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The Liberal Media and How To Stop ItYou can't. But these days, how much does it matter?

By Jack ShaferPosted Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2008, at 6:49 PM ET

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In 2003, Jack Shafer wandered aimlessly around the topic of media bias. Please don't click here to read. Michael Kinsley shines brightly on the topic of liberal bias in this 2002 sidebar to a dandy piece about Bernard Goldberg.

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Even so, the Obamavalanche Slate recorded this year, like the similar blowouts for Kerry and Gore in 2004 and 2000, require additional meditation. In theory, Slate is a quasi-liberal magazine about politics and culture that publishes opinion, interpretive journalism, essays, straight reporting, and more. But I've never witnessed any top editor applying a liberal litmus test to a prospective hire or freelancer, and I've been here since before the magazine's 1996 launch.

Far from practicing monoculture, the Slate farm has always planted conservative and libertarian ideas in its Web pages, as can be gleaned from scanning the archives, where you'll find the bylines of such writers as James Q. Wilson, Steve Chapman, Steven E. Landsburg, Brian Doherty, Richard A. Epstein, Andrew Sullivan, Christopher Caldwell, Michael Young, William F. Buckley Jr., Eugene Volokh, Herbert Stein, Ben Stein, Daniel Drezner, Karen Lehrman, David Brooks, Anne Applebaum, Sam Tanenhaus, Jonah Goldberg, Tucker Carlson, Mark Steyn, Matt Labash, Alex Kozinski, Jack Goldsmith, Douglas W. Kmiec, David Frum, Richard A. Posner, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., Ross Douthat, Lucianne Goldberg, Viet Dinh, James Pinkerton, David Klinghoffer, Dinesh D'Souza, Wladyslaw Pleszczynski, Norman Podhoretz, Nick Gillespie, Midge Decter, Abigail Thernstrom, Stephan Thernstrom, Cathy Young, Radley Balko, Jill Stewart, Charles Paul Freund, and William McGurn. And I'm not even counting those heretics Kaus and Hitchens.

So if Slate is so keen on conservative and libertarian ideas, why do so few staffers tilt that way? One explanation could be that like-hires-like in almost every field, and that editors depend on their social networks to fill positions. But that's a pretty thin explanation if their social networks are big enough to assign pieces to conservatives and libertarians but not hire them. Another explanation could be that Slate knows it can't be taken seriously as a magazine of ideas without considering ideas outside of its quasi-liberal wheelhouse. But that seems pretty thin, too. This magazine has never been a debate society. Its mission has been to prowl for the vital, the new, and the urgent.

I can't solve the Slate Obamavalanche conundrum. But that doesn't mean I'd support an affirmative action program for conservatives just because they think they're underrepresented. Screw that. Conservatives put their minds to filling the ranks of the commentariat, and they did OK there. If they want to fill more mainstream reporter and editor jobs, let them tug harder on their bootstraps.

And if the folks at Fox News Channel really think that the mainstream media is doing such an awful job of reporting the 2008 campaign, they should direct their complaints to their boss, Rupert Murdoch, who owns the second-biggest newspaper in the country, the Wall Street Journal. The best press criticism isn't a column or a moan of disgust into a TV camera. It's writing a better story.

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I stole my nifty headline from a book that I recommended last May: The Future of the Internet—and How to Stop It. I sought guidance for this piece from notorious liberal Timothy Noah, whose insights proved worthless, thereby proving that there is a liberal conspiracy to undo me. Thanks, Tim! Send liberal complaints via e-mail to . (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum; in a future article; or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)

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