MARK HEMINGWAY: News For The Elite.
The few worthwhile media critics that don’t reflexively blame the death of the industry on readers who have the temerity to vote the wrong way often do little more than bash the media for their relentless partisanship. That’s a valid complaint, yes, but pointing out that The New York Times is essentially just a Democratic super PAC that sells ads has been done ad nauseam and gets us no further in solving the problem.
I have a shelf of books on the media that can be divided evenly into these camps, and so I had ample reason to approach Batya Ungar-Sargon’s book, Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy, with trepidation. So it is very relieving that Bad News is something different and far more penetrating—the book’s key insight is that the media’s problems stem largely from issues of class, even if the problems are outwardly manifested as political and cultural extremism in the news. Journalism used to be written primarily by the working class for the working class, but as the industry shrinks, it has become ensconced in an elitist bubble that serves the interests of its corporate owners and distribution channels controlled by Big Tech. This renders it incapable of accurately describing, much less diagnosing, the problems faced by working-class readers, leaving the news business in a death spiral as ordinary Americans reject the media in growing numbers.
Almost any journalist old enough to remember when their profession wasn’t a wasteland of listicle sweatshops will acknowledge there’s been a massive cultural shift in newsrooms in recent decades that rarely gets commented on. I started in journalism in the late 1990s. Back then prominent members of the newsroom’s old guard still drank at lunch and smoked in the office—but they were more transgressive in an important regard: They were all working class, or at a minimum, possessed working-class sympathies. An editor I was lucky to work with early in my career, John Corry, started his multi-decade career at the New York Times as a copyboy on the sports desk where he made $25 a week on the side by supplying bookies with the scores of late ballgames by phone, before working his way up the Times’ masthead. “Mild raffishness, moderate dissoluteness, and minor deviancy were tolerated and tacitly encouraged at the Times, and this fact helped breed allegiance to the newsroom,” Corry writes in his memoir, My Times. . . .
But the hypocrisy isn’t merely a matter of unfortunate juxtaposition. Who the media establishment ultimately serves has a profound impact on how newsrooms go about addressing fundamental questions. Instead of presenting real solutions that require reporting uncomfortable truths, woke media frames the issue so that any changes to the system don’t threaten existing liberal power structures. We only see performative posturing designed to assuage elite guilt.
To be fair, the elites have a lot to feel guilty about. Plus:
On the question of conservative media and its growing influence, she observes that the rise of Fox News is, again, as much about class as it is about politics.
“But though the New York Times may claim that ‘Talk Radio Is Turning Millions of Americans into Conservatives,’ the truth is almost certainly the opposite: Conservative media is conservative because it caters to the working class, and not the other way around,” she writes. Indeed, this, in particular, is an example of how the medium is the message—most people who had jobs affording them the opportunity to listen to Rush Limbaugh for three hours in the middle of the day were either on the job in cars or working on shop floors.
Conversely, the legacy media haven’t just abandoned the working class, they’ve embraced full-on snobbery. Ungar-Sargon quotes Nick Williams, the editor in chief of the L.A. Times saying the quiet part loud: “Newspaper prestige, not always but usually, is a function of liberal estimation. Most intellectuals are liberal, and editorial prestige depends on what intellectuals judge it to be.” Ungar later makes the astute observation that this desire to rebuff the working classes “signaled that not through circulation but through content.” No matter how big a story is—the opioid crisis is the prime example—if it doesn’t appeal to affluent liberals who fancy themselves “intellectuals,” it won’t get the coverage it merits.
Indeed.