Stockholm Rules

There are essentially no conservatives in the newsrooms of major newspapers. It's so bad that the few conservatives who are there essentially live in a Witness Protection Program:

But some of the conservatives' complaints about a liberal tilt are valid. Journalism naturally draws liberals; we like to change the world. I'll bet that most Post journalists voted for Obama. I did. There are centrists at The Post as well. But the conservatives I know here feel so outnumbered that they don't even want to be quoted by name in a memo.

That's no wingnut, that's the Washington Post's Ombudsman. Now it's true that the plural of "anecdote" isn't "data", but research backs this up:

While the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is conservative, the newspaper's news pages are liberal, even more liberal than The New York Times. The Drudge Report may have a right-wing reputation, but it leans left. Coverage by public television and radio is conservative compared to the rest of the mainstream media. Meanwhile, almost all major media outlets tilt to the left.

These are just a few of the surprising findings from a UCLA-led study, which is believed to be the first successful attempt at objectively quantifying bias in a range of media outlets and ranking them accordingly.

So does common sense:

A week after a Rasmussen Reports survey discovered that by a ten-to-one margin the public believes the media are trying to hurt Sarah Palin, a new Rasmussen poll of 1,000 likely voters, briefly highlighted Wednesday night on FNC's Hannity & Colmes, determined "69 percent remain convinced that reporters try to help the candidate they want to win, and this year by a nearly five-to-one margin voters believe they are trying to help Barack Obama." Specifically, "50 percent of voters think most reporters are trying to help Obama win versus 11 percent who believe they are trying to help his Republican opponent John McCain" with 26 percent saying "reporters offer unbiased coverage."

Faculty lounges, too, tilt wildly to the left.

This isn't another tired rant about left-wing intellectual bias; that ship has sailed, and besides, I've said what I have to say here. Instead, this is a rant about why conservatives and small-l libertarians hide their views. It's ugly.

We're seeing a lot from Instapundit and others about "buyer's remorse" from nominal conservatives who - despite all evidence - convinced themselves that Obama was a moderate. These are smart people, and it beggars belief that someone like David Brooks would actually convince himself that Obama was anything but an unreconstructed leftist. So how did it happen?

I think it's Stockholm Syndrome.

Stockholm syndrome is a psychological response sometimes seen in abducted hostages, in which the hostage shows signs of loyalty to the hostage-taker, regardless of the danger or risk in which they have been placed.

Imagine that you're a conservative reporter, working for the New York Times in Manhattan. Your friends and co-workers are mostly liberals, and have just come out of eight years under Chimpy McHitlerBurton. Emotions were running high, and there's always the temptation on the left: the personal is political. Of course you keep your views to yourself. But it goes deeper than that, and Will Collier simply nails it:

The Dinner Party Conservatives, hailing mostly from Manhattan and Georgetown, made it clear during the last election that they'd had enough. Eight years of being beaten down by their New Class peers over malapropisms and "Bush is so stupid" jokes have driven them to capitulation. It was the social equivalent of Gletkin keeping Rubashov awake for weeks in "Darkness At Noon;" the Dinner Party crowd just didn't have the stamina to take any more. The noisy rubes from Beyond must be cast out in the name of fewer unpleasant exchanges during the cocktail hour.

They've given up. They're tired of the ridicule, of the passive-aggressive intellectual attacks. These are the preferred strategy of the Intellectual Class - the old saw about academic battles being so viscous because the stakes are so small applies in the newsroom as well as the faculty lounge. Rachel Lucas describes the tactics in a different context, but it applies here so closely that you should RTWT:

It starts in about 4th grade, when girls start engaging in what can only be called a war of attrition via emotional abuse. They form evil little cliques and set about utterly destroying each other’s self-esteem and pride.

...

Then you move on to the nightmare-scape called junior high school, where the females carefully hone their craft and the sabotage is raised to a whole new level of hate. During my soul-ripping years there, I had one boy who “bullied” me but there about five girls who did, and they were ten times meaner about it. Sneaky and manipulative. At least when boys pick on you, it’s all out in the open. Girls? Oh god no. They use subterfuge and reconnaissance. Girls will pretend to be your best friend just to discover your weaknesses, which they’ll then employ to bring you down.

Read Queen Bees and Wannabes for details on the tactics. It isn't a male/female thing, it's a passive-aggressive thing. No wonder they've given up and curled up into a self-protective ball. There's only so long that you can go on being treated as a traitor before you get warped. And traitor is precisely the right word, because your friends and co-workers will view you as a traitor to the Intellectual Class.

That's why people convinced themselves that Obama was a moderate. They had to believe, under the Stockholm rules. Sure, they may have voted for McCain, but their friends could accept that (McCain is the moderate republican, remember) as long they agreed that Obama was a moderate democrat.

That's why Sarah Palin won't ever get good press. Not that she doesn't govern from the middle - but your lefty friends won't invite you to dinner if you're straight in your stories. They're out for her, and if you know what's good for you, you will be, too. It's Class Warfare, and they will expect you to fall in.

So, the press will be slanted to the left - actively in what they write about, and passively in what they refuse to write about - until they finally go out of business. The faculty lounge will do this, too. They're not as far along - in some departments, at least - but you see it even in the hard sciences.

Fortunately, the press is headed off a cliff. In ancient Rome, Cato the elder would end each speech in the Senate with the words "Also, Carthage should be destroyed" (Ceterum autem censeo, Carthaginem esse delendam, usually mis-translated as Carthago delenda est). He recognized that coexistence was not viable, and that the tiger could not change its stripes. Same with the New York Times. The faculty lounge will have to wait a bit longer for their 18 Brumaire, but the best thing for the Republic is for the press to go out of business.

Faster, please.

UPDATE 11 March 2009 17:29: You couldn't get a better example of newsroom "judgement" fail than this, at the L.A. Times.