The writing is, as they say, on the wall. Megan McArdle:
While outlets like my employer [Bloomberg], and [Jack Schafer’s Reuters*], and maybe ESPN, may invest in commercial news, most of the political and international journalism that we’re used to seeing is going to be ideological, if not explicitly partisan. People will come to the news assuming that the people making it have an agenda — and they will seek out outlets that match their own agenda, if they see political news at all.
This matters for Democrats because, of course, the majority of people in the news media right now are Democrats, whose sympathies naturally lie with social liberalism, government programs and so forth. A more ideological media will be hiring more conservatives, and that will change what a large portion of the country gets as news.
This is not a horrible thing, mind you. The Republic worked quite well under a paradigm where the newspapers openly took sides and had their says. It’s understandable that our current crop of journalists – the ones who were raised and educated to believe that the Watergate investigation was the pinnacle of Western civilization – might feel otherwise, but then the newspapers exist to serve the populace, not the other way around. If you have too many liberal journalists chasing too few jobs for liberal journalists, well, maybe that should tell you something.
Via Instapundit.
Moe Lane
*I think.
No prob. They can just become fake conservative journos! Of course we have plenty of those already…
al-reuters doesn’t have a political agenda?
Oh, and the only thing that “If you have too many liberal journalists chasing too few jobs for liberal journalists” will tell them is that liberal journalists need more government subsidized jobs.
Took the words righ outta my mouth…err, off o’ my keyboard
Hence Dick Durbins desire to declare who is a journalist and who isn’t