The opinion pages of America’s august media outlets have long been where ideological wars are fought, and have been a battleground in the larger war over the liberal mainstream media. Conservatives are in the minority in the newsroom and on the opinion pages, but how much representation do they truly deserve?
Kevin Williamson was unceremoniously fired this week from his job at The Atlantic after just one published piece. It was a result of his having provocated multiple times that abortion was a crime, should be treated as such, and that the death penalty may be appropriate. (In his words, by hanging.) His specific language and status as a provocateur were well-known before The Atlantic made the hire, and perhaps they should not have. He is a provocateur! But in the wake of his hiring and the victory lap that some quarters of the Left are making after his firing, many argued that the mainstream media are already saturated with conservative voices and need no more.
This is an absurd notion.
Osita Nwanevu in Slate offered the argument that that conservatives have “plenty of representation in the nation’s opinion pages,” and that until conservative media organizations hire socialists, their claims should be “dismissed out of hand.” He pits The Daily Caller as the conservative answer to The New York Times, and even so, counts 18 (!) conservatives on the staffs of The Atlantic, The New York Times, and the Washington Post. This is “plenty.”
At The Atlantic, there are eight conservatives and libertarians on an editorial staff of approximately 100. (It’s unclear how involved The Atlantic’s contributing editor staff is, but Nwanevu counts Reihan Salam, so we’re throwing them all in.) The Washington Post is a little hard to figure — they don’t list all of their online writers in an easy repository — but by my count they have five conservatives on a 20-person columnist staff, and eight conservative and libertarian writers on an online and blog staff of 30. (This doesn’t count The Monkey Cage blog, which is populated by liberal academics but whose cast is not always regular.)
At The New York Times there are four conservatives out of the 24 opinion writers and editorial board members — and there were only two a few months ago, before the hirings of Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss, who were strenuously objected to by left-wing media critics. Maybe Nwanevu is right that The New York Times doesn’t need more than four conservatives. But if they hadn’t hired Weiss and Stephens and had a mere two conservative writers, even at the Times, seems unacceptably low.
Roughly 10 percent representation at The Atlantic, 26 percent representation at The Washington Post, 16 percent representation at The New York Times. This, we are told, is “plenty.”
There are a lot of things conservatives can and should do to combat their low representation in the mainstream media — ideas like successfully running their own gold-standard media organizations, or training good journalists to work in the mainstream media. Nwanevu suggests these, and they’re ideas that I’ve endorsed in these very pages. But that’s not what’s at stake in the current media landscape.
Perhaps the overwhelmingly liberal ideological breakdown is the proper state of affairs. It’s not at all obvious that, for a mainstream media whose leaders have been fighting against the idea that they’re all a bunch of liberals, there is plenty of conservative representation. While outlets like The Daily Caller and Townhall self-identify as conservative, the mainstream outlets in question here do not. Perhaps the Times and the Post are indeed as liberal as The Daily Caller is conservative. It would be a refreshing state of affairs for conservatives to see those institutions admit as much.
The mainstream media is liberal. It’s liberal on the opinion pages, it’s liberal in the newsrooms, and it’s liberal on the editorial staffs. These are critiques that conservatives have been making and liberals have been denying for decades. Perhaps conservatives do have “plenty” of representation already — but for the leaders of these organizations, it would mean accepting that the conservative criticism of the liberal media has been right all along.
Kevin Glass (@KevinWGlass) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. Previously he was director of outreach and policy at The Franklin Center and managing editor at Townhall. His views here are his own.
