Tuesday, August 04, 2009

Why Most Journalists are Biased Leftward

The following excerpt is from an article posted at a Psychology Today blog. It is well worth reading in its entirety.
As it turns out, the preponderance of journalists are Democrats. And socialism, with its idyllic, “progressive” programs, has formed an increasingly important role in Democratic policies. Who wants to investigate a possible dark side of your own party’s plank?

We’ll get to that. First—why are most journalists Democrats?

Unsurprisingly, self-selection plays an important role in choosing a job. People choosing to do work related to prisons, for example, commonly show quite different characteristics than those who volunteer for work in helping disadvantaged youths. Academicians have very different characteristics than CEOs—or politicians, for that matter.

Harry Stein, former ethics editor of Esquire, once said: "Journalism, like social work, tends to attract individuals with a keen interest in bettering the world.” In other words, journalists self-select based on a desire to help others. Socialism, with its “spread the wealth” mentality intended to help society’s underdogs, sounds ideal.

Most journalists take a number of psychology, sociology, political science, and humanities courses during their early years in college. Unfortunately, these courses have long served as ideological training programs—ignoring biological sources of self-serving, corrupt, and criminal behavior for a number of reasons, including lack of scientific training; postmodern, antiscience bias; and well-intentioned, facts-be-damned desire to have their students view the world from an egalitarian perspective. Instead, these disciplines ram home the idea that troubled behavior can be fixed through expensive socialist programs that, coincidentally, provide employment opportunities for graduates of the social sciences. Modern neuroscience is showing how flawed many of these policies have been—structural differences in the brains of psychopaths, for example, help explain why remedial programs simply helped them become better at conning people.

Academics in the social sciences tend to give short shrift to the dramatic failures and corruption within US educational system or unions. (Think here of the Detroit Public School system, or the National Education Association, whose former officers have written: “The NEA has been the single biggest obstacle to education reform in this country. We know because we worked for the NEA.”) Instead, because of their ideological biases, professors often emphasize that corporations are the bad guys, while unions and the government—at least the type of government that supports higher paychecks for social science professors and jobs for their students—are good. This type of teaching makes the Democratic Party and its increasingly socialist ideals seem naturally desirable, and criticism about how those ideals will supposedly be met less likely. (How many social scientists predicted that the billions spent on busing and the Projects would worsen the situations they were meant to solve, as ultimately happened?) It’s no wonder that journalists enter the profession as Democrats, then keep their beliefs intact through all-too-common tendencies to conform. _PsychologyToday
Follow the link and read the whole thing.

Journalists and other college educated leftists are blind because they enrolled in an academic program of self-blinding. They came by their biases in a step by step progression, by intentional programming.

Anyone who reads their drivel uncritically runs the risk of unconsciously following the same program of brain blinding and brain binding. Soon, if no contravening forces apply, an entire society can become mentally blind and subject to electing clowns as president. It could happen.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Anyone who reads their drivel uncritically runs the risk of unconsciously following the same program of brain blinding and brain binding.

Which is why I stopped watching television. That, and I work overnight.

Soon, if no contravening forces apply, an entire society can become mentally blind and subject to electing clowns as president. It could happen.

This explains why the Evangelical voters were one of the only groups to go strongly for McCain. Evangelicals have their own TV networks, their own churches, often have their own schools, and generally have a completely parallel system to the rest of society.