Note to the Left on Descriptive Representation: Practice What You Preach

Many in the media and on the left obsess over descriptive representation, the idea that the demographics of Congress should closely mirror the demographics of American society; specifically focusing on race and gender.  According to descriptive representation, Congress should have a much higher proportion of African-Americans, Hispanics and women and a much lower proportion of men and lawyers.  No politician has taken the idea of descriptive representation to the extreme more than left-wing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who sought a 50-50 balance of men and women when putting his cabinet together.   

The Democrats will certainly tout the “diversity” of their candidates as they seek to take control of both houses of Congress.  The Democrats and the media have already obsessed over the large number of female Democratic candidates that they think will ride a “pink wave” accompanying the “blue wave” that will sweep the Democrats back into power.  Republicans actually have quite a few female candidates running in statewide races, such as Marsha Blackburn in Tennessee, Kristi Noem in South Dakota, Kim Reynolds in Iowa, and Kay Ivey in Alabama as well but don’t expect them to find any support from the media.  While the media will likely moan about what a misogynist country we live in should the Democratic female candidates end up losing their elections, they won’t cast the people of Tennessee as misogynists should Marsha Blackburn end up losing the Senate election to a Democrat. 

If only the mainstream media used descriptive representation when picking which stories it chooses to cover.  A study from The Media Research Center found that the three network evening newscasts, which last approximately 30 minutes each including commercials, devoted 684 minutes to scandals surrounding the Trump administration from January 1 to April 30, 2018; especially choosing to focus on Russia, porn star Stormy Daniels’ allegations of an affair with the President, and President Trump’s alleged use of the word “sh**hole when describing impoverished countries.  Cable and broadcast news effectively took on the collective role of mouthpiece for Daniels’ lawyer Michael Avenatti; he made 147 TV appearances over the course of ten weeks, from the beginning of March to the middle of May.  Sean Hannity gave CNN the nickname “Sh**hole News Network,” after the network used the term uncensored 195 times in one day.  

 

For the remaining 807 minutes of coverage devoted to all things Trump in the first four months of 2018, the media actually did manage to focus on his policies.  Although, they showered most policy coverage, especially with regards to immigration and gun control, with negative coverage topping 90 percent.  The press gave President Trump the least amount of negative coverage when covering an upcoming summit with North Korean Dictator Kim Jong-Un but the negative coverage still outnumbered the positive coverage by a two-to-one margin.

The negative coverage has continued well into 2018, with the media barely mentioning stories that make President Trump look positive, such as a new executive order signed by the President establishing the President’s National Council for the American Worker and the American Workforce Policy Board.  According to Fox News’s Steve Hilton, ABC, CBS, and NBC spent 0 minutes each covering the executive order designed to “train workers for the jobs of the future.”  The media has spent much of the time since the Media Research Center study came out comparing President Trump to a wide variety of dictators including Josef Stalin and Turkish President Erdogan.    

According to Gallup, 14 percent of Americans consider “economic problems” the most important problem facing the nation.  The amount of Americans who consider “the situation with Russia” the most important problem facing the nation barely registered in the Gallup poll.  Yet based on the media coverage, an alien landing in America from outerspace would conclude that a majority of Americans view Russia as the most important issue facing the country.

 

The media does not cover stories of interest to the American people at large because the media does not represent the American public at large.  Maybe the media should start using descriptive representation when hiring people.  While America has a pretty even split of independents, Democrats, and Republicans; the political views of the media overwhelmingly lean to the left, as Bernie Goldberg pointed out in his book A Slobbering Love Affair: “In 2004, a poll of campaign journalists based outside of Washington, D.C., showed they supported the Democratic candidate, John Kerry, over the Republican George W. Bush by a ratio of 3 to 1.  Those based inside the Beltway favored Kerry based on a ratio of 12 to 1.”  No wonder President Trump receives 90 percent negative coverage from the three major news networks, not to mention the cable networks.    

 

Many journalists have political pedigrees, mostly consisting of experience working on political campaigns. In her book Slander, Ann Coulter points out that nearly all prominent journalists who have worked on political campaigns in the past ended up working for Democrats.  She listed “Brian Williams, Lesley Stahl, Jane Pauley, Jeff Greenfield, Tim Russert, Ken Bode, Bill Moyers, Rick Inderfurth, (and) Pierre Salinger” as examples of TV personalities who have “all worked for Democrats.”  She also listed a handful of print journalists who had previously worked in Democratic politics, including David Shipley, Ken Auletta, Leslie Gelb, James Fallows, Tom Johnson, Walter Pincus, Jack Rosenthal, and John Seigenthaler Sr.    

