone else out

I actually like Hannity much more than Limbaugh because he interviews guests, many of which are liberal. I have also heard him on serveral occasions agreeing with liberals on issues. Of course, according to Bill, this makes agreeing with liberals wing-nuttery.

Why would someone who actually knows a lot about a particular field go into journalism? Journalism doesn't pay much, and actual expertise tends to count against journalists because of ridiculous guild notions such as: journalists must pretend not to have opinions or overt biases. So it's no surprise that a lot of professional journalists are either airheads or have covert ideological agendas.

The best journalism is often done by practitioners in the fields they are writing about. Such people usually have a clue and don't have to pretend not to be biased. They can provide honest opinions (which everyone knows to be opinions) and can teach their audience what matters and what doesn't. Rand's space blogging is a good example of how this works. So is blogging and other journalism by financial practitioners like Don Luskin and Barry Ritholtz. Luskin and Ritholtz are promoting their businesses, of course, but in doing so they provide a much higher quality of market information than do the hairdos at CNBC.

What's truly insidious is that since just about everyone in journalism _is_ politically leftish, they don't know it. They think they're moderates, and will quite honestly and sincerely deny that they're liberals. When they do encounter someone who doesn't share their views, he must be an extreme right-winger, because _they_ are all perfectly moderate.

I think this is also why they're willing to entertain some rather bizarre conspiracy theories about the "right wing" -- as with the 9/11 conspiracy lies, the whole "Diebold is rigging the voting machines!" lie, etc. Since the people in media know they are moderates, and Republicans are therefore "right wing extremists," it seems quite plausible to people in media that the Republicans are using underhanded methods to get elected. How else to explain it? Nobody _they_ know votes Republican.

Here's a perfect example of (Anti-American) opinion inserted into a news "story" untethered to any facts, anonymously sourced in this morning's Boston Globe. In an article about the indictment of a Khmer Rouge prison commander responsible for the (real) torture and murder of up to 16,000 Cambodians the following paragraph is slipped in almost unobtrusively:

"Some historians believe that heavy US bombing of the countryside radicalized many peasants, swelling the guerrilla ranks and eventually turning their anger into brutality"

Make of it what you will, but it light on Who, What, When, or Where and heavy on Why. Why, if the US bombing didn't anger those Cambodian peasants then they wouldn't have become brutal and torture and kill their own peaople!

There aren't a lot of conservative journalists because righties don't care about the truth. They just make stuff up, and the idiots who believe them will repeat it and purposely not look at real news because its "biased" (aka true).

Facts anon, you got any? Or is cowardly accusations your best hand?

Anon is just showing us what grade of non-critical thinking retard it takes to swallow the drive-by media propoganda.