ROSS DOUTHAT ON THE GUNS VS. GOSNELL COVERAGE CONTRAST, AND MEDIA BIAS. “As the last example suggests, the problem here isn’t that American journalists are too quick to go on crusades. Rather, it’s that the press’s ideological blinders limit the kinds of crusades mainstream outlets are willing to entertain, and the formal commitment to neutrality encourages self-deception about what counts as crusading.”

UPDATE: Prof. Stephen Clark writes:

When I read op/ed’s like those of Douthat, I can’t help but think that modern journalism is the very antithesis of Mother Jones’ dictum that they so like to imagine themselves fulfilling: To comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Rather, they seem to aspire to that which Finley Peter Dunne, through his character Dooley, warned against – a passage from which Jones and many others have uncritically borrowed: “Th newspaper does ivrything f’r us. It runs th’ polis foorce an’ th’ banks, commands th’ milishy, controls th’ ligislachure, baptizes th’ young, marries th’ foolish, comforts th’ afflicted, afflicts th’ comfortable, buries th’ dead an’ roasts thim aftherward”.

Modern journalists are very far from being the rabble rousers and muckrakers they imagine themselves to be. They are merely courtiers to the political and cultural powers incumbent in society.

It’s not surprising that when journalism started recruiting from the apparatchik class, it became part of the apparat. Or maybe it’s the other way around. . . .