The Free Press and The Rich
Jonathan has written what I think to be a compelling argument for why journalists should give to the political causes of their choice. After all, better that one's biases be laid bare for all to see, and the public can judge the fairness of his or her work. I couldn't agree more.
Jonathan says it's "mostly conservative people" who are upset by this practice. That hasn't been my experience. The one person to complain about journalists giving to campaigns at this site is Mariel, and no one's ever accused her of being a conservative! As for what I've heard from actual conservatives, the complaint isn't about journalists' giving money to pols -- most, I suspect, would agree with Jonathan on this point -- but that the pols collecting the money here are overwhelmingly liberal. This, conservatives say, is evidence of liberal media bias. To which charge Jonathan replies:
Does anyone seriously think that if we were to search the political giving records of the publishers, owners, shareholders and boards of directors of the major media conglomerates that the vast preponderance of their contributions would not go to Republican candidates and conservative causes?
I'll bite. Yes, I do seriously think that the "vast preponderance" of their contributions would not go to Republican candidates and conservative causes.
Jonathan proposes this assumption as self-evident because it fits the old paradigm of "GOP is the party of the rich, Democrats are the party of the working guy" -- a paradigm dating back to FDR and the New Deal. The problem, though, is the paradigm is dated. Karl Zinsmeister wrote about this phenomenon in the Wall Street Journal three years ago:
Starting in the 1960s and '70s, whole blocs of "little guys"--ethnics, rural residents, evangelicals, cops, construction workers, homemakers, military veterans--began moving into the Republican column. And big chunks of America's rich elite--financiers, academics, heiresses, media barons, software millionaires, entertainers--drifted into the Democratic Party.The extent to which the parties have flipped positions on the little-guy/rich-guy divide is illustrated by research from the Ipsos-Reid polling firm. Comparing counties that voted strongly for George W. Bush to those that voted strongly for Al Gore in the 2000 election, the study shows that in pro-Bush counties, only 7% of voters earned at least $100,000, while 38% had household incomes below $30,000. In the pro-Gore counties, fully 14% pulled in $100,000 or more, while 29% earned less than $30,000....
Wall Street, traditionally thought of as a GOP bastion, is no longer any such thing. Ultraincome brokers and bankers now give heavily to the party of Andrew Jackson. Six of the top 15 contributions to Democratic nominee John Kerry came from partners at firms like Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan....
And media magnates seem to follow the same pattern:
Over the last generation, reports Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, professional elites have become both "less nationalistic" and "more liberal than the American public. This is revealed by 20 public opinion surveys from 1974 to 2000." One authoritative study of a dozen different elites, including top civil servants, lawyers, religious authorities, military officers, entertainment moguls, union leaders, nonprofit managers, business executives and media chieftains, found that every one of these groups but two (businesspeople and the military) was twice to three times as liberal as the public at large.
Yes, Rupert Murdoch is of the right, but this hardly demonstrates a "vast preponderance" of right-wing media moguls any more than Ted Turner demonstrates the opposite.
The old "party of the rich, party of the poor" paradigm simply doesn't hold any more. As Zinsmeister describes it: "It's not as if the Democrats have taken over the top of the socioeconomic ladder and the Republicans the bottom. Rather, Democrats dominate at the very upper and lowest rungs, while Republicans find their following in the middle."
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