Fair & Balanced

Nicholas Lemann's article On Balance in the Columbia Journalism Review commented on David Horowitz's calls for J-schools to hire more conservative faculty. Is this the same David Horowitz, fellow Wildcat from Northwestern, who graduated a few years before I did?

David Horowitz, the left-wing activist turned right-wing activist, recently produced a study of the ideological leanings of faculty members at leading law and journalism schools. He found that they are overwhelmingly liberal ...

Lemann explains the foundations of academic journalism and then concludes:

Our mission should be to rid our students of automatic or blinkered thinking; to teach them to recognize and try to overcome the assumptions and preconceptions they bring to a story, to make them push themselves to find alternative perspectives. Sometimes this entails explicitly considering ideological positions. It doesn't always, though. For us to build in liberal-conservative balance in every hire and every class would be to take us away from our core assumption, which is that reporting can get you meaningfully closer to the truth. Not a version of truth — the truth.

Right! That's the way I learned to report and feature, long before creative nonfiction and gonzo journalism appeared. [journalism]

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