The job description is funny, but it’s also telling:
Job posting: The Washington Post is looking for an enterprising reporter based in Texas to document life in red state America and develop a new beat mapping the culture, public policies and politics in a region shaped by conservative ideology.https://t.co/CJS99O8kg7
— Washington Post PR (@WashPostPR) April 12, 2022
It’s the kind of description you might have seen from a paper looking for someone to cover Kosovo or Cambodia. Do these outlets need reporters to decode the mysteries of a “region shaped by liberal ideology,” as well? The ad speaks to the hermitic insularity you find at these papers. Yes, Texas is a “part of the country that is governed largely by one political party” — in the same way California, New York, and Washington, D.C., are mono-political. The “forces driving political polarization” in Texas are the same partisan forces driving polarization in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. But D.C. media culture, those poor souls coming out of journalism schools, see progressivism as an apolitical norm and conservatism as a disruptive — reactionary — belief system, even though 90 percent of the country is probably more temperamentally and ideologically “conservative” than the average Post reporter. This, and it’s just one example, is why media outlets will report that bills legalizing late-term abortions up until crowning are “codifying the right” but bills limiting abortions are “controversial.”
You don’t have to be friends with someone who owns a pickup truck or an AR-15 to be a good straight-news reporter, but if you view the other half of the country, the half that might well win back the government over the next few years, as a collection of exotic troglodytes, you can’t be. And I don’t think outlets like the Post really care anymore.