As far as investigating the dark side of the Major Issues, there’s a
critically important concept that students of journalism are rarely
taught. It’s easy to find any number of targets to write about in
capitalist societies with an open press. But totalitarian governments are journalistic black holes.
Journalists can tickle their self-righteous neurocircuitry every day
(and many do), by exposing easy-to-find faults in democratic societies.
But beyond their event horizon is the bigger story that often remains
untold as it occurs—the horrific deaths of millions in totalitarian
regimes like the former Soviet Union, Communist China, North Korea and,
yes, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Recently I came across this surprising Psychology Today article by
Barbara Oakley entitled
Why Most Journalists Are Democrats (A View from the Soviet Socialist Trenches).
What I found [while working in the USSR several decades ago] was so much propaganda about the wonders of Soviet
Socialist Mankind and the horrors of Western Democracy that the people
exposed to it might as well have had electrodes implanted to control
their thoughts. There were no governmental checks and balances and
nothing even close to a free press—so positions of power were filled by
nasty sorts who kept good people in fear
for their lives if they didn’t think the right thoughts. Soviet
Socialism, as it turned out, was a perverse system that killed motivation even as it made fear as natural as breathing.
Why wasn’t this widely reported in the Western press?
As it turns out, the preponderance of journalists are Democrats.
And socialism, with its idyllic, “progressive” programs, has formed an
increasingly important role in Democratic policies. Who wants to
investigate a possible dark side of your own party’s plank?
We’ll get to that. First—why are most journalists Democrats?
Unsurprisingly, self-selection plays an
important role in choosing a job. People choosing to do work related
to prisons, for example, commonly show quite different characteristics
than those who volunteer for work in helping disadvantaged youths.
Academicians have very different characteristics than CEOs—or
politicians, for that matter.
Harry Stein, former ethics editor of Esquire, once said: "Journalism,
like social work, tends to attract individuals with a keen interest in
bettering the world.” In other words, journalists self-select based on a
desire to help others. Socialism, with its “spread the wealth”
mentality intended to help society’s underdogs, sounds ideal.
Most journalists take a number of psychology, sociology, political
science, and humanities courses during their early years in college.
Unfortunately, these courses have long served as ideological training programs—ignoring
biological sources of self-serving, corrupt, and criminal behavior for a
number of reasons, including lack of scientific training; postmodern,
antiscience bias;
and well-intentioned, facts-be-damned desire to have their students
view the world from an egalitarian perspective. Instead, these
disciplines ram home the idea that troubled behavior can be fixed
through expensive socialist programs that, coincidentally, provide
employment opportunities for graduates of the social sciences. Modern neuroscience
is showing how flawed many of these policies have been—structural
differences in the brains of psychopaths, for example, help explain why
remedial programs simply helped them become better at conning people.
Academics in the social sciences tend to give short shrift to the dramatic failures and corruption within US educational system or unions. (Think here of the Detroit Public School system, or the National Education Association, whose former officers have written:
“The NEA has been the single biggest obstacle to education reform in
this country. We know because we worked for the NEA.”) Instead, because
of their ideological biases, professors often emphasize that corporations are the bad guys, while unions and the government—at least the type of government
that supports higher paychecks for social science professors and jobs
for their students—are good. This type of teaching makes the Democratic
Party and its increasingly socialist ideals seem naturally desirable,
and criticism about how those ideals will supposedly be met less
likely. (How many social scientists predicted that the billions spent
on busing and the Projects would worsen the situations they were meant
to solve, as ultimately happened?) It’s no wonder that journalists
enter the profession as Democrats, then keep their beliefs intact
through all-too-common tendencies to conform.
Journalists sometimes say conservatives and political
independents don’t go into journalism because they’re more interested in
money. The unspoken message, of course, is that conservatives are
greedy bastards who don’t have a social conscience. But many
conservatives go through college to become stay-at-home
housewives—they’re hardly Gordon Geckos. More likely, conservatives are
turned off by the propaganda dished out in their social science
classes.
… This also ignores journalism’s own issues with greed and corruption—most
despicably with Walter Duranty, who covered the Soviet Union for the New York Times and
won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for a series of stories that
uncritically backed Stalinist propaganda, denied the Ukrainian famine,
and defended Stalin's infamous trials. Duranty lived lavishly in
Stalin’s good graces. (Meanwhile, the Times has never returned the Pulitzer.)
… Professors in the humanities and social sciences are taken aback by the
kinds of claims I’m making here. How could there possibly be such
problems within a discipline—or multiple disciplines—without most
academicians being aware of them? But, having worked among the Soviets,
I know that large groups of very intelligent people can fall into a
collective delusion that what they are doing in certain areas is the
right thing, when it's actually not the right thing at all. It
… As far as investigating the dark side of the Major Issues, there’s a
critically important concept that students of journalism are rarely
taught. It’s easy to find any number of targets to write about in
capitalist societies with an open press. But totalitarian governments are journalistic black holes.
Journalists can tickle their self-righteous neurocircuitry every day
(and many do), by exposing easy-to-find faults in democratic societies.
But beyond their event horizon is the bigger story that often remains
untold as it occurs—the horrific deaths of millions in totalitarian
regimes like the former Soviet Union, Communist China, North Korea and,
yes, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. That’s why, when Robert Conquest was asked
whether he wanted to retitle his updated The Great Terror, about the Soviet purges, his answer was: Yes, how about I Told You So, You Fucking Fools?
