Ideological Journalism

Ezra Klein: in favor of capitalism after all. (Okay, okay, he's always been in favor of some tempered version of it.)

Anyway, he makes an interesting point about the paucity of work for full time ideological journalists:

It's very hard, however, to make a living being a conscientious, opinionated, progressive writer. And the problem is basic: There are very few outlets. Think about it. You want to get a full-time job as a liberal pundit-type. Where do you apply? Well, The American Prospect, of course. The Nation too. In These Times really doesn't have any money, and The Washington Monthly has a skeletal staff. I guess you could try The New Republic, but that bridge is charred and smoking. Oh, and Salon, and I'm sure a couple more I'm forgetting.

Not one of those outlets turns a profit. Not one employs more than a dozen writers. Between them, you're looking at fewer than (I'd guess) 30 full-time liberal writing positions, and half of those are at TNR.

I might put the number a little higher by counting journalists who, say, work for environmental magazines like Grist or other more narrowly focused publications with a distinctly liberal bent. And while we're at it, let's throw in Harper's and Mother Jones and maybe even the numerous editorial page writing spots that stick almost exclusively to liberal views, just for the sake of completeness. And if you want to be even more generous, you can add a few think tank type positions that exist primarily to fund progressive writing of some sort. But even still, this number is pretty small in the grand scheme of things, and his basic point stands: It is indeed difficult to make a living as a full time, explicitly progressive journalist, just as it's not always easy to make a living as a full time, explicitly conservative journalist.

However, the difference I see is that liberals have more outlets for, if not explicitly liberal, then soft liberal journalism--the sort of "objective" and/or "mainstream" journalism that doesn't declare its biases but, however subtly, pushes a left leaning viewpoint. And no matter what, there are simply more liberal-leaning journalists working in today's newsrooms. As poll after poll has shown, members of the news media tend to self-identify as liberal by a pretty wide margin, meaning that even if there aren't always a huge number of outlets devoted to ardently liberal journalism, there are plenty of opportunities for liberal journalists.