 reminder to email your to the point queries to roundtable.reason.com. This one comes from Chris Geary. Who writes, I'd like your thoughts on the idea that to improve our collective sense making, it should become a norm for at least all non-opinion news outlets to require their journalists to disclose their voting records. Reason does, did he says, something similar, yes. And I think this would be immensely helpful in at least four ways. One, it provides the reader with information that's important context to the story, the postmodern consideration. Two, it establishes a baseline of trust between journalist and recipient. I'm putting my cards in the table. Three, it would encourage the journalist to try to be more balanced in reporting because journal knows what bias reader will be looking for. So journal will want to proactively counter it. And four, it would hopefully shame the publisher into seeking out and hiring journalists with different outlooks, which Jonathan Rouch tells us is necessary for the constitution of knowledge to actually work. I'm sure there would be downsides to but thoughts. I have many of thoughts, we'll get to them, but Catherine, do you want to lead off? Yes, so the letter writer is correct. Reason does do this, has been doing this for a long time. And especially points one and two are mostly the reasons we do it. I am deeply skeptical that point four has very much power because the other publication that has done this in the past with some consistency, although I don't think they do it anymore, is Slate, where they make academia look ideologically diverse. It's really something. And people don't have any shame about it. I mean, we have these findings over and over and over in all of our elite institutions that they are overwhelmingly, not just kind of philosophically liberal in disposition, but democratically partisan at a over 90% level, everywhere, absolutely everywhere. And no one seems to be embarrassed. No one is ashamed. Reason does it, we will probably do it again. And when we do it, a bunch of people are gonna get their panties in a bunch about it because someone on our staff- Well, that's because everybody had recent votes for Norman Thomas, right? Someone on our staff is gonna vote a way that they don't like. And even if in their text of their explanation, they say, this is the most grudging possible vote. This is being dragged from me by wild horses only due to a tiny reason why this person is marginally less bad than the other person or whatever. The brain poisoning of partisanship is so bad that people will say, look, I added up all the votes. And there was one Biden voter and two Trump voters and everyone else basically just screamed, ah, into their answer. But that means that reason endorsed Donald Trump, right? And that's, I wish that people wouldn't do that because I don't think that's the point of the exercise, but what I think is the point doesn't matter. The whole idea of it is you put it out there and people do with this information what they will. If I may, Matt, I wanna thank you for introducing that awful feature to reason that came in when you darkened our door and pushed me as editor of the print magazine at the time to do it. What I found most interesting about the way we do it at reason was that people also talked about previous votes and then some other question and that we bring in people in our universe that you wouldn't necessarily hear about. So it could be Penn Gillette or our cartoonist Peter Bag or thinkers like Stuart Brand, people who are adjacent to us. And it just becomes an interesting discussion of what's going on during a presidential election year, but also what is a wide range of people, who are they voting for and why? That can be kind of interesting. I think what the letter writer is getting at, and this is a very different question, at the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post or media that pretends to be objective, that would be genuinely fascinating even if they just tabulated without giving the names. They can anonymize the data and just say, you know what, we polled X number of staffers who write on a daily basis and this is the breakdown of who's voting for whom or who's not voting. I've met and I'm struggling to remember any of their names, but that's because I'm struggling to remember all names at this point in my life, but I've met a bunch of like high-profile legacy media journalists who say, I don't vote because I would be compromised somehow. I think that's stupid, but I kind of respect that. But I would love to see this. I don't think it can be interesting as a feature in publications like Slate if they were ever interesting. And it can be interesting. It is interesting in reason-style publications, but the most interesting thing would be in these other objective groups. And I would like to see that become a norm. I do love the weird reversal of cause and effect that comes in that line that you just mentioned, Nick. Like I don't hear it as much anymore and I guess I never thought I would miss it, but now I do, but it was a very, very common thing for journalists to say, I don't vote because that would bias me. Which is both like what? No, like the bias would certainly pre-exist the vote if you were biased, but also is true. Like it also is true that like if you commit to something then you are more likely to seek out its positive attributes and downplay its negative attributes. Like it's like a weirdly deep psychological insight that I think people are just saying in a stupid way. But I now am retroactively nostalgic for the days when at least some journalists said that because now almost every journalist at a publication that would describe itself as objective is in fact going to vote for Joe Biden. And many of them will believe that not doing so represents an existential threat to the country and to their own profession. The other variation on this, which is good for a laugh is when the nation used to do this all the time where they would, in every election, there would be a socialist, a green party, somebody who embodied everything they stood for often named Ralph Nader and they would always say, Ralph, we agree with you 10,000% but this election is too important to vote for the person who perfectly encapsulates what we believe. So would you please drop out so we can vote for a candidate that we loathe ideologically but obviously support with every fiber of our being. And they just do that on an almost regular basis which is kind of funny. The Intercept published that exact piece about seven or eight days ago without necessarily lionizing Cornell West and Jill Stein but saying, you know. Oh, what a team. It's too, could they be co-presidents? That's so perfect. But I was going to say, Catherine, that my lifelong not belonging to a political party is totally out of that same impulse. I don't want to join anything because I write about this stuff. And also because I'm not the joiner of things at all. Peter, because you're a moral coward, Matt. That was a clip from the Reason Roundtable podcast. To watch more clips, go here. To watch the whole show, go here and subscribe to the Reason Roundtable wherever you get your podcasts.