June 30, 2007

Not reported...

I highly recommend a piece by Rod Dreher, The Godless Party: Media Bias & Blindness—And the Big Story They Missed

....Indeed, religion has become such a galvanizing issue for both parties that, say the authors, "the religious gap among white voters in the 1992, 1996 and 2000 presidential elections was more important than other demographic and social cleavages in the electorate; it was much larger than the gender gap and more significant than any combination of differences in education, income, occupation, age, marital status and regional groupings." The media have thoroughly reported the key role religious conservatives play in Republican Party politics; what they’ve ignored is the equally important role militant secularists play in setting the agenda of the Democratic Party—as the late pro-life Governor Bob Casey, denied a decent podium at the 1992 Democratic convention, could have attested.

The divide has become so stark that the authors have discerned a new kind of voter: the "anti-fundamentalist." According to the 2000 ANES data, the hatred of religious conservatives long apparent among Democratic convention delegates has found a home among a disproportionate number of Democratic voters. Twenty-five percent of white respondents in the ANES survey expressed serious hostility towards religious conservatives, as opposed to only one percent who felt this strongly against Jews, and 2.5 percent who disliked blacks and Catholics to a strong degree. (Ironically, these are people who say they "‘strongly agree’ that one should be tolerant of persons whose moral standards are different from one’s own.") Eighty percent of these voters picked Bill Clinton in 1996, with 70 percent choosing Al Gore in 2000. Conclude the authors, "One has to reach back to pre-New Deal America, when political divisions between Catholics and Protestants encapsulated local ethno-cultural cleavages over Prohibition, immigration, public education, and blue laws, to find a period when voting behavior was influenced by this degree of antipathy toward a religious group." If Al Smith were to return and run for president today, his enemies wouldn’t be yesterday’s rustic anti-Catholic bigots of the Bible Belt, but today’s urbane anti-Christian bigots of liberal coastal cities dubbed (by the Wall Street Journal ) the Porn Belt...

....But their most striking finding was the near total lack of editorial and news coverage devoted to the increased importance of secularists to the Democratic Party versus the role of traditionalists in the GOP. The numbers are mind-boggling: 43 stories on secularist Democrats, 682 stories on traditionalist Republicans. In 1992, the Times alone published nearly twice the number of stories about Evangelicals in the GOP than both papers did about secularists among the Democrats for the entire decade. The bias is even worse among television journalists, who filled the airwaves with stories about the "Religious Right" and the Republican Party, but who didn’t file a single story—not one—about the Secular Left’s relationship to the Democrats. But their most striking finding was the near total lack of editorial and news coverage devoted to the increased importance of secularists to the Democratic Party versus the role of traditionalists in the GOP. The numbers are mind-boggling: 43 stories on secularist Democrats, 682 stories on traditionalist Republicans. In 1992, the Times alone published nearly twice the number of stories about Evangelicals in the GOP than both papers did about secularists among the Democrats for the entire decade. The bias is even worse among television journalists, who filled the airwaves with stories about the "Religious Right" and the Republican Party, but who didn’t file a single story—not one—about the Secular Left’s relationship to the Democrats....

The numbers would seem to indicate a cover-up, but my guess is that it's mostly a matter of people in the news media considering secularism so normal, that they don't even see it. Sort of like the way you don't hear your own accent, and think you are just speaking "normally."

But I think there is a huge psychological cover-up going on, as liberals try to pretend that they are still the modern mainstream, and anyone who disagrees is kooky or primitive. And that psychology is a subject that utterly fascinates me...

Posted by John Weidner at June 30, 2007 06:56 AM
Comments

There's a report that I continually cite, where a survey was done of the demographics of the journalism profession. That study— done in several mid-range markets, not the large or small ones— showed a strong similarity in the lifestyles of those professionals. Renteers rather than owners. City dwellers rather than suburban or rural. Those kinds of things. A lot of those lifestyle points are fairly obvious; in a profession where you can move on for as little a reason as a new program director or editor, or for a promotion, it makes little sense to buy, and in the city is close to the job, after all.

But when taken in aggregate, the overwhelming majority of journalists fell into a lifestyle that is common to 2% of Americans. Fish have no word for water, right. But what's amazing is that the percentage of people who feel alienated from the press is so much less than 98%, really.

(NB: This survey is about a decade old. I haven't the faintest idea what effect the Internet has had on this.

Posted by: B. Durbin at July 1, 2007 08:53 PM

What's wrong with renters and city dwellers? I'm one, and I'm a rightwing warmongering fascist.

A lot of those "renter" journalists, by the way, are as stuck to their tony New York apartments as if they had inherited them and were nailed to the floor. In any case, the ability to move around doesn't mean jack when it comes to political viewpoints. The sort of leftist society many liberals want to implement would probably have Soviet-style restrictions on movement anyway.

I don't think that study proves much of anything, except that most journalists live in big cities where there are plenty of apartments. Most taxi drivers live in big cities too. No, there is something else that explains the way journalists think, and it isn't the fact that they check "rent" instead of "own" on applications.

Posted by: Andrea Harris at July 2, 2007 03:34 AM

I think renting is just a side-effect.

We all know the term "yuppie," for "young upwardly-mobile professionals." But there's another type we have no nickname for, who tend to go for urban careers that are not "upwardly," but instead reward one with feelings of intellectual and cultural superiority.

Not just journalism, but the academy, the art world, urban bookshops and galleries, advertising and design, and many "support" positions in the business or political world. Their "life well lived" is measured perhaps in ethnic-restaurants-discovered-before-everybody-else, instead of house-kids-cars-in-upscale-suburb.....

Posted by: John Weidner at July 2, 2007 07:35 AM
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