Barrel Strength

I was talking to the former editor of a major Canadian newspaper and the subject came up why the mainstream media are so relentlessly left-wing, of the we-are-always-wrong school. My friend the Dark Lord had occasioned this discussion by sending me Barbara Oakley’ article on the same subject.
Oakley explains the group think well:
“But, having worked among the Soviets, I know that large groups of very intelligent people can fall into a collective delusion that what they are doing in certain areas is the right thing, when it’s actually not the right thing at all. It’s rather like the Skinnerian viewpoint on psychology. For a full half century, psychologists insisted it wasn’t proper to posit anything going on inside people’s heads. Advances in psychology ground to a halt during that time, but it was impossible to convince mainstream psychologists that there was anything wrong to their approach. After all–everybody was using Skinner’s approach, and everybody couldn’t be wrong.”

We had nothing to add to the view the journalists are mentally lazy conformists who believe, for whatever reasons, that they are morally superior to most conservatives (i.e liberals) as well as the millions of others who do not share their bohemian self-regard. What he did say however, struck home.

“They (mainstream media) will continue to be that way until the last newsroom turns off the lights. And when the last lights are turned off, the Canadian public will say: so what?”