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Tuesday, May 05, 2009
Debra J. Saunders :: Townhall.com Columnist
News Biz: Unbiased and Out of Business
by Debra J. Saunders
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Was the Copenhagen Global Warming Summit Walk-Out a Win for the U.S.?


Then she dismissed the event as "anti-government" and "anti-CNN" -- and the product of the "right-wing conservative network, Fox."

Asked about Roesgen, CNN's response: "No comment." In this space I have lamented what seems to be the advent of Designer News, that allow consumers to cull out undesirable viewpoints and information.

The irony here is that newspapers have written fawning stories about Google and Twitter and free classified ad sites as if they are all good. But when newspapers cover Fox News, they have this need to write the network off as right-wing -- end of story. Nothing to learn there, right?

Clearly there is an insatiable appetite for news from a conservative perspective that the folks who run newspapers continue to overlook -- except in the opinion pages.

There are days I wonder if newspaper and network news execs cannot change by broadening their ideological diversity -- even to save themselves. They'll keep telling themselves that they are unbiased -- up until the end.

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A Deeper Explanation?
I wonder if the explanation isn't deeper.

When I was an engineering undergraduate, I observed that the engineers tended to be politically conservative, while the liberal arts majors tended to be politically liberal. I thought then that maybe it had something to do with engineering being, necessarily, rooted in physical reality.

Somewhere since, I've read that societies with beautiful languages -- e.g., Arabic (or French) -- tend to more disconnection from hard reality and absorption into verbal fantasies. "But it sounds so good!"

Or perhaps we've made the mistake in Journalism that we made in Teaching. The teachers colleges focused intently on pedagogy -- how to teach. The unintended nasty side effect was that we graduated many people who were very skillful at getting ideas out of their heads and into the students', but who had no ideas inside their head that were worth knowing! I wonder if Journalism programs haven't made the same mistake: With the exception of sports reporters, few journalism graduates know very much about the subjects they report on. (And television has aggravated that, with news "readers" whose prime job qualification seems to be their well coiffed hair-do.)

Reporters deal heavily in words. And they believe in words. Too often, those words construct a fantasy. And most graduates of Journalism schools -- in spite of their preening to the contrary -- never acquired the critical skills to question whatever some slick & smiling politician tells them.

Cronkite said

I remember when Cronkite said that the reason that most journalists were liberal, was because when they first got into the business, their first jobs were to cover the streets, and they saw all the poor people, the ones who need government help.

I thought they would have seen the idiots who dropped out of school, who were dealing drugs, who were robbing stores, and on and on.

Remember, a Liberal sees what he believes, a Conservative believes what he sees.

Or something like that. Do I remember that old “saw” correctly?
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