Rugoz wrote:
Few such constraints? Surely their publications must be up to a certain standard if they want to be successful. Academics with an obvious political bias can still be excellent scientists (e.g. Krugman). Obviously the softer a science the more room there is for "personal interpretation".
In any case, I'm not sure where you're going with this. Certain jobs attract certain people, usually the ones who are good at it. Military and law enforcement are full of right-wingers, but I haven't heard you complain about it.
It's difficult to find data on this, but in the US at least the skew in the military towards the right is nowhere near as large as that to the left in the soft sciences and humanities. Among
military officers it's around 2:1 in favour of the right *. This is comparable to the proportion of economists who identify as left wing, but economics is one of the more balanced fields. In others, like sociology, history or journalism, you are looking at higher ratios, up to 20:1 in some.
I agree that this is mostly a result of self selection.
As for where I'm going, I'm not sure what is unclear about my previous posts on this. The people who assess the media coverage are usually just as, if not more, left wing or progressive in their world view and this influences their judgement. Further, the increasing left wing dominance is also reflected in the field itself and hence the teaching and curricula, e.g.:
Oxford Bibliographies wrote:There has been a normative turn in journalism studies and, more generally, communication theory, which has led to renewed and wider academic interest in the ethics of journalism. The longstanding focus of liberal theories on autonomy and the focus of applied ethics theories on professional duty and the consequences of actions have been pushed wider since the early 2000s. Journalism ethics has become imagined as much more of a social achievement, negotiated with communities and motivated by ideas of living well together and quality public discourse. As a consequence, some of the big questions are now about virtue, justice, caring for others, and dialogue. There has been a flowering of thinking about what good journalists do and what contribution they make to public life, which is providing both practitioners and those who watch them with further resources to reflect on journalism’s role in society. This new thinking is partly a response to the many crises in journalism and public life, which direct attention to the legitimacy of Western media and political institutions. But it goes deeper. The Enlightenment imaginary of free and rational individuals is no longer held sufficient by most journalism ethicists as a guide to good practice. Ethics has also become better connected, through theories of community, public life, and social justice, with critical sociology and cultural studies. The old sociological critique that ethics is a form of professional self-justification of power or is marginal alongside structural concerns about the media has shifted to a concern about how the institutions and texts of the media position people in relation to each other. The sections on the Media and Moral Publics and on Globalized Media Ethics are testament to the field’s reach well beyond questions of individual professional decision-making. These concerns also give communication ethics greater relevance to wider thinking about justice, democracy, and social change.
If you look at other research of the two authors of Pod's second article you'll find jargon such as togetherness, othering, otherness, we-ness, bordering, deservingness, see for instance:
Zaborowski wrote:Figures of crisis: the delineation of (un)deserving refugees in the German media
[...]
We contend that this discourse of deservingness — in which the humanitarian logics of protection and the securitizing rhetoric of deterrence mutually reinforce each other — directly mirrors and extends the humanitarian securitization of European borders (Vaughan-Williams, 2015) into public discourse. Consequently, this paper offers not only an extensive illustration of how discourses of the ‘refugee crisis’ reinscribe shifting borders through which social exclusion, violence and death are legitimized, but it also points to the conditionality that underlies current humanitarian responses within European border regimes.
[...]
Within this process, deservingness operates as a mode of bordering, which is reinstated through and within the discourse of crisis, and Germany continues to be framed as a racially and ethnically homogenous entity that erects clear boundaries of belonging.
This terminology comes straight out of "critical" studies which are everywhere in the humanities by now and are also making their way into the social sciences (plenty of examples
here). People who subscribe to this type of thinking have no use for objectivity and rationality. In fact, they reject them and often call them white patriarchal concepts. As the above demonstrates, it's perfectly acceptable to denounce borders and make stuff up about "racial homogeneity" and I suspect that there is actually consensus that borders, real and metaphorical (as in e.g. national identity), are bad and need to be torn down. So there certainly are standards but they increasingly revolve around "virtue, justice, caring for others, and dialogue" as interpreted by progressives.
At this point, anything on contentious topics (such as "refugees") that comes out of the humanities/soft science departments needs to be dismissed as a default until these fields come back from the brink and rehabilitate themselves.
* If you include
all of the military the picture is even less skewed and quite similar to the general population.