AND THE ROLE OF PAULINE KAEL WILL BE PLAYED BY…: New Yorker writer admits he’s never met a Trump supporter at work in 15-year media career. ‘So, yes, there is a liberal bias to the news,’ the longtime journalist wrote.
Jay Caspian Kang, a staff writer for The New Yorker, ascribed media bias not to a conspiracy among journalists, but to the fact that the overwhelming majority of journalists are left-leaning.
Kang wrote a piece for The New Yorker, “How Biased Is the Media, Really?” in response to a recent Gallup poll showing that Americans’ trust in mass media remains not only historically low, but consistently abysmal for the third year in a row.
He responded by addressing multiple common critiques from Americans on both sides of the political spectrum, including the accusation that “Every news organization that feigns objectivity is actually heavily slanted toward the left. Not only that; the media is actively working with the Democrats to defeat Donald Trump.”
“The most obvious explanation for this impression is that the press corps is mostly made up of liberals,” he wrote in the piece, adding that “At prestige outlets—many of which do don the armor of impartiality—the imbalance skews a lot further to the left than what many outsiders might imagine.”
He recalled Uri Berliner emerging as a whistleblower against NPR and the rise of progressive identity-politics, but argued the effect of such politics on journalism is ultimately “negligible compared with the effect of the fact that nearly everyone who works [in the media]” are “college-educated Democratic voters from middle- to upper-middle-class families. I have mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: in the course of a fifteen-year career that has included stints at radio shows, print outlets, digital media and television, I have yet to meet a Trump supporter at work.”
As Pauline Kael, the New Yorker’s film critic was quoted after the 1972 election, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”
But certainly not in a newsroom, curiously enough.
But then, given the way that the New York Times’ uber-woke young staffers turned on former Weekly Standard assistant editor Adam Rubenstein like the torch and pitchfork-wielding rampaging mob out of a 1930s Universal horror movie for publishing Tom Cotton’s op-ed in 2020, would anyone who’s even Trump-curious admit to such inclinations in a 2024 newspaper newsroom?