Last month I wrote a post in which I said (emphasis added this morning):
But why was the mainstream media considered so liberal in the first place? Was it true? Was it fair? And I'm going to surprise you by saying, "yes." Why is that? And I'm going to say (and open myself up to charges of snobbery) that the members of the mainstream media are just plain smarter, better-educated and more open to new ideas than the average person. Also, while doctors, lawyers and businessmen are more motivated by money, the average reporter is more attracted to what they would consider an "interesting" career. So members of the media are, in effect, the intelligentsia, the vanguard, the cutting edge of society while the rest of us struggle to keep up. And who can blame us? We're busy with marriages, careers, kids, etc. and don't have time to be as well-informed as our brethren in the media. So, it's true, I think, that the media is more "liberal" than the population as a whole. It's their job, I suppose, to drag us kicking and screaming into the modern world while we bitch and moan that we would rather be left where we are (it's more comfortable). Make sense?
Why do I bring this up again? Because that guy at the top of this post, Bill Minor, died at age 94. From his obit in the Times:
Bill Minor, whose courageous reporting helped open Americans’ eyes to everyday racial discrimination in the South in the 1960s and won him recognition as the “conscience of Mississippi,” died on Tuesday in Ridgeland, Miss., outside Jackson.
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“No Southern newspaperman has done more for civil rights and civil liberties than Bill Minor,” Claude Sitton, another son of the South who covered the movement for The Times, once said.
So, yeah, Mr. Minor was a liberal. And he was probably more liberal than his readers. I bet they hated him. And, to paraphrase FDR, he should have welcomed their hatred.
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