THE LEFT'S WAR ON OPINION

Antony Loewenstein's next book -- due for a 2007 release (rewrites could cause release-date slippage) -- on the Western media has been preempted by The War on Democracy by academics Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler. Here's the first sentence from the excerpted introduction:

The Howard government can win in parliament, but on its own it can’t win the war on democracy in the public sphere.

The book's promotional page provides further info:

If current conservative opinion writers are to be believed, Australian political and cultural life continues to be infiltrated and dominated by plotting left-wing ideologues, ‘Marxists’ and ‘extremists’. While conservatives see themselves as representing the interests of ‘ordinary’ Australians, they see ‘the left’ as politically correct and self-serving elitists, intent on imposing their undemocratic views on the media, schools, universities and other public institutions and cultural practices.

If Australia's tertiary institutions are anything like America's, the lefties are indeed well entrenched:

My assertion — hardly mine alone — that the university environment is heavily skewed to the political left should have been uncontroversial. If it had been received as such by my opponents, the discussion would then have focused on whether the disparity mattered, and what, if anything, should be done.

Instead, my opponents forced me to prove the obvious. My study — which I admitted was a crude survey of the party registration of faculty members at 32 elite universities — was challenged. The challenge inspired more studies, this time conducted by social scientists like Daniel B. Klein, associate professor of economics at Santa Clara University, that were methodologically sophisticated and took in much larger samples. The result? We now have an empirically sound picture of just how one-sided university faculties have become.

That's because the really smart people are left leaning. Just ask them, they'll tell you.