Opinion | Why Journalists Have More Freedom Than Professors – The New York Times

The latter scenario is suggested by the Canadian academic Eric Kaufmanns response to the wokeness-has-peaked arguments. The current pendulum swing is real enough, he argues, but the ideological enforcers dont need to win every near-term battle to win the institutional war:

in the long run, liberalism is giving way to progressivism in elite spaces. The new cultural liberalism in the media reflects the views of senior staff members and is opposed by affinity groups and young employees. Thats important, because surveys consistently find that woke values are twice as prevalent among younger leftists than among older leftists. Over eight in 10 undergraduates at 150 leading U.S. colleges say speakers who say B.L.M. is a hate group or transgenderism is a mental disorder should not be permitted to speak on campus. Whats more, seven in 10 think a professor who says something that students find offensive should be reported to their university. Young academics are twice as censorious as those over 50. These are the editorial teams and professoriate of tomorrow.

Theres a lot to say about this subject, but I want to focus on that last sentence, because I think it conflates two experiences that reality may substantially divide: the intellectual climate within media and journalism on the one hand and in academia on the other.

Both of these professions are subject to the pressures and ideas and incentives that gave rise to woke progressivism, and both have experienced various forms of internal tumult in recent years. But my sense is that their ideological paths have already diverged a bit and are likely to diverge further as the generational turnover Kaufmann describes continues.

To be clear, Im discussing the media outlets that traditionally think of themselves as mainstream enterprises ideologically neutral or center-left or small-l liberal, not explicitly political in their formal missions, with some room for diversity, even though their staffs vote mostly for Democrats. These organizations seem less likely to become as ideologically bunkered as similarly situated academic institutions because of several forces that limit the full entrenchment of progressive ideology.

First, the media is, by definition, an outward-facing, audience-driven enterprise, dependent on some kind of mass market for its viability. Mass audiences can make their own ideological demands and effectively capture some of the journalists who serve them; you can certainly see versions of this happening in explicitly right-wing media in the Trump era. But wokeness has often been more of an elite-driven ideology, with special influence in academia and professionalized activist organizations, and its rules and shibboleths tend to spread from inner circles outward, rather than being demanded by a mass public first.

Which means there will always be a large potential audience that doesnt get the new ideological rules, or not yet, and for whom dissent or debate around the emergent order will seem much more normal and desirable than to true believers. And if normal debate seems poised to disappear from a given publication or broadcast channel, some readers, listeners and viewers will follow the argument elsewhere to a rival, a start-up, a Joe Rogan-esque alternative or a platform like Substack, if necessary. And some of the commentators and journalists whom they follow, who choose to work in this terrain, may even end up much more richly rewarded than they were before.

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Opinion | Why Journalists Have More Freedom Than Professors - The New York Times