MARK JUDGE: Journalists Need to Learn How to Lay Bricks. “In order to support my writing I often take seasonal jobs, a lot of them temporary—washing dishes, selling Christmas trees, working in a deli. At each and every one of them it has taken me about five minutes to discover, or reconfirm, that the working class—particularly young male minorities—is essentially conservative. It’s obvious why the elites don’t know what’s going on, but the grifters of Conservatism, Inc., are equally clueless.”
Plus:
In most professions, there are intermittent periods of tutoring required to sharpen skills. Professional athletes practice in the off-season, studying strategy and doing drills to master the fundamentals. Airline pilots have to take tests to make sure their senses stay sharp. Doctors bone up on the latest illness and treatments.
Journalists, on the other hand, are not required to have such training. As a result, they tend to isolate themselves—living among similar types, hanging out at the same New York and Washington parties or network green rooms, never leaving the small radius of their beat. They lose touch with the people they claim to cover. Their coverage becomes a tape-loop, repeating the same talking points for hours on end.
The solution is easy: Journalists should be required to get seasonal jobs working with real people to be taken seriously. They can work manual labor part time, or for a few months over the holidays. A job in a restaurant kitchen, or at a home-improvement retailer or hardware store, or steel mill or a coal mine, or on a construction crew or in nursing home, can reintroduce journalists to the people they claim to cover. It also might reintroduce them to the concept of humility. . . .
If journalists spent any time at all with actual working people, they would realize a couple things very quickly. The first is that most Americans are not race obsessives the way Hollywood and the media are. I worked Christmas season in a large home-improvement store, and my coworkers were from Africa, Ireland, Mexico, the Middle East, everywhere. We were all focused on various tasks and made friends with each other easily, usually bonding in the break room over whatever professional sport was playing on TV. It was, in short, the real world.
Liberals depend on a crisis culture of “breaking news” to give them things to do. They don’t like to hear it, but the American experiment is working fine without their interference and advice. We all tend to respect each other.
If the news is what gives meaning to your life, you’re in trouble. But it is for a fair number of people.