Volume 3, Issue 1

This article seeks to provide a historical context for the current state of the media. It concludes that the political bias, and capacity to produce journalistic scandal, so conspicuous in recent years among leading newspapers and television networks, reflects the impact of major cultural, market, and technological developments.

This article first examines the ideological composition of American university faculty and then tests whether ideological homogeneity has become self-reinforcing. A randomly based national survey of 1643 faculty members from 183 four-year colleges and universities finds that liberals and Democrats outnumber conservatives and Republicans by large margins, and the differences are not limited to elite universities or to the social sciences and humanities. A multivariate analysis finds that, even after taking into account the effects of professional accomplishment, along with many other individual characteristics, conservatives and Republicans teach at lower quality schools than do liberals and Democrats. This suggests that complaints of ideologically-based discrimination in academic advancement deserve serious consideration and further study. The analysis finds similar effects based on gender and religiosity, i.e., women and practicing Christians teach at lower quality schools than their professional accomplishments would predict.

By the early 1990s, the Great Powers had developed a de facto division of labor for international conflict, with the U.S. taking the lead for combat operations while its allies focused on peace-keeping duties. By eschewing responsibility for post-conflict peacekeeping and nation-building, the transformation of the American military under Secretary Rumsfeld has exacerbated U.S. dependency on foreign expertise in these crucial "soft" areas. The Bush administration's decision to go it alone in Iraq in 2003, followed by its calamitous mismanagement of the post-conflict situation in that country, has exposed this dependency, raising important questions about the future direction of American neo-imperial ambitions.

Despite early optimistic assessments, the Green Party seems unlikely to have the sort of impact in the United States as it has in Western Europe. Fundamentally, like other minor parties, the Green Party will unlikely be able to overcome the traditional institutional and social-cultural constraints on third party success in the United States. However, the 2004 elections suggest that the Green Party is also suffering from the failure of a short-term strategy in supporting the celebrity candidacy of Ralph Nader in the 2000 presidential election rather than investing in long-term party-building to encourage local candidates to run office.

Skinner and Klinkner (2004) argue that attitudes reflecting racial prejudice were present in the 2003 Louisiana governor’s race, and were even stronger in north Louisiana. Utilizing as did they aggregate data with an approach that better fits theory and available data, this study shows that they overstate the significance and importance of presumed racial prejudice in the election, especially statewide. Across the state, attitudes reflecting racial prejudice had no impact on the vote decision, and where they did in north Louisiana, the effects were small enough that they did not change the outcome of the contest. However, using individual-level data showed that partisan effects strongly controlled voting in this contest; in fact, non-Republicans displayed a chauvinistic tendency in their voting while a Republican partisanship negated this effect. Conflating various meanings to variables and inferior indicators explains the less-valid results and interpretations achieved by the use of aggregate data compared to the individual-level data.