Thanks to Tim Worstall, you can read this John Tierney column on "Where Cronies Dwell" without subscribing to New York Times Select.
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.
Good column. Please read it.
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