Ackman and the Cronies

Are journalists and even lawyers grromed to be liberal Democrats. More likely they start out that way. John Tierney sees it as a problem, one of self-selection or cronyism:

John Tierney writes in his October 11 NY Times Column:

October 11, 2005
Where 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.


The following day, the Times published my letter to the editor:

From The New York Times, Oct. 12, 2005

To the Editor:

As a graduate of both law school and journalism school, I find it hard to argue with John Tierney's premise that law professors and especially journalism professors tend toward liberalism. But it's harder to argue that either profession favors liberals outside the academy.

Indeed, conservative lawyers, if they are a minority, have a much better shot at judgeships or high-level government positions since it's conservatives who are doing the appointing more often than not.

More broadly, if liberals are channeling their own most brilliant acolytes into law and journalism, that just leaves more space in business schools, banks and corporations for young conservatives. Thus, the conservatives wind up wielding greater power, lacking only vague cultural influence.

If conservatives had concocted this arrangement deliberately, they could have hardly done better for themselves.

Daniel L. Ackman

Jersey City, Oct. 11, 2005