WEDNESDAY'S LETTERS: Food for Thought

By: E&P Staff E&P's letters will be taking a Thanksgiving holiday break, and will return on Monday. Until then, eat lots of turkey, debate your relatives, and feast your eyes on the following. If the urge to purge strikes, sound off in our letters column.

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Tilting at Unprovable Bias

Enjoyed your column on Tierney, although I think you should have challenged his numbers more. In Horowitz's highly selective and unscientific study, a majority of the journalism professors were non-partisan or not registered. Out of 314 journalism professors studied by Horowitz, 120 are registered Democrats, or 38.2%. That's a smaller figure than most surveys of journalists reveal.

Although the proportion of Republicans in journalism schools is smaller than among the general public, this reflects the fact that conservatives like Tierney can make more money in the corporate media, while liberals are willing to sacrifice high salaries because of their desire to teach. Instead of denouncing professors for a bias Tierney can't prove, perhaps he ought to attend a few of their classes and learn the basics of sound reporting.

John K. Wilson
Coordinator, Campus Journalism Project
Founder, www.collegefreedom.org
Author, Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies (Paradigm, 2006)

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A Liberal Trait?

Questioning authority is after all a liberal trait. For all of Tierney's crying, the media certainly slants conservative these days. My liberal friends and I also get our news mostly from Internet sites that lean our way. So what does that prove? Since there are hundreds of conservative media members out there, perhaps we should ask where they went to j-school. Oh, I get it; judging by their stories, they didn't go to j-school!

Greg Klein
New York City, N.Y.

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Newspaper Layoffs Just Good Business

All U.S. industry is getting leaner and meaner, in response to competition. So the news industry too must cut its salary expense. If more liberals than conservatives get axed it is because liberals predominate. And, yes, journalism schools in the past may have filled those desks with writers who are leftists first and professionals second. Hopefully the result of media reorganizations will be more professional news output. Liberals may miss Maureen Dowd. Conservatives may miss cartoonist Rodriguez. But in their place will we readers see more accurate information? More information that we ALL can use? Counting on it!

John Clothier
Chino, Calif.