Funmurphys: the Blog

The Real Reason the Media Is Liberal

I haven't noticed what station my alarm clock radio is set to until this week. Normally when it goes off, I have it back off in 2 seconds. But now that the funWife is away, I don't have to worry about waking her, and with her and the kids gone, I don't have to worry about missing my time in the shower and messing every one up. So I've been a little slow about turning the alarm off, and it turns out it is set to KHITS 96. And no wonder, they play my kind of music, and they have all the old (and I do mean old) DJs from KSHE's glory days.

I am not a talk radio guy, and while KHITS is not talk radio, morning personalities all talk way too much for my tastes. I foolishly listened to J.C. Corcoran this morning, and at least he wasn't threatening to commit mass murder or doing black dialect while mocking a black man because he missed the Super Bowl halftime show. Today, the liberal J.C. was apparently reacting to a Pew Research Center survey that says that decidedly more journalists self identify as liberal than conservative. Now I happen to think that is a "well duh" kind of result, but J.C. was a mite riled up.

I came to full consciousness when he was saying the media were only liberal in comparison to fringe right wing bloggers. Ahh, another convenient whipping boy, the fringe right wing blogger. Then after he had exhausted his spleen, he went on to claim that the job itself caused a certain empathy and understanding because you got to go into rural areas and see real live bigots like some lounge singer at a Holiday Inn who had a dancing black mannequin named Leroy (not that people in the big city would ever hear bigoted comments on the radio), and see real bad poverty, and travel a lot, unlike most people who live in big cities. So the job itself would just naturally make you a liberal.

I especially liked how the two explanations are contradictory - the first was that journalists are only liberal in comparison to rightwing nuts, and the second was that the job itself makes you a liberal. I didn't wait around for another possible explanation, because the most obvious one, that liberals discriminate against conservatives in hiring, was not one I was going to hear pass the lips of Mr. Corcoran.