The book came out in 2002, long before “Sleepy Eyes” Chuck Todd, who worked on Iowa Senator Tom Harkin’s ultimately unsuccessful Presidential Campaign in 1992, began hosting “Meet the Press.” At the time of the book’s publication, George Stephanopolous, who served as Communications Director for the Clinton White House and later as Senior Advisor to the President, worked for ABC News as a political analyst.  Sixteen years later, Stephanopolous serves as co-host of “Good Morning America” in addition to hosting the Sunday Show “This Week.”  Both programs paint themselves as objective but Stephanopolous has not exactly severed his ties with the Democratic Party, donating $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation during his time at ABC News.  Stephanopolous did not disclose the donations to his employer or his viewers until after Politico brought them to light in 2015.    

Coulter also listed the children of prominent Democratic politicians, pointing out that “hailing from a family of Democratic politicians also appears to be an excellent springboard for a career in journalism,” listing Chris Cuomo, Eleanor Mondale, Cokie Roberts, and Maria Shriver as examples.

Perhaps supposedly objective journalists suck up to Democrats so much because they want to hold key roles in the Administration.  Coulter listed a variety of journalists who left the field to work for Democratic Presidents; including Strobe Talbott of Time Magazine and Donald Baer of U.S. News & World Report.   In fairness, the “revolving door” also applies to Republicans but to a lesser degree. While President Bush ended up hiring “Fox News Sunday” host Tony Snow as his Press Secretary and “Fox & Friends” news anchor Heather Nauert ended up leaving Fox News to work as the State Department Spokeswoman, this does not change the fact that the media overwhelmingly sympathizes with Democrats.

Academia may also want to try using descriptive representation when hiring professors and administrators.  While Academia obsesses over diversity of race and gender, even creating administrative positions for the sole purpose of promoting diversity, they could care less about diversity of thought.  Brooklyn College’s Mitchell Langbert studied the political affiliation of nearly 9,000 professors from 51 of the 66 top ranked liberal arts colleges in the United States, according to the US News and World Report.  He released the results of his study earlier this year, finding that 78 percent of the academic departments do not have a single Republican professor.  Using descriptive representation, 36 percent of college professors should identify as conservative, while just 25 percent should identify as liberal; based on the results of a January 2017 Gallup poll.   

As part of his study, Langbert analyzed the political affiliations of professors in 25 different fields. As a rule, engineering departments as well as professors of computer science, mathematics, economics, mathematics, and natural sciences tended to have the least lopsided political registration.  The most politically balanced colleges included military academies and colleges with religious affiliations, not surprisingly.  Unfortunately, his study did not look specifically at professors of Genders Studies and/or African-American Studies; which certainly would have had the highest ratio of Democrats to Republicans.  In the absence of these two departments, Langbert’s study found that the Communications and Anthropology Departments at the colleges he studied included a whopping zero registered Republicans; with the Communications Departments taking home the trophy for most ideologically homogeneous.  Guess who end up walking away with communications degrees?  The supposedly objective journalists who have earned the moniker of “fake news” due to their overwhelmingly negative coverage of the Trump administration. What a nice coincidence!

For all of the talk about diversity as a strength, it seems like the left sees viewpoint diversity as a weakness.  Fortunately, a group of more than 1,800 professors and graduate students have decided to start Heterodox Academy, which has dedicated itself to “improving research and education in unversities by increasing viewpoint diversity, mutual understanding, and constructive disagreement.”  In other words, Heterodox Academy hopes to put a stop to the homogeneous thinking that has dominated higher education since the Cultural Revolution, when the “long march through the institutions” first began.  The left-wing uniformity in Academia leads to the domination of left-wing ideas in other fields, especially the mainstream media and Silicon Valley, as a result of conservative viewpoints lacking the opportunity to receive a fair hearing in the marketplace of ideas. Former Google employee James Damore learned the hard way what happens when one dares to question the

left’s one-sided obsession with diversity. He ended up losing his job when he published a 10-page memo describing Google as an “ideological echo chamber” and boldly suggested that men and women actually do have biological and psychological differences.  

 

Only if diversity of opinion becomes the norm on college campuses, will the media even come close to employing a diverse workforce that does not unanimously agree that President Trump represents the greatest threat to American democracy.  It is long past time for the left to practice what it preaches when it comes to descriptive representation.