We Must End The ‘Journalism Pay Gap’

We all know by now that the so-called “gender pay gap” is a feminist myth that won’t die, based on dodgy number-crunching, that no reputable economist takes seriously.

As we’ve reported before, contrary to feminist mythology, women under 30 in the U.S. and the U.K. are actually paid more for the same work. You can only produce a “pay gap” by using meaningless, over-simplified statistics and purposefully ignoring the different life choices women make.

The truth is, you can find a “pay gap” between almost any group in society by using the same sort of childish math. In the interests of social justice, I’ve set myself the task of finding other pay gaps crying out for urgent justice. This is purely a result of my natural egalitarian instincts, of course. Petty vindictiveness and ridicule is not my style, as readers will know.

With that said, let’s turn to one of the most pressing social justice issues of our time: the journalism pay gap. The shocking truth is, that today in 2015, liberal journalists are a privileged class, earning almost three times as much as their conservative counterparts. Let me explain.

Progressives comprise by far the largest segment of journalists. According to Pew, 40 per cent of journalists are liberals, compared to 33 per cent who identify as “middle of the road,” 2 per cent who refuse to self-identify, and 25 per cent who identify as conservative.

Of course, “middle of the road” to the mainstream media means that they like Lenin but think Stalin perhaps went a bit too far at times, so it’s safer to lump these self-described moderates in with the Left as well. As for the 2 per cent who refuse to identify, I expect they’re just members of the Cthulhu cult and therefore also leftists. So we’re left with a field that is 25 per cent conservative and 75 per cent liberal.

Bear with me, because we are are about to deploy feminist mathematics. 

Feminists arrive at the gender pay gap by taking the average pay of women and comparing it to the average pay of men. So what happens when we do the same to liberals and conservatives in journalism?

The average salary for journalists in the United States is just under $38,000.  There are approximately 36,700 journalists working in print newspapers, and 3,000 working at websites. Combined with broadcast journalists, the Pew Research centre estimates that there were about 100,000 journalists working in the U.S. in 2006.

If 75 per cent of journalists are left or left-leaning, that means their collective pay is $2,835,975,000. For conservatives, who make up 25 per cent of journalists, it’s $945,325,000. To arrive at the pay gap, all we need to do is divide conservative wages by liberal wages.

The result? Conservatives earn just 33 cents for every dollar earned by a liberal journalist. That’s correct, gentle reader: conservative journalists are suffering under the weight of a 68 per cent pay gap. When will this barbaric injustice end?

Follow Milo Yiannopoulos (@Nero) on Twitter and Facebook. He’s a riot! Android users can download Milo Alert! to be notified about new articles when they are published.