There were a couple of interesting posts on the subject of journalism this past week. The first one was a guest post by William Katz, a former New York Times Magazine editor and longtime talent coordinator for the "Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson. The whole thing is worth reading, but I wanted to highlight this bit:

But there have been, especially since the sixties, disturbing trends in journalism. Just as Hollywood, in its hiring practices, has replaced talent with education, journalism is in danger of replacing experience with report cards. Journalism is not a profession. There is no specific body of knowledge required, and there is no licensing. What is needed is a sharp set of skills, high powers of observation, and a humility about how much we can understand quickly, and these come only from experience. But when you've gone through Yale or Stanford, when you've been told how smart you are, when you got 700s on your SATs, you start to believe what mom has whispered in your ear. You start to think that you "know." It's a kind of self-inflicted grade inflation. I'm bright, therefore I'm right.

This may be the case, but I'd suspect that most journalists didn't get 700 on their SATs. However, I do think that there is a severe lack of humility among journalists.

Following up on the recent comments by columnist/journalist Robert Novak about conservatives in the news media, Rob Dreher, a National Review alum and currently an editorial columnist at the Dallas Morning News, confirms Novak's analysis and adds some observations of his own.

It is hard to convey how unfriendly, even at times hostile, American newsrooms are to conservatives, especially religious conservatives. I know a person who works at the very top of American broadcast journalism, who is literally afraid that her colleagues will find out that she's an Evangelical Christian, for fear of what this will do to her career. There are so few conservatives working in daily journalism that it's easy for stereotypes to be taken as fact by journalists. The thing that's striking to me, coming to the end of my second decade as a professional journalist, is not that the media are liberal, but that so many journalists have no idea how liberal they are. That is, they take their own political and cultural views as normative, because most of the people they know share those beliefs.

I don't suppose I will ever understand how journalism executives will make such a fetish of "diversity" in hiring, but make no apparent effort to reach out to graduates of religious colleges, or other places where they might actually find people whose beliefs are consonant with a rather large segment of the public whose views are grossly underrepresented in newsrooms. As a purely business strategy, this makes no sense. Nor does it make sense for a publication that wants to report on the community as it actually is, in all its contradictions and complexities, as opposed to the community that one's ideology directs one to see. [emphasis in original]

I've said this before, but I don't expect any of this to change anytime soon. Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center, in a recent book, hypothesized that the mainstream media would have to start hiring conservatives when they realized they saw their continually worsening ratings. I thought it was an interesting hypothesis, but I continued to wonder where the media is going to find conservatives. It's not so much about pay -- though the pay, especially at low levels is substandard for a profession that requires a college degree (teachers think they're underpaid, they should try a journalist's salary sometime) -- but it is definitely a difficult working environment.