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Re:2020 Pulitzer Prize Winners by lambdaphagy on Tuesday May 05, 2020 @12:31AM (#23076509)
I would find it more surprising if journalists didn't share certain demographic regularities. As an exercise, I looked up the educational backgrounds of the current NYT masthead on wikipedia. Here are the results:

Columbia

Harvard, Harvard

UMich

N/A (the art design guy)

Notre Dame

Princeton

Yale

Columbia

Tufts

Stonyhurst, Oxford

UVA

Are those results out of line with what you were expecting? I can't say that they are for me. If anything, I consider it exceptionally broadminded of The Gray Lady to hire an ND grad.

Please recall that I never claimed this was a good or a bad thing. In some sense I regard domination by elites as inevitable, but I do think it's preferable to be explicit about it, and failing to recognize "the media" as a coherent social category tends to frustrate that recognition.

The political affiliation of journalists is a well-studied topic. Polls consistently find that Democrats outnumber Republicans and liberals outnumber conservatives by wide margins, ranging from 4-1 to 20-1 [!] depending on survey methodology (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3279453). A study which compared rates of citation of various think tanks by media outlets, vs. by Congress, found that every media outlet surveyed except Fox and the Washington Times stood to the left of the Congressional median (https://www.jstor.org/stable/25098770?seq=1).

Again, I'm not making any normative claims about any of this. I'm just surprised at the resistance to taking it for granted.

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