I've argued many times that very few journalists are likely to personally know anyone in the military before they're assigned to cover a combat zone, but I've always understood that to be an age issue, a question of the simple fact that we've moved so many years past the draft that fewer and fewer Americans will be associated with the military. That was the data we got with the great big study of civil-military relations that was done under TISS's aegis in the late '90s.
But, via Iraqnow, Econopundit doesn't think it is generational. He' thinks it's geographic, that my argument would hold true for the blue states, but not for the red states. (As he points out, that would still explain the media's alienation from military culture, given where the media is headquartered and where they tend to draw from. Or would it? We know where the media lives. We know what schools they go to. Do we know which states they come from?)
In any event, he isn't finding the demographic data he wants. It'll be interesting to see if he finds it, since the TISS data set wouldn't control for what he's looking for and therefore wouldn't be of use in answering his question.
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