John Tierney: Where Cronies Dwell.

John Tierney today. Yes, there is cronyism, alive and well in the US. But where?

Journalists and legal scholars have been decrying
''cronyism'' and calling for ''mainstream'' values
when picking a Supreme Court justice. But how do they
go about picking the professors to train the next
generation of journalists and lawyers?

David Horowitz, the conservative who is president of
the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, analyzed
the political affiliations of the faculty at 18 elite
journalism and law schools. By checking all the party
registrations he could find, he concluded that
Democrats outnumber Republicans by 8 to 1 at the law
schools, with the ratio ranging from 3 to 1 at Penn to
28 to 1 at Stanford.

Only one journalism school, the University of Kansas,
had a preponderance of Republicans (by 10 to 8). At
the rest of the schools, there was a 6-to-1 ratio of
Democrats to Republicans. The ratio was 4 to 1 at
Northwestern and New York University, 13 to 1 at the
University of Southern California, 15 to 1 at
Columbia. Horowitz didn't find any Republicans at
Berkeley.

Some academics argue that their political ideologies
don't affect the way they teach, which to me is proof
of how detached they've become from reality in their
monocultures. This claim is especially dubious if
you're training lawyers and journalists to deal with
controversial public policies.

I realize, from experience at six newspapers, that
most journalists try not to impose their prejudices on
their work. When I did stories whose facts challenged
liberal orthodoxies, editors were glad to run them.
When liberal reporters wrote stories, they tried to
present the conservative perspective.

The problem isn't so much the stories that appear as
the ones that no one thinks to do. Journalists
naturally tend to pursue questions that interest them.
So when you have a press corps that's heavily
Democratic -- more than 80 percent, according to some
surveys of Washington journalists -- they tend to do
stories that reflect Democrats' interests.

When they see a problem, their instinct is to ask what
the government can do to solve it. I once sat in on a
newspaper story conference the day after an
armored-car company was robbed of millions of dollars
bound for banks. The first idea that came up for a
follow-up story was: Does this robbery show the need
for stricter regulation of armored-car companies?

We kicked this idea around until I suggested that
companies in the business of transporting cash already
had a fairly strong incentive not to lose it --
presumably an even stronger incentive than any
government official regulating their security
arrangements. That story idea died, but not the
mind-set that produced it.

The surest way to impress the judges for a journalism
prize is to write a series of articles that spur a
legislature to right some evil, particularly if it was
committed by a corporation. When journalists do
exposes of government malfeasance, they usually focus
on the need for more regulations and bigger budgets,
not on whether the government should be doing the job
in the first place.

To some extent, this is a problem of self-selection.
Journalism attracts people who want to right wrongs,
and the generation that's been running journalism
schools and media businesses came of age when
government, especially the federal government, was
seen as the solution to most wrongs. These executives,
like the tenured radicals in law schools and the rest
of academia, hired ideological cronies and shaped
their institutions to reflect their views.

But those views are no longer dominant outside
newsrooms and academia. A lot of young conservatives
and libertarians have simply given up on the
traditional media, either as a source of news or as a
place to work.

Instead, they post on conservative blogs and start
careers at magazines like The Weekly Standard and
Reason, knowing these credentials will hurt their
chances of becoming reporters for ''mainstream''
publications -- whereas a job at The New Republic or
The Washington Monthly wouldn't be a disqualifying
credential.

I'm not suggesting that journalism or law schools
should be forced to have ideological balance on their
faculties -- this is one of those many problems that
doesn't require a solution by government. But it's
curious how little the schools seem to care about it.

They keep meticulous tabs on the race and gender and
ethnic background of their students and faculty. But
the lack of political diversity is taken as a matter
of course. As long as the professors look different,
why worry if they think the same?

A palpable hit there, a very nice snipe. As mentioned earlier today our experience in the UK is different which is why we have a different style of blogging to go with our different style (and diversity of viewpoint) of media.

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