Where Cronies Dwell - New York Times

Where Cronies Dwell - New York TimesWhere Cronies Dwell
By JOHN TIERNEY

Journalists and legal scholars have been decrying "cronyism" and calling for "mainstream" values when picking a Supreme Court justice. But how do they go about picking the professors to train the next generation of journalists and lawyers?

David Horowitz, the conservative who is president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, analyzed the political affiliations of the faculty at 18 elite journalism and law schools. By checking all the party registrations he could find, he concluded that Democrats outnumber Republicans by 8 to 1 at the law schools, with the ratio ranging from 3 to 1 at Penn to 28 to 1 at Stanford.

Only one journalism school, the University of Kansas, had a preponderance of Republicans (by 10 to 8). At the rest of the schools, there was a 6-to-1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans. The ratio was 4 to 1 at Northwestern and New York University, 13 to 1 at the University of Southern California, 15 to 1 at Columbia. Horowitz didn't find any Republicans at Berkeley.

Some academics 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 fairly strong incentive not to lose it - presumably an even stronger incentive than any government official regulating their security arrangements. That story idea 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 exposés 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. A lot of young conservatives and libertarians have simply given up on the traditional media, either as a source of news or as a place to work.

Instead, they post on conservative blogs and start careers at magazines like The Weekly Standard and Reason, knowing these credentials will hurt their chances of becoming reporters for "mainstream" publications - whereas a job at The New Republic or The Washington Monthly wouldn't be a disqualifying credential.

I'm not suggesting that journalism or law schools should be forced to have ideological balance on their faculties - this is one of those many problems that doesn't require a solution by government. But it's curious how little the schools seem to care about it.

They keep meticulous tabs on the race and gender and ethnic background of their students and faculty. But the lack of political diversity is taken as a matter of course. As long as the professors look different, why worry if they think the same?

For Further Reading:

To read the full study go to www.frontpagemag.com

"Republicans Outnumbered in Academia, Studies Find" by John Tierney. New York Times, November 18, 2004.