Against this argument, I present the following article from Slate Magazine. Slate polled its reporters and staff and discovered that 55 of its 57 of it employees where voting for Barack Obama. Explaining this phenomenon, David Plotz, the editor of Slate, had this to say:
Why did Obama win the swing state of Slate? Like Mike and Jacob before me, I don't think a candidate's Slate victory reflects a bias that has corrupted the magazine during the campaign. There are obvious reasons why Slate would lean heavily toward Obama: Most of our staff and contributors live in extremely Democratic cities on the East and West Coast. (It's worth noting that our lone McCain voter, Deputy Managing Editor Rachael Larimore, lives in Ohio.) Slate's voters tend to skew young, and all polls show younger voters favoring the Democrat.
Tucked away in this explanation is a valuable nugget; the nature of a magazine like Slate is that similar people work for it, people who live in the same cities and are roughly the same age group. I think it is obvious that the situation at Slate is not unusual. As Page himself notes later in his essay, the owners and editors of a news institution are responsible the hiring and firing of their reporting core. Thus, even though Journalists have autonomy in their reporting, this autonomy does not guarantee there will be variety in the coverage. The opposite is also true; since the reporters of a particular organization are similar in nature, they most likely will take a similar attitude towards events, thus negating Page’s claim that the individual status of reporters acts as check on a concentrated bias by a News organization. In other words, Page only makes sense if these reporters are a pool from the general population, as opposed to be kindred souls, as is the case with Slate.
There is a problem with using Slate as an example for all news organizations. Slate is not meant to be a news magazine in the traditional sense, but rather acts as a glossy op-ed. It is not necessarily meant to be balanced, but rather caters to a segment of the public. Reporters are hired accordingly. This may not be true of traditional news organizations, like the New York Times or WSJ. I am still scouring the internet in an attempt to find satistics that back up or rebutt this claim.
1 comments:
A good start to an effort to unpack these questions. And right of you to point out that Slate can hardly be thought of as representative of much of anything. Many national reporters/political analysts likely have more in common than geography, however: education and income (and, obviously, profession) come immediately to mind. I wonder how well-educated, (mostly) white, high-earning journalists compare to the rest of well-educated, white, high-earning "knowledge-based" workers. . . .
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