One thing is just so self-evident that we dont even have to express it. Like why the media tend to be liberal. Thats like asking why are university professors and scholars more likely to be liberal? Or asking why are clergy more progressive or liberal than those in their congregations. Even why most Jews are more liberal and open-minded. Its simple: information, ideas and education. Expose your receiving mind to concepts and it will never be the same. How delicious, how liberating, how natural to expand ones thinking and to freely discard faulty notions. It defies all logic to think media people would or could be exposed to so many ideas, yet remain personally indifferent. Still the mature journalist can and should stay neutral in the reporting role. It is a discipline. Give high regard for learning and reading and you are signing your warrant to change what you are and what you think. I remember spending a summer back home just before starting graduate school and feeling the great intellectual divide between my parents and me, partly due to my education, travels and diverse reading. In more than 40 years of writing for publication, I have come to honor, respect and admire intellect, reasoning and analysis. The tens of millions of words I have read in newspapers, magazines, books, web sites, letters and so many other sources have shaped my thinking as it has yours. I read my own school newspaper editorials and commentaries from 1964 and wince at the limits of their breadth, the naivet and cocksure ideas so lacking in life experiences. They were words without perspective. But, at the time, I was a farm kid going to a small-time high school with 47 in my class, all white kids of the same stock. I listen to erudite voices on National Public Radio or the Friday night news shows on Public Television and they tend to run liberal because they are educated people whose enormous exposure to information and so many forces of marketplace debate that they tend to be anything but reactionary. In 35 years of daily journalism, Ive been an observer of the people who choose this trade probably as many as a couple thousand people by now. They have gotten assaulted by ideas, made to report on societys way of working and seen powers way of dominating the agenda. With the refinement of judgment and sharper sensibilities, news people tend to grow contemptuous and skeptical of the status quo the conservatives treasured place. I watch reporters and editors mature, grow and change because of the avalanche of information that shapes their thinking. They dont tend to turn more conservative, from my experience. Discernment is a great thing. Making up your own mind, in spite of what someone tried to once tell you is necessary and noble. As a spiritual life editor, Im intrigued at those religions that work so hard to protect their followers from falsehood. Keeping the rank and file unwavering believers in their particular package of tenets is so essential to preservation of a particular faith. The healthy religions dont keep people captive or dependent. Nor do they profess an exclusiveness to truth. They dont run colleges that expel professors whose writings or teachings deviate from their sanctioned truth. At one time, wandering tribes in the Mideast were told that there were 613 rules that had to be observed. Not surprisingly most of them seem quaint absurdities, like not benefiting from an ox condemned to be stoned or offering two lambs of sacrifice daily or the rule to pay wages on the day they are earned. Or the king must not have too much silver and gold." Check out the 613 laws: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/613_mitzvot. Liberals have passed those by. As long as good ideas morph into better ideas, absolutists will be left behind in their dogmas and orthodoxy. Thinking and brighter ideas are the best way out of the darkness.

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