Antonia Zerbisias and the ‘Water-Cooler Consensus’

posted at 10:19 pm on April 29, 2009 by The Other McCain
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Michelle Malkin has a post about Antonia Zerbisias of the Toronto Star, who Twittered a Malkin death wish last night.

To me, the most interesting part of the story is this: Zerbisias isn’t a political reporter or an op-ed commentator. She’s not someone whose job involves politics at all. She’s a “Living” section columnist.

When I’m asked about liberal bias in the news media, one of the things I sometimes talk about is the “water-cooler consensus.” Bias is not the result of a conspiracy. It’s just that most journalists are liberals, and they hang around the office, talk amongst themselves, and a sort of consensus opinion prevails. Fitting in, being part of the crowd, requires that you echo that consensus — or at least, not directly contradict it.

You see, then, how you end up with a lifestyle columnist who thinks she’s Keith Olbermann. And you understand why there are so few conservatives in media. In America’s newsrooms, opinions like Antonia Zerbisias are so commonplace that the person who doesn’t share them is an oddball. A conservative in the news business learns to bite his tongue, because to vocally disagree with liberalism is to expose oneself as an enemy.

The liberal “water-cooler consensus” thus goes uncontradicted, and next thing you know, even the photographers, sports writers and lamebrain “Living” section columnists are echoing the consensus. Journalists work in an environment where almost everyone is a liberal, where the assumptions of liberalism are pervasive, and so it never even occurs to most reporters to ask the kinds of questions a conservative would ask. Journalists don’t notice liberal bias for the same reason fish don’t notice water.

This is why a mush-mouthed, apologetic, watered-down kind of conservative message won’t work. People in the media expect conservatives to be defensive and fearful, because most journalists consider conservatism something wrong and shameful. So when a David Frum or a Meghan McCain tries to cut corners and blunt the message, it only reinforces liberal assumptions.

Standing up to the likes of Antonia Zerbisias is necessary, if only to give courage to those few newsroom conservatives — and I know they’re still out there — who would otherwise be intimidated into silence.

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