Affirmative Action For Republican Journalists
By Michael LeStrange

Hey, I got a question for all you right wingers out there.  I keep hearing how the media is so biased by a plethora of liberal reporters, journalists and the like.  I also keep hearing the litany of how our education system is overrun with liberals as well (something like 80% of them, by some counts).  So the question is this:

Where are all the right wing reporters, journalists and professors? 

I mean, something evil must be up here.  It's almost like a conspiracy.  If you on the right wing are correct, then there must be a heck of a lot of discrimination lawsuits out there.  What you guys need to do is file a shit load of lawsuits against all our media and academic institutions.  Seriously.  I know you say you hate lawyers, but when push comes to shove you hire them like crazy.  After all witness the some odd 14.5 million dollars George Bush spent on lawyers in his fight against Gore in the Florida 2000 presidential aftermath.

So you're certainly not adverse to using the very people you rail against daily when you think you have a case.  Come to think of it, the whole hounding of Clinton was substantially funded by you guys on the right.  Lot's of lawyers in that process.  But that was certainly your right.

So where are the lawsuits?  We've certainly seen initiatives and other token lawsuits from the right wing.  Where's this one?  Where is the lawsuit that attacks these sorry institutions of ours for their discriminatory hiring practices?  Something has to be going on here, and I'm just wondering out loud why you haven't made a federal case out of this.  A literal federal case.  C'mon.  Take it to court.

I Dare You

In fact, I think you should take it even further.  I think you should sue the government to enforce balanced hiring practices in the media and academia.  Don't call it affirmative action, though.  That'd just play into the liberal's hands.  What we need is more of something like a fairness policy.  Something that ensconces into law that there must be a balance of political thinking.

Oh wait.  We used to have such a thing.  It was the FCC's Fairness Doctrine.  But the Reagan era brought an end to that one, didn't it.  The democratically controlled house and senate voted to make the FCC's doctrine law, but Reagan vetoed that bill.  The democratically controlled congress tried again to make the fairness doctrine law in George Bush's (41) presidential term.  Naturally, he vetoed that law as well.

So maybe it's a good time to get the ball rolling again, eh?  Heck, I'd even donate whatever money I can scrape up for the cause.  Let's get the fairness doctrine passed, but let's not limit the domain of the law to the media.  Let's extend it to cover our academic institutions as well.  After all, if there's bias in our academic institutions, it must be severely warping our kids and therefore warping our future.  This is really dangerous and there should be clear regulations which ensure balance in the education of our kids.

But you won't, will you.  You on the right have a lot of problems with doing this kind of thing, don't you?  I can see your dilemma, which I guess is the real reason the whole liberal media and liberal academia thing really torques you off.

First, you'd have to explain why there isn't a shit load of right wing reporters and intellectuals waiting in the wing to fill these jobs.  After all, if you really had half (or more) of the American population identifying with you, then you would expect half of the job applicants for these positions to be republicans.  Therefore, you'd have to explain why there isn't a vast population of people who would be professors in our colleges, who would be reporters, who would be journalists, but have been cruelly shut out of these positions by those evil liberals who control these organizations.

That might be something you find not only hard to do, but might produce quite a bit of pain when you can't find any.  So there'd have to be some advance work by Karl Rove's boys on this.  Maybe the good volunteer force you have on the right could come up with some good reasons where all these people went.  There's got to be a ton of stories out there by people who wanted to be journalists but were repelled by the democrats who control the hiring.  I think you could even tie the media and the academics together into a pretty plausible conspiracy.  Obviously, if the schools that train professors and journalists are completely biased by an overly liberal population, then the students trained by these people will be biased towards the left.  So it's a self re-enforcing pattern.

Really, I want to help

Secondly, you might have to come uncomfortably close to using the same arguments that those commie liberals use for affirmative action.  And I'm sure it won't be comfortable explaining why a lot of the smart people needed to staff these positions don't have republican ideology and politics.  After all, if academia and the media corporations are just hiring the best in the field - or the best of the available population - then you're going to have to have some sort of structural reparations to get the system back in balance. 

If the only qualified applicants happen to be liberals, or if they happen to pull in the big bucks for the media corporations and they're liberal, then there will have to be some sacrifices made in the name of balance.  For a short while - determined by a court, of course - the political thinking of a job candidate may have to have more consideration than their qualifications.  After all, if there's not a lot of qualified candidates with the appropriate political thinking available, we have to do one of two things.  We have to hire a candidate with less qualifications but has the right political thinking over a more qualified candidate with political leanings that would overtly unbalance the organization.

Of course, the problem could be that all the really smart republicans who would otherwise be journalists or academics have done the smart thing and hold better paying positions in the private sector.  After all, academics and journalists aren't exactly known for their vast wealth.  It could be that all we have to do is start paying these positions better and we'd solve the problem without the need to resort to affirmative action.  But this solution is probably a non-starter with those of you on the right as well, because you think these blokes are paid too much as it is.  After all, throwing more money at them is not only inefficient, but would only just encourage them - all the money would probably just go to the liberals anyway.

So what's the story guys?

Lastly, you probably would have to be suing the very rich republicans who represent corporate media and academic institutions.  I don't know what the average makeup of corporate boards and executive management is, but I'm sure there are a few token democrats in the group.  This might actually be a good strategy.  You can probably show that the largest number of liberal journalists and such are concentrated in the liberally owned sector of the industry.  This will give you a chance to pin the entire blame on them, instead of the far more numerous (by market share) republican leaning media corporations.  And heck, if all these corporations turn out to be democrats right up to the frickin' boardroom?  Well, we just institute the fairness doctrine in corporate board make up.

Now that I think about it, it's probably best to pin it on the labor unions.  They're the ones with real power in these corporations, after all.  We all know how evil these parasitic organizations are.  Everyone knows the corporation or institution's hands are tied because of the almost total control a union wields.  That'd be great.  You can force a hiring of right wing employees by forcing the unions to obey the new fairness doctrine.  No need to worry about bringing the corporations and academic institutions themselves to task over this egregious situation.

Really.  People Will Eat It Up.

Being a dimwitted democrat, I guess I'll have to defer to the superior intelligence of the political right.  I agree that there is a tremendous imbalance in our institutions and something has to be done about it.  Let's make it a bi-partisan effort.  Let's band together and make political balance in our most important institutions the law of the land.

But I guess I'm just talking to the wind (obviously).  You girly boys on the right won't do anything about it.  You just love to whine and complain about the liberal bias without offering any solutions to the problem.  You keep complaining and complaining in that shrill voice of yours about how unfair it all is, and how the liberals control everything.

Well, wake up and smell the coffee monkey boys.  Take a good long drink and start being a party of ideas.  Start figuring out a way we can balance these institutions and FAST!   Obviously the liberal attempts at ensconcing the fairness doctrine into law didn't meet the high standards of the right - and that's why they were vetoed not once but twice!  So get off your lazy and quite ample republican behinds and start getting to work.  Untie the other half of Rush Limbaugh's brain and let him loose on the project!  Get the CATO institute stoked and fired up about the problem.  Force the Hoover institution out of its ivory tower and make them come back down to earth and get to work on this most pressing of problems.

That is, if you have the guts.  Sure, you can talk the talk.  But can you walk the walk?

Don't bother responding, I already know your answer.  I can hear the whining from all the way over here.

November 22, 2002