[conservatism_IS_compassion]

our research did NOT show what I thought-—a sudden lurch during or after JFK. Rather, it showed a very steady but consistent move further left by ALL major papers every year. The implications are that you cannot tie this leftward lurch to a specific event, but rather to larger forces that are more difficult to quantify. It is across the board-—At. Constitution, Cleveland Plain Dealer, NYTimes, WaPo, and LA Times moved at about the same rate.

35 posted on April 26, 2010 12:56:18 PM EDT by LS

Perhaps the shift leftward is a result of the collectivists purposely going into journalism to co-opt the trade." - abb

First part true. Last part, no, I think it is the natural self-selection process.

The mystery is not why journalists agree with liberals, but why it was possible for them to get more in agreement with them over time. They should - I refer you both to my #32 - have always been perfectly simpatico, at least after the hegemony of the AP was established.

"Objective" journalists and "liberals" are the same thing - cardboard heroes who construct, and defend us from, "enemies" who are perfectly harmless in the first place.

I recall your having proposed the theory that journalism became liberal after JFK, Larry - and I'm confident that I said at the time you first mentioned it that the Joe McCarthy example illustrates clearly that journalists were already very markedly leftist by 1950. As Ann Coulter documented in Treason, the denouement of the Army-McCarthy hearings was created pretty much out of whole cloth by journalism.

[LS]

You have to be careful with journalists and McCarthy. He was the master at playing reporters, and his recent biography shows that for some time he was very “in” with reporters. There certainly were leftist streams in journalism before 1960, but our research shows that the five major papers, in both domestic and foreign policy, on a scale of conservatism vs. liberalism were quite conservative from 1958 until the mid-1960s.