Right or left? Either way, conventional thinking rules op/ed pages

[Commentary] News organizations are still struggling to diversify their ranks. Minority groups only accounted for about 13 percent of newspaper jobs in 2015, according to one industry survey. Tied into that equation is a socioeconomic component that anyone who works in today’s precarious news industry is well aware of: holding a newspaper job often means coming from an affluent household, especially as both undergraduate and graduate degrees, along with a slew of prestigious internships, become the price of admission for scant openings.

Despite all the upheaval over the past year, the unchanging nature of newspaper op-ed pages doesn’t surprise Jack Shafer, a Politico media columnist. “A newspaper is not a Twitter feed. It’s not skywriting,” Shafer says. The editorial status quo will remain as long as the people who control the pages hail from the same classes and ideological backgrounds they’ve always known. “We can argue whether Bret Stephens or Paul Krugman’s ideas are worthy of placement in The New York Times,” Shafer says. “but [A.J.] Liebling said it best. The freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”