I’m not blaming liberals for the rise of the conservative-media ghetto.
…There was certainly no liberal media conspiracy, just an iterative process controlled by no one: Being human, liberals naturally prefer the work of folks who agree with them, so those are the folks they tend to hire and promote. As they became increasingly dominant in the media, the trend became self-reinforcing. Fewer conservatives wanted to enter the castle in the first place, and few were allowed to.
This could describe academia as well.
The conservatives that she points to in mainstream media are what people in the mid-1960s days of civil rights called “token Negroes.” There are one or two, and they are put on prominent display, but the underlying prejudice remains. Everyone knows that George Will is on the WaPo editorial page to show that that the newspaper is supposedly balanced. What no one sees is that all of the reporters and editors who put together the news pages are on the left.
I am not saying that anyone should feel sorry for conservative intellectuals. The people you should feel sorry for are the people in the left-wing echo chamber who are dumbing themselves down, the students on college campuses who suffer from low-quality education, and ordinary citizens who suffer from bad policies.
At least genuine tokens don’t spend half their time harranguing the other members of their own class as if preferring and adopting the critical perspective of their outgroup colleagues. ‘Conservatives’ don’t even get that, mostly false tokens which won’t even buy you a game in the arcade.
There is some evidence the reason for fewer conservatives in academia is it offers low pay for the education required. This is likely the same reason for mainstream media where credentials are more valued. Conservatives are more money driven so these are less attractive except to the lower skilled. This also explains the low quality of conservative media.
And here is the poster child for Kling’s point at the end. Wow!
Is that an echo I hear? At least we don’t have to listen to liberals p&m ing about how conservatives are over represented among business execs.
Obviously, I am listening to you right now. Just look at what you wrote above and try to see it how someone of the opposite political point of view would interpret it.
In other words, you can’t make blanket generalizations the way you do, especially in a blog post like this one. I am just dumbfounded sometimes at some people’s complete lack of self-awareness.
Consider the Big 5 personality traits. Conservatives typically score lower on openness to experience. It could be that people who make it through PhDs, people who are creating some new knowledge, score more highly on this than average. This could be one reason why conservatives are less likely in academia.
I wouldn’t define PhD track as being more open to experience than the alternative. I specifically left after my Masters and didn’t continue on the PhD track because there was no problem so interesting I wanted to dedicate the next 10 years of my life to it…
Yes, every time I have a political discussion with a leftist, I’m impressed by their openness to different points of view (specifically, of people further to the left) and to revising their preconceived ideological narrative in light of events and experience. Some of them are even prepared to admit that they did not sufficiently idolize Obama back in 2008 – Hillary, for example.
Touche.
McArdle has it almost completely wrong, markets don’t work this way in terms of reinforcement. If media shifts left then there should be a large untapped audience to cater to, the further left it shifts the larger the vacuum that there is to fill and the more incentive to fill it. If the shift left is perpetual it has to mean either its an uncompetitive medium, or there isn’t a strong demand for conservative news, or there is only a demand for news that everyone else you know is hearing. I would bet it is a combination of the 2nd and 3rd, media is entertainment, no one tunes in for “zero mass shootings today” but they will tune it for a sensational headline and then talk about it the next day at work.
Obviously, FoxNews proves your point, as does the WSJ and Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage and others.
McCardle is wrong, though- the conservative movement wasn’t pushed into a media ghetto. I love Ms. McCardle, but she is losing her way at first, The Atlantic and now at Bloomberg. Talking about conservative media as a ghetto is using the Left’s terminology. She is in danger of becoming David Brooks.
McArdle was ahead of you. When McArdle quotes Post’s Catherine Rampell on the “right wing media swamp”, that is what is catering to the unfulfilled demand that the mainstream media outlets won’t cater to. The mainstream media did move to the left of the public, and the demand for right wing coverage was filled outside of mainstream media. If you want to “drain the right wing media swamp” the mainstream media will have to make room in the castle.
The “right-wing media swamp” mostly endorsed other conventional candidates in the Republican primary (notably Cruz), or expressed consistent neutrality – so I’m not sure how draining that swamp would result in fewer Trump-like events in the future.
Conservative radio definitely shows a lot of confirmation bias, but it’s not like there aren’t like a zillion good reason to oppose Hillary
Isn’t there an Elvis Presley song on this subject?