Ward Churchill was fired because of academic dishonesty. From Inside Higher Ed:
@Dr_Manhattan
“…the leanings of the NY Times are clear…”
No they aren’t. Their leanings, if anything, seem to be right in the mainstream of American beliefs according to that Pew poll.
What your poll showed me is that liberals are more often interested in reading different points of view. Thus you have MORE liberals reading The Economist than watching MSNBC! You see nothing even close to that on the other end of the spectrum.
Of course, the right wing would call The Economist a left wing magazine because nowadays if you are more interested in facts than rhetoric, you are “on the left”.
All you need to do is compare the news sources on the far right and far left in that chart. There is absolutely no comparison. On the left are news sources where reporters are interested in facts. On the right you have news sources that like to rile up people’s anger. Now maybe that’s because of my “left” bias.
But if my child went to a university where the professor was teaching the students that there is no difference between using the “far left” “New Yorker” as a citation and using Breitbart or the Rush Limbaugh show, I would really bemoan the state of academia.
Students on the right are not shutting down speakers on campus with any regularity to my knowledge. The converse is not true.
As to the rest of your post, you have got to be kidding.
But the WaPost article clearly states that the majority of journalists state they are independents and the number identifying as D was lower in 2014 than in 2002. The percentage of Ds was closer to the number in the general population and of Rs were lower than in general population, but about 68% were NOT Ds. How is that a majority?
I don’t disagree UCB, but Ohiodad specified he was talking about mainstream media, which is not people’s internet newfeeds. And thanks for posting the polls. Interesting. Certainly the results do not entirely mesh with some current policies.
The Pew poll was interesting, I have Breitbart, Wall Street journal and the NYTimes in my feed and occasionally catch up on the LA Times just to see what California is up to. I like to read differing POV. Gave up on network news years ago.
William Shockley got protests like this (and fervent late-night dorm-room debates about free speech vs. offensive speech) in 1976 or 1977. Maybe a bit more civil, but only a bit.
And, in the other direction, if I recall correctly feminist scholar and provocateuse Mary Daly got protested and disinvited various places in the early '80s because of her refusal to allow men to ask questions at her lectures.
Former New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent: “The Times thinks of itself as a centrist national newspaper, but it’s more accurate to say its politics are perfectly centered on the slices of America that look and think the most like Manhattan.”
Quotation is included in a discussion/opinion on the landscape of journalism in the US - take it or leave it, but it discusses an interesting point: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bubble-real-journalism-jobs-east-coast-215048
Nate Silver, 538: “You should be looking toward how much evidence there is for a particular position as opposed to how many people hold that position: Having 20 independent pieces of evidence that mostly point in the same direction might indeed reflect a powerful consensus, while having 20 like-minded people citing the same warmed-over evidence is much less powerful.” [he qualifies this somewhat, but still gives a stern warning along with a call for more diversity of opinion in his article]
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/there-really-was-a-liberal-media-bubble/
@mom2and, the question with polling and survey data about leanings (your question about self identification of media) is always about relative numbers. Yes, many in the media (as well as the culture generally) do not self identify, but the spread between self identified Ds and Rs is stark, and much broader than in the general population (where self identified Ds hold a 8-10point lead normally). In any event, I don’t know a single serious person who does not acknowledge that the main stream media leans generally left. It is impossible to reach any other conclusion if you consume media widely and regularly.
As far as the other polling data cited above, much of it is good stuff, but as is often the case, the devil can be in the details. For example, there is broad support to allow DREAMErs to remain in the US, which assuredly @ucbalumnus would take as evidence that public opinion leans left, even though no credible politician on either side has called for kicking those individuals out. On the other hand, there is broad disapproval of the idea of “sanctuary cities” which has been a hallmark of current democratic tactics on immigration recently. In the same vein, and relative to the last travel ban, early generic polling (captured here) show majority disapproval of the pollsters’ formulation of the ban, but later polling shows fairly broad support for the ban as enacted. Similar results are seen with polling on abortion, where the top line data shows majority support for continuing to fund planned parenthood, but all polling has consistently shown strong majority support for restrictions on abortion, particularly post first trimester, and very broad support on partial birth abortion for years. One contrary example is funding for Trump’s wall, where there has been a pretty steady majority opposed for some time. This may have something to do with why we here less and less about this from the White House.
