The Silencing by Kirsten Powers

Author:Kirsten Powers [Powers, Kirsten]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Best 2015 Nonfiction, Censorship, History, Nonfiction, Political Science, Retail
ISBN: 9781621573913
Google: VoipBgAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Published: 2015-05-11T04:00:00+00:00

PURGING THE MEDIA OF DISSENTERS

The vast majority of people who work in the mainstream media are left of center. That’s been true for decades, and some prominent liberal journalists have openly confessed it. Daniel Okrent, for one, conceded in July 2004, when he was an editor at the New York Times, that on “social issues: gay rights, gun control, abortion and environmental regulation . . . if you think the Times plays it down the middle on any of them, you’ve been reading the paper with your eyes closed.”38 Similarly at the Washington Post in 2005, one of the paper’s editors, Marie Arana, wrote “The elephant in the newsroom is our narrowness. Too often, we wear liberalism on our sleeve and are intolerant of other lifestyles and opinions. . . . We’re not very subtle about it at this paper: If you work here, you must be one of us. You must be liberal, progressive, a Democrat.” She added, “I’ve been in communal gatherings in the Post, watching election returns, and have been flabbergasted to see my colleagues cheer unabashedly for the Democrats.”39

Longtime Washington Post political reporter Thomas Edsall wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2009: “The mainstream press is liberal . . . [and journalists] tend to favor abortion rights, women’s rights, civil rights, and gay rights. . . . If reporters were the only ones allowed to vote, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, and John Kerry would have won the White House by landslide margins.”40

What was true then is true now. Politico’s Jim VandeHei, for instance, said in March 2012 that, “I’ve worked at the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and worked here at Politico,” he said. “If I had to guess, if you put all of the reporters that I’ve ever worked with on truth serum, most of them vote Democratic.”41

Obviously, mainstream reporters can be liberals or Democrats and still provide fair reporting so long as they are willing to check their bias at the door. Unfortunately, they seem to be blinded by their biases too often, and because so few people who don’t share their worldview exist in the newsrooms, there is nobody to push back against their biases. How was it, for instance, that the mainstream media managed to ignore the trial of abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, a grisly but hugely important story? Slate’s Dave Weigel explained in an April 2013 column that this journalistic lapse was the result of unified cultural and ideological views amongst a media that skewed left. “Let’s just state the obvious: National political reporters are, by and large, socially liberal,” he wrote. “We are more likely to know a gay couple than to know someone who owns an ‘assault weapon.’ We are, generally, pro-choice. Twice, in D.C., I’ve caused a friend to literally leave a conversation and freeze me out for a day or so because I suggested that the Stupak Amendment and the Hyde Amendment [barring federal taxpayer dollars from funding abortions] made sense. There is a bubble.

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