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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   30967 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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I'm pretty sure I remember seeing a graph which showed the breakdown of political affiliations of all employees at all the major news media organisations. (IIRC Fox News was one of the most right-leaning ones but still substantially Democrat.)

But I can't find it again for the life of me on Google or DuckDuckGo, nor the underlying data. Does anyone have this?

All I've found so far:

  • Graph of tech company employee donations - visually looks like the right sort of thing but wrong industry.

  • Breakdown of news hosts registered party affiliations (pretty balanced, Fox is overwhelmingly Republican)

  • OpenSecrets breakdown of Fox employee donations (100% Democrat, but small sample size)

  • Survey of journalist self-reported party affiliation (overwhelmingly independent or Democrat.)

It's neither here nor there, but it's kind of crazy that your fourth link cites an increase of female journalists from 33% to 37.5% in 2013, while today 53.4% are female. It's also funny to read

However, women still represent only slightly more than one-third of all full-time journalists working for the U.S. news media, as has been true since the early 1980s. This trend persists despite the fact that more women than ever are graduating from journalism schools.

with the hindsight knowledge that this was the start of huge change in the gender makeup of reporters.

On the other hand, 2/3 of graduates with a degree in journalism or mass communication were women in 2017. If people's careers are 40 years long, then we'd expect the percent of women in journalism to change by (2/3 - 1/3) / 40 = 0.8% per year, which is 4 times smaller than the 3.5% change that was actually observed.

This line of reasoning also makes the change from 33% to 53.4% in 10 years seem crazy -- that's an increase of 2% every year, which seems like it shouldn't be possible looking at graduation disparities, and factoring in how slowly people more into/out of a field. I feel like this necessitates an exodus of (disproportionately) men out of reporting.

One thing that probably factors in that is difficult to gauge is the credentialism. Prior to the 21st century, you didn't need a journalism degree to get a job as a journalist. If you could write well enough and fast enough, and you managed to impress an editor or two, you didn't even need to have finished school. And then the internet started picking up steam, and a lot of guys who would have gone on to magazine journalism simply started writing a blog. And it was overwhelmingly men who did this.

Your 4th option is the one I recall seeing cited multiple times over the years.

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