Liberalism and the news
The Washington Examiner recently released an analysis of campaign-finance data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research group. The analysis found that 88 percent of 2008 contributions to a political campaign by national media employees went to Democrats. ("National media employees" included producers, anchors, editors, journalists, etc.)
These numbers, it seems, surprise nobody.
Many conservatives will claim it as proof that most members of the mainstream media are liberal — thus, the media itself is pervaded by a liberal slant. And many liberals will insist that despite the left-leaning political tendencies of most journalists, the news itself remains unbiased.
And although "liberal" is not synonymous with donating to Democratic candidates — and perhaps fewer than 88 percent of journalists would self-identify as liberal — other studies have confirmed that a majority of journalists identify as such.
The question then becomes, why?
Either there is something about journalism that entices people who donate to Democratic candidates to pursue journalism as a career, or there is something about journalism that makes the people who partake in it more liberal.
When I started looking for data to explain this gap, I was somewhat surprised by what I found. According to the World Values Survey, self-identified liberals are actually more likely to value high pay in a job. (And in case you haven't heard, journalism isn't exactly making a killing these days.)
At that point, it becomes clear that there has to be something about journalism that makes the people who make a career of it more liberal.
The answer, I believe, lies in a widely heralded liberal trait: empathy. Conservatism is generally more focused on individuals, diminishing the need for empathy. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to place more emphasis on the group, rendering empathy a more valuable value.
A good — and, admittedly, imperfect — empathy example is same-sex marriage.
Demonizing gays is more difficult if you've had to report on it, if you've had to go out into the world and actually have cogent, intelligent conversations with homosexuals. (In fact, people are nearly three times more likely to oppose same-sex marriage if they do not personally know a gay person, according to a 2009 Gallup poll.)
And this is what journalists do for a living: get to know people.
Granted, even if you do personally know a gay person, the odds of supporting same-sex marriage are about 50/50 — and there are some people who support gay marriage and aren't liberal.
For the record, in 2002, 88 percent of journalists thought that society should accept homosexuality. At the time, that view was shared by only 50 percent of Americans.)
And clearly this isn't a universal rule. There are conservative journalists. But their small slice of the journalist population speaks volumes about the effect that journalism — and empathy — has on the people who make a career of it.
Journalists, for the most part, seem to be liberal for the same reason that people who live in big cities are traditionally liberal. If you encounter people who are not like you — be it through your profession, from riding the bus, or simply because the people around you are different — you will probably be less likely to think that they're out to get you.
Or that they're really all that different in the first place — something that seems to lend itself to liberal politics.
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