I’ve gotten a lot of response to my Dallas Morning
News column of last
week in which I talked about how difficult it can be for
conservatives in American newsrooms, and how the first thing conservatives
will notice upon being hired is how oppressive the liberal groupthink is
there. My mail is so split you’d think I was writing about parallel
universes. Journalists who are liberals all say, one way or another, “It’s
not true, and you right-wingers are whiners.” Self-described conservative
journalists, on the other hand, say, “It’s all true, thank you for saying
it, and let me tell you what it’s like here.” Part of the problem I
described in that column is a refusal by newsroom liberals even to
acknowledge that anti-conservative bias is a problem at all. I wrote in a
subsequent blog about N., a friend of mine who works in network news, and
who is a closet Christian out of fear that the same colleagues who
routinely trash Christianity in editorial meetings will retaliate if the
truth were known. I hear the same thing from practicing Christians in
secular newsrooms all over the country. Isn’t this shocking? It ought to be.
News executives ought to ask themselves how it is that some of their
employees have come to believe that such a climate of fear exists in their
newsrooms. If a gay employee were afraid to come out because he had had to
sit around and listen to bigoted anti-gay comments from his colleagues, it
would be an intolerable situation. Do conservative Christians, or political
conservatives, feel the same way? Do editors and producers even bother to
ask?