Novak's advice for conservative journalists

  • The veteran conservative journalist Robert Novak was on the Diane Rehm Show on Monday. He was talking about his 50 years in journalism, and talked about how liberal the profession is. He said that conservatives don't want to go into journalism, but for those who do:

     Quote:
    The advice I give them is to go into the closet. Don’t tell anybody you’re a conservative, because you’re not going to get the job, and you’re not going to get the advance.


    That's smart advice, I think. It is hard to convey how unfriendly, even at times hostile, American newsrooms are to conservatives, especially religious conservatives. I know a person who works at the very top of American broadcast journalism, who is literally afraid that her colleagues will find out that she's an Evangelical Christian, for fear of what this will do to her career. There are so few conservatives working in daily journalism that it's easy for stereotypes to be taken as fact by journalists. The thing that's striking to me, coming to the end of my second decade as a professional journalist, is not that the media are liberal, but that so many journalists have no idea how liberal they are. That is, they take their own political and cultural views as normative, because most of the people they know share those beliefs.

    I don't suppose I will ever understand how journalism executives will make such a fetish of "diversity" in hiring, but make no apparent effort to reach out to graduates of religious colleges, or other places where they might actually find people whose beliefs are consonant with a rather large segment of the public whose views are grossly underrepresented in newsrooms. As a purely business strategy, this makes no sense. Nor does it make sense for a publication that wants to report on the community as it actually is, in all its contradictions and complexities, as opposed to the community that one's ideology directs one to see.