I’ve sold 57 articles, many to the Homes section of my local paper. I wanted to write for the op/ed page and my editor laughed. To write on that page I had to be an actual employee so they could “ensure the quality of the content.” I took that to mean that I was appropriately left leaning. When I moved to town I actually thought the Tallahassee Democrat was the Democratic party’s official newspaper; as you couldn’t have slipped a piece of paper between their positions.
A friend and wonderful writer brought me a letter he’d sent to the Democrat and what the Democrat published. The letter argued eloquently for concealed carry. What the Democrat published (and told him they’d edited for brevity) could have been written by somebody you’d run from if confronted in public. I asked the editor why he’d done that. He huffed, wiggled and snorted and said, “I had to change it. Otherwise, how would people know what a nut case that guy was?”
A reporter told me once, “It’s okay to lie about Republicans. It makes up for all the times they did sh*t and you just didn’t catch them at it.”
After laughing at me about the job my editor pointed to a stack of resumes thig- high and running the length of the wall. “Those, she said, are just the resumes for the one reporter position we have open. Every one of them graduated with a liberal arts degree. You are an engineer.” I suddenly realized that for at least a generation, in order to work in the media you had to have been steeped in “liberal” arts. I could not have passed a single course on that side of campus as even the art classes I was forced to take managed to include an unhealthy dollop of Communism.
I don’t think you need a liberal arts degree; I think you just have to toe the liberal line. A liberal arts degree is just a degree without a specific focus.
If the print media wants to survive they need to put the screws to their fellow travelers in the teachers’ unions: lib papers don’t sell in areas where lib parasites can’t even read.