cfbleachers is right “Deadwood media are acting in manner inconsistent with their own economic health and welfare, in order to sustain a worldview.”
However, I don’t think it is an institutional world view, but a PERSONAL one.
Two factors are at work here. One is the “birds of a feather…” idea. George Will once quoted a New Yorker who said, with all honesty, “I don’t know how McGovern could have lost, everyone I know voted for him.” In a “hard” science or engineering one will hire and associate with people less on a matter of social compatibility than on basis of ability…(“He may be a little wierd, but he knows more about Laminar flow than anyone else in the country.”). Without objectively verifiable results, getting work in the arts or humanities becomes more a matter of who you know than what you know.
Secondly, the process of becoming a Leftist is a lot like the process of becoming dammed. It happens a little at a time but it is very difficult to go back.
Think a moment like a babyboomer. Lets say that in 1969 you were afraid of being drafted, so you began to loathe the military. You burned your draft card, yelled “Hell No We Won’t Go!” and did other various and sundry things. Even though it is almost 40 years later, and even though you have seen Saigon fall, Pol Pot’s killing fields, the “yellow rain” on the Meo, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and 9-11; to turn around now and embrace the military means that what you, personally, did in the 60′s was wrong.. If you are someone who spent years being openly and aggressively “anti-military”; if you suddenly admit that the kids who went to “Nam were doing the honorable, brave, patriotic, and even (dare we say it) heroic thing…what does that make you?
That is a pretty emotionally uncomfortable place to go for a lot of people. It means admitting to yourself that your Dad was probably right when he said you were “…nothing but a lazy, pot smoking, cowardly little draft dodger…”. Nobody wants to do that. So, no matter how much objective intellectual evidence you see, you won’t…do that…to much emotional pain attached to it. In fact psychologically you can’t, see the military as a group of heros; and your art will naturally enough reflect that.
Abortion is a similar tale. If you have had, or pushed a partner (or employee) to have an abortion, the guilt and pain that would follow from admitting to yourself that you had participated in the murder of an innocent child is going to be difficult to bear. You would have to see yourself as (literally) a “baby killer”. A few people are honest and strong enough to do this… many aren’t.
The list goes on and on. If you have had several affairs, and are on your third trophy wife, the conventional Christian teachings on divorce and adultery will not be something you are comfortable hearing. People who bought or sold drugs will, (at least not until they complete rehab) be comfortable admitting the pain they caused others by so doing.
On a personal, and even a professional level it is psychologically easier to make a money losing movie that you and your friends like, rather than one that makes money but that people find upsetting and that offends their political positions, because for many of the children of the 60s the political IS the personal. If you attack a Conservative’s views you attack his views, but if you attack a Liberal’s views, you (often as not) attack his conscience. This provokes a much nastier and much more personal reaction. Everyone agrees that John Milius is a brilliant film-make, but his resume has an almost three year long gap in it after he made RED DAWN.
