They're unhappy?!

The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press has published its latest poll of journalists. The first graf of the Overview:

Journalists are unhappy with the way things are going in their profession these days. Many give poor grades to the coverage offered by the types of media that serve most Americans: daily newspapers, local TV, network TV news and cable news outlets. In fact, despite recent scandals at the New York Times and USA Today, only national newspapers and the websites of national news organizations� receive good performance grades from the journalistic ranks.

The pessimism is based on "bottom-line pressures."

The other main finding was that journalists think that the press is going too easy on Bush, as if this were just between him and them. Most of them have bought into the "Bush lied" meme, despite the lack of proof and the irrelevance of that argument.

The number who describe themselves as liberal has gone up, but the majority still describe themselves as moderate. Hugh Hewitt describes himself as moderate conservative, I guess to distinguish himself from the Aryan Nations Conservatives. So journalists are moderate compared to what, the Bader-Meinhof Gang? I'm not sure there is such a thing as moderate in today's politics. If you can be "moderate" on the war, tax cuts, etc. it probably means that you don't understand the term, or you don't pay attention to what's going on. The big chasm between the parties today is over fundamental things like the meaning of 9/11, whether Saddam should have been left in power and whether the U.N. is, or ever has been, a trustworthy or effectual organization. It's hard to be in the middle on those.

The thing that has always annoyed me about journalists I see on TV is that they all assume that they are moderates, when they all sound like they belong to the Church of FDR. They never seem to question their own assumptions, or the rightness of undermining the confidence of the people in all of our institutions, except maybe the Social Security Administration.

More:

The strong sentiment in favor of a more critical view of White House coverage is just one way the climate of opinion among journalists has changed since the 1990s. More generally, there has been a steep decline in the percentage of national and local news people who think the traditional criticism of the press as too cynical still holds up. If anything, more national news people today fault the press for being too timid, not too cynical.

Not only do many national news people believe the press has gone too soft in its coverage of President Bush, they express considerably less confidence in the political judgment of the American public than they did five years ago.

I haven't seen such hostility in the press toward a president since Nixon, and he was guilty. They were pretty tough on Clinton, but he handed them a big juicy sex scandal to play with. Bush hasn't done anything that most people would consider criminal, immoral or even dishonest, yet he is the bete noir of the chattering classes, who don't seem to wonder even to themselves why they hate him so.

Shouldn't it be a warning sign that so many of them in national media have less confidence in the judgment of the electorate than they did five years ago? They seem to live in a different society, concentrated in the blue states and are no longer interested in how so many Americans could disagree with what they're putting out. The "bottom line" stuff seems an awful lot like rationalization for what is more likely a shift in their own awareness of the nation. I'd be interested in a trend line of national journalists' income over the last 30 years. That might explain a lot.