Stacy McCain takes up where Jonathan Martin left off, first explaining why it’s so hard to break in to the paid punditry racket and then focusing on why it’s hard to get conservatives on the just-the-facts reportorial side of the paper:
The newspaper business is one of the lowest-paying professions in America. Most years, my brother who’s a semi-truck driver in Georgia made more money than I did as an assistant national editor at The Washington Times.
Liberals dominate the newspaper business for the same reason they dominate the fields of education and social work. Liberals are much more willing to do low-wage work that they think “makes a difference.” Conservatives want to make a buck. (I was a Democrat when I started out, which explains how I ended up in the newsprint ghetto.)
If you’re a liberal with good writing skills, you become a journalist. If you’re a conservative with good writing skills, you go to law school.
There’s something to that, I think. Beyond that, though, reporting is becoming increasingly professionalized and therefore it suffers the same problems in this regard as academe: conservatives, especially religious social conservatives, simply don’t fit into the culture very well.