That was a good article. If you look at colleges and universities, a similar bubble exists as researched by Kathy Cramer at UW-Madison.
But isn’t one reason the “mainstream media” is more likely to be Democrat because it is a profession largely pursued by college graduates? Voters with a college degree lean strongly Democrat. And in the last election, Clinton versus Trump, voters with a college degree leaned even MORE strongly toward Clinton.
If you polled any random group of college educated adults, they would lean Democrat. That’s been a growing trend.
Journalists are increasingly likely to be college graduates. They may not have been true 50 years ago, but I believe it is true today. Therefore, they lean Democrat like all Americans who are college graduates do.
@observer12, you are not wrong, although I would caution you to not rely too heavily on the education numbers, since pretty much all the data shows an increasing skew the farther you go, which strains the numbers a bit. This will muddy even further as we see single women taking a larger share of the post secondary data, because that classification skews pretty hard D, particularly young. But more broadly, sure there is a lot of self selection. People who pursue journalism as a career tend to have a more liberal/progressive viewpoint. Whether that has become more pronounced over the last couple decades, or whether the explosion of the internet has brought that in to sharp relief is a whole mother question.
How much of the race debate centers around the acceptance of personal responsibility and accountability vs. bad luck/racism, where to place blame for poor life results, etc.?
Do we believe more in bad luck or poor decisions? Both? I imagine most of us are somewhere in the middle and maybe BLM is in the “bad luck/racism” camp, while the Alt-Right is in the “you get what you deserve” camp.
“Do we believe more in bad luck or poor decisions?”
How about systemic racism built into our country/system or do you consider that the bad luck bit? Bad luck if you were born to a group that doesn’t get an equal shot. I find it interesting that you lump racism in with bad luck. I tend to think of bad luck as you had an accident, illness, something else that could happen to anyone that caused a set back for you. If the white nationalists which are what the alt-right label really is think that hardship is due solely to “you get what you deserve” than their racism and prejudice are both showing IMO.
“How about systemic racism built into our country/system or do you consider that the bad luck bit?”
I consider that the good luck a lot per the two cases below
Case 1
03-12-2012 at 12:10 am edited March 2012 in University of Wisconsin
I recently got a call that I have the opportunity to be a Chancellor Scholar at UW Madison. It covers full tuition and awards an $800 stipend for books. Would I be a fool to turn this down in favor of a 50k+ private university? I may be jumping the gun on any acceptances, but I think its a valid question. I applied to Madison because all my friends did. I honestly had no desire to attend a state university before this scholarship. Money is not really an issue for my family, but any amount I don’t spend on college is mine to keep. Basically my parents said the decision is mine. If I do turn it down, I’ll feel guilty. The program sounds pretty nice with all the service opportunities and private networking, but I just don’t know if it beats a school like Northwestern. I always had a dream of being a Wildcat, but the money and title from Madison is beginning to look really enticing. So, what are your thoughts?
03-12-2012 at 8:51 am
One of the requirements for Chancellor’s Scholar:
Be a member of one of the following groups:
a. African American
b. Native American
c. Hispanic/Latino
d. Southeast Asian (Cambodian, Hmong, Laotian, or Vietnamese)
e. Educationally/culturally disadvantaged
Case 2
ACCEPTED!!!
Which School? Weinberg
Objective:
SAT I (breakdown): 1280 (Yeah I know)
ACT: Didn’t take
SAT II: Lmao I didn’t submit these horrific nightmares to anyone.
Unweighted GPA (out of 4.0): 4.0
Rank (percentile if rank is unavailable): Valedictorian (1)
AP:
IB:
Senior Year Course Load: English 4, English Level 2(Dual Enrollment), English Level 3 (Dual Enrollment), Calculus 2 (Dual Enrollment), Linear Algebra (Dual Enrollment), Econ, PE (Dual Enrollment). Theater (Dual Enrollment), Government, Senior Project, Spanish 3.
