from James Taranto’s Best of the Web,
Special note: James Taranto will be our guest Sunday evening in the 8pm EST hour on Pundit Review Radio.
Something odd is afoot in America’s elite media–increasingly, journalists are unabashed about admitting their liberal bias. Another example is Jonathan Alter of Newsweek, who talked to radio host Hugh Hewitt yesterday:
Hewitt: What [the Washington Post’s Thomas] Edsall admitted, which was so damning, is that the people who drive the news are the reporters, and the reporters are, by 15-25 to 1 leftists.
Alter: OK. All right. Now I’m not sure that ratio is wrong. I mean, I don’t think anybody has a good study of it, but–
Hewitt: But it feels right.
Alter: –it’s overwhelmingly, the question, though, the threshold question that you have to look at is how much does that affect their coverage? Now I think some. I think liberals who say well, that doesn’t affect their coverage at all are wrong. Obviously, people’s worldviews will affect their coverage to a certain extent.
And then there is this, also from Taranto, The Pope is Catholic, the Media is Liberal
Back in June, Linda Greenhouse, Supreme Court correspondent for the New York Times, gave a politically charged speech at the Radcliffe Institute. It was standard liberal baby-boomer sanctimony, as we noted in July:
Linda Greenhouse ’68 went to a Simon and Garfunkel concert soon after the war in Iraq began, and in the middle of the concert she had a crying jag. . . . “Thinking back to my college days in those troubled and tumultuous late 1960s, there were many things that divided my generation. . . . [Yet] we were absolutely united in one conviction: the belief that in future decades, if the world lasted that long, when our turn came to run the country, we wouldn’t make the same mistakes. . . . I cried that night . . . out of the realization that my faith had been misplaced. . . . We were the problem.”
For some reason this speech is getting attention again now, notably a segment on NPR’s “All Things Considered” yesterday titled “Critics Question Reporter’s Airing of Personal Views.” It’s what you’d expect, too, but this passage is telling:
Jack Nelson, former Washington bureau chief for The Los Angeles Times, blanches at hearing of Greenhouse’s remarks, but agrees with her tough critique of the White House.
“If I was the Washington bureau chief and she was my Supreme Court reporter, I might have to answer to the editors in L.A. for that,” Nelson says.