Last week, NPR’s Jeffrey Dvorkin worried that taxpayers (in the form of bloggers) were undermining his taxpayer-financed radio network by expressing their opinions about its content. Here’s another revealing quote from Dvorkin in this Wall Street Journal article (subscribers only) by Jacob Laskin:

NPR “comes under attack quite frequently for its apparently left-wing bias,” [Dvorkin] explained, “but most of these criticisms come from media organizations that are openly conservative. So I take those kinds of criticisms with a certain amount of salt.” Mr. Dvorkin also noted that liberal bias, far from being a problem, should be seen as an occupational quirk among journalists: “There is some kind of liberal empathy on the part of some journalists, because their curiosity about how other people live tends to involve a certain liberal stance,” he said.

Let’s enumerate Dvorkin’s logic:

1. Charges of bias against NPR are not to be believed because they come from conservatives, and
2. Journalists are naturally liberal because curiosity is a job requirement and curious people tend to be liberal.

Doesn’t his second point prove the bias that he denies in his first point? I’m scratching my head trying to figure out what Dvorkin’s message is here. If he’s saying that NPR doesn’t have a liberal bias, then it must be because NPR has a bunch of uncurious (i.e. not liberal) reporters. And if NPR does lean left, then that’s okay, because those uncurious conservatives are not suitable to be decent reporters anyway.

How pervasive is that thinking in the media, I wonder? If the folks responsible for hiring reporters shared similar views, then isn’t it possible that it would affect hiring decisions? If conservative is just a synonym for uncurious, then wouldn’t a conservative candidate for a job in journalism be at a disadvantage? After all, who wants to hire uncurious reporters? NPR might, depending on which of Dvorkin’s statements he wants us to believe.