Major Awards (USAMO, Intel etc.): NCWIT Regional Affiliate Runner-up, School Honor Role, District Black Highest Honors Awards… (I started to win more impressive national/regional stuff after I applied which means I wasn’t able to put it on my application so I’m only listing what was on my app)
Subjective:
Extracurriculars (place leadership in parenthesis): Black Student Union (President), Raising my little brother, Democratic Society, Math Engineering Science Achievement (Administrative Assistant), Book Club (Vice President) (I’ve done a little bit more than this but this is all I listed under my application as well b/c ya know… Limited space… but overall I didn’t cure cancer or anything impressive.)
Job/Work Experience: Certified College Tutor, Technology Assistant for a Real Estate Company
Volunteer/Community service: Interact club is the main one I listed on my app but I’ve done a lot of other ones not listed like volunteering at a Disabled Students Center, volunteering as a physics tutor and a lot more.
Summer Activities: Girls Who Code Summer Immersion Program and receiving a sponsorship to study Public Policy at Cornell on a full ride
Accepted: Northwestern, UCSD, UCD, UCSC, Hampton.
Rejected: UCLA
Waiting on: Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, USC, Berkeley, Stanford
I won’t get into what I think about the post above except to highlight this portion of it, as affirmative action discussion, which appears to be what that post is griping about, is supposed to be constrained to only one thread on CC:
“Unweighted GPA (out of 4.0): 4.0
Rank (percentile if rank is unavailable): Valedictorian (1)”
We could separate bad luck and systemic racism, sure.
If you remove racism, that could be a simplified way of deciding where to place blame for socioeconomic woes.
Whether it is racism or bad luck, bad things happen to good people. Conversely, while we cannot always control what happens to us, we can control our responses. I don’t believe a “woe is me” attitude and complete disavowal of personal accountability and (thus) responsible living are acceptable; nor, however, do I believe that everyone gets the same fair shake all the time.
I think the key is to provide equal opportunity… but not equal results. We’d still have some blaming the system, but at least we would know that the person had opportunities – school, job, etc.
If we weave race into that, we need to be teaching kids to evaluate people not at all by the color of their skin or their sex, creed, etc… but by their actions.
We will never stop making excuses, as a species, for personal failure… because sometimes it’s hard to blame yourself for squandered opportunities and sometimes we’re just plain unlucky. But if we can get rid of racism on a personal level, the institutional must follow eventually – people treated solely based on merit – and if we can provide good education, including practical lessons in searching for jobs, researching and financing higher and vocational education options, handling money, etc… we’ll be in a better place in terms of helping to ensure opportunity for all. What you do with that ball is largely up to you – you can dunk it or throw it out of bounds – and maybe it will get stolen, and we have a safety net to help you through that… but at least you will have your ball.
I hope that analogy fits. haha
We just can not and do not provide equal opportunity to children. Unless you can figure out a way for them to pick their parents, that is not going to change.
I really miss dstark.
Thank you for that, @alh. Such an important thing. We’re influenced, even before birth, beyond our control in ways that affect us each differently.
I miss @dstark, too.
White privilege theory based on the concept of “structural racism” argues that all white people, according to public intellectuals such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, are de facto racists no matter what they say or think. It’s not politically realistic to expect that any race or ethnic group will accept the contention that they are the embodiment of historical evil. It is a vote loser. Most psychologically healthy people, of any race, are not that self-loathing, regardless of how “woke” they are. You can’t have “tribalism for me but not for thee.” When you ask white people to become more aware of their “privilege,” you are encouraging them to identify with their whiteness. That is a very very bad idea. There is a growing “Euro-American” identity movement in the US based on a mythology of pan-European cultural unity based on the Roman Empire. It is fictional nostalgia not all that different from the whole “Black Athena”/“We were Kings” Martin Bernal stuff debunked by Mary Lefkowitz and other classicists, but it offers similar consolations to angry young men who feel disrespected.
I am very disheartened by the lack of regard for the principle of free speech demonstrated by current college students, regardless of political orientation. Free speech is a bedrock Enlightenment principle. There is a collapse in civic trust which bodes ill for republican self-governance (small “r”).
Wouldn’t it be nice to just remove racism from the equation. But, uncooperative racists just keep getting in the way…sigh. Not to mention those who don’t believe racism exists unless it is in your face blatant and even then excuses appear like, “those people read too much into it”, “there’s too much PC”, “students like this see racism where none exists”, “it was a practical joke”, “the commander made too much of the situation”, “there’s no such thing as white privilege”, “good people on both sides”, etc.