How Journalism Abandoned the Working Class

[Ptarmigan]

How Journalism Abandoned the Working Class
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/how-journalism-abandoned-the-working

On November 16, 2018, CNN’s Don Lemon hosted a panel discussion about white women who voted for Donald Trump. There was no real news peg for the story; the president hadn’t spent the morning tweeting about anything specific, and it was 10 days after the midterm elections. But Lemon valiantly torqued them into an awkward hook for the panel: “A wave of women, white, black and brown are sweeping into office after the 2018 election. Does Donald Trump still have the support of a majority of white women and if so, why is that?”

A Friday night capping off a slow news week was as good an opportunity as any to bring up the increasingly hot topic of white supremacy. In fact, the only remarkable thing about the panel was how unremarkable it was, one of a thousand such panels that have graced American airwaves in recent years.

Lemon’s guests were Kirsten Powers, a senior CNN political analyst; Alice Stewart, a CNN commentator playing the supporting role of token Republican; and Stephanie Jones-Rogers, a professor of history at UC Berkeley, whose book “They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South” had been cited in an article on Vox, a progressive opinion site that caters to millennials.

Interesting article.

But Trump is an insufficient answer. The moral panic mainstreamed by the liberal news media had actually been underway for at least five years before Trump appeared on the scene. It began around 2011, the year the New York Times erected its online paywall. It was then that articles mentioning “racism,” “people of color,” “slavery,” or “oppression” started to appear with exponential frequency at the Times, BuzzFeed, Vox, the Washington Post, and NPR.

This “Great Awokening” has been impossible to miss if you consume mainstream news. But you don’t have to rely on your impressions. David Rozado, a computer scientist who teaches at New Zealand’s Otago Polytechnic, created a computer program that trawled the online archives of the Times from 1970 to 2018 to track the frequency with which certain words were used. What he found was that the frequency of words like “racism,” “white supremacy,” “KKK,” “traumatizing,” “marginalized,” “hate speech,” “intersectionality,” and “activism” had absolutely skyrocketed during that time.

His work echoes that of another academic, Zach Goldberg, a PhD candidate in political science at Georgia State University who found that in 2010, the term “white supremacy” was used fewer than 75 times in 2010 in the Washington Post and the New York Times, but over 700 times in 2020 alone; at NPR, it was used 2,400 times. The word “racism” appeared in the Washington Post over 4,000 times in 2020. That’s the equivalent of using it in 10 articles every single day.

What could explain the sudden market for this obsession with race and power?

The reason for this radical shift, despite the media’s fixation on race, has very little to do with it. It has everything to do with class.

Journalism was blue collar and became elitist.

Journalism has become a profession of astonishing privilege over the past century, metamorphosing from a blue-collar trade into one of the occupations with the most highly educated workforces in the United States. And along with this status revolution has come the radicalization of the profession on questions of identity, leaving in the dust anything commensurate to a similar concern with economic inequality.

The recent obsession with identity has allowed these journalists to pretend—indeed to believe—they are still speaking truth to power, still fighting on behalf of the little guy, even after they have themselves ascended to the ranks of the powerful, even when they are speaking down to an audience who, in more cases than not, have less than them on every measurable scale. It has quite simply been a displacement exercise; instead of experiencing economic guilt about rising inequality and their status among America’s elite, members of the news media—along with other highly educated liberals—have come to believe that the only inequality that matters is racial inequality; the only guilt that matters is white guilt, the kind you can do absolutely nothing to fix, given that it’s based on something as immutable as your skin color.

In other words, despite a no doubt well-intentioned desire to ameliorate racial inequality, their enthusiasm for the language of wokeness has allowed affluent white liberals to perpetuate and even excuse a deeply unequal economic status quo.

