Alan Greenblatt of the St. Petersburg Times reflects on his personal disomfort with the tone of a prestigious conference for journalists he attended at Harvard University's Nieman Foundation last August. Norman Mailer and other speakers who svagely attacked President Bush and Republicans and conservatives received enthusiastic cheers and applause.

"I'm a newspaperman — these people don't seem to understand what their role in society is," said Jack Hart, managing editor of the Portland Oregonian, which cosponsored the conference along with the Boston Globe and the Poynter Institute (which owns the St. Petersburg Times and Governing magazine, where I work). "It makes me very uncomfortable."

With good reason. The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press released a widely touted study in June that found that the audience for news is increasingly fragmenting along partisan lines. In other words, large numbers of readers and viewers are turning to media outlets that reinforce their previously held convictions, and tuning out those in which they detect a disagreeable bias....

The level of public distrust evoked by partisan leanings — real or perceived — did not stop the reporters at the Nieman conference from applauding frequent left—leaning sentiments....

If ever a word was spoken from a conference podium that was positive about Bush or any Republican policy — or even one that noted in neutral tones that the president had just been re—elected by a majority of the American electorate — it must have been at a session I missed.

In conversation, numerous individual reporters expressed unease that the conference was marked by partisan speeches that were so openly and warmly received. Invoking the sadly diminished dictum of "no cheering in the press box," Dane Huffman, an assistant sports editor at the Raleigh, N.C., News & Observer, said, "When I'm at a game, even with my son, I don't applaud or cheer."

But collectively, it was as if a great liberal id had been conjured and unleashed. "You get a gathering like this and there are shared . . . assumptions," said Paul Janensch, who teaches journalism at Quinnipiac University, "but they're not assumptions shared throughout the country or even in South Boston."

It's good to know that at least a small minority of journalists "get it."

Hat tip: Ed Laksy

Thomas Lifson  1 04 05