If journalists once fought the powerful on behalf of the powerless, in 21st century America, they are the powerful. While the average pay for a journalism job is quite low at around $40,000 a year, that’s because entry-level jobs pay so little; at the higher levels, journalists now make quite a bit more than the average American. More importantly, journalists now have social and cultural power, and they are overwhelming the children of economic elites. After all, to even be able to make it on $30,000 a year while living in the most expensive cities in America (the only ones left with a functioning journalism industry, thanks to the rise of the Internet and the collapse of local newspapers), you have to come from a family with enormous economic privilege who can help you out. Once a blue-collar trade, journalism has become something akin to an impenetrable caste. And what journalists have done with that power, perhaps inadvertently, is to wage a cultural battle that enhances their own economic interests against a less-educated and struggling American working class.

Once working-class warriors, the little guys taking on America’s powerful elites, journalists today are an American elite, a caste that has abandoned its working class roots as part of its meritocratic climb. And a moral panic around race has allowed them to mask this abandonment under the guise of “social justice.”

It does not come out nowhere.

Why are affluent white liberals so eager to believe we’re living in a white-supremacist state, and that they are the beneficiaries of white supremacy? There are a number of explanations.

In his 2007 book “White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era,” Shelby Steele argues that the success of the civil rights movement resulted in a crisis of moral authority in white America when it recognized its collective role in the sin of racism. Writing in the 1990s, the historian Christopher Lasch argued that the Left had begun to portray the nation, the neighborhood, and even the commitment to a common standard as racist, as part of a larger attack on populism and abandonment of the working class.

More recently, in his book “Hate, Inc.,” Matt Taibbi explores how the media uses a fake notion of dissent to hide all the issues relevant to real Americans that it refuses to cover. “We manufactured fake dissent, to prevent real dissent,” writes Taibbi in a nod to Noam Chomsky’s famous work “Manufacturing Consent.” And we know that historically, at least since the Russian Revolution, the intelligentsia has gone to great lengths to portray its own economic interests and power hoarding in the guise of a noble cause that works on behalf of the powerless.

I think these are all pieces of the puzzle. But there’s another real reason that, however unconscious, is certainly also at play, and it’s this: Wokeness perpetuates the economic interests of affluent white liberals. I believe that many of them truly do wish to live in a more equitable society, but today’s liberal elites are also governed by a competing commitment: their belief in meritocracy, or the fiction that their status was earned by their intelligence and talents. Today’s meritocratic elites subscribe to the view that not only wealth but also political power should be the province of the highly educated. Still, liberals see themselves as compassionate and progressive. And perhaps unconsciously, they sought a way to reconcile the inequality that their meritocratic status produces with the compassionate emotions they feel toward the less fortunate. They needed a way to be perpetually on what they saw as the right side of history without having to disrupt what was right for them and their children.

A moral panic around race was the perfect solution: It took the guilt that they should have felt around their economic good fortune and political power— which they could have shared with the less fortunate had they cared to—and displaced it onto their whiteness, an immutable characteristic that they could do absolutely nothing to change.

[FlaGator]

There is very little true journalism anymore. What we now have are narratives supported by opinions that are based on made-up or slanted information. There is so little truth in what the news media tells us that watching some broadcasts is little different than viewing a low-budget drama or comedy. I wish I could lay this completely at the feet of liberals but I see it happening with the likes of Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson. Don't get me wrong I like Tucker's show but he does add lots of extra information that is solely there to sway someone's opinion and is often not relevant to the subject being discussed. Still, he is much more honest than any of the libtards on MSNBC or CNN.

[thundley4]

There is very little true journalism anymore. What we now have are narratives supported by opinions that are based on made-up or slanted information. There is so little truth in what the news media tells us that watching some broadcasts is little different than viewing a low-budget drama or comedy. I wish I could lay this completely at the feet of liberals but I see it happening with the likes of Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson. Don't get me wrong I like Tucker's show but he does add lots of extra information that is solely there to sway someone's opinion and is often not relevant to the subject being discussed. Still, he is much more honest than any of the libtards on MSNBC or CNN.

Two of the best independent reporters are both women and both former employees of Democrat networks. Lara Logan and Sharyl Attkisson, Greta Van Susteren gets an honorable mention.