"In Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, Batya Ungar-Sargon, the deputy opinion editor of Newsweek (where, full disclosure, she has published two of my essays), argues that elite left-wing journalists have embraced a race-based view of American inequality and abandoned any sort of class-based analysis. They’ve done this, she explains, because it largely absolves them of having to apologize for their own elite lifestyles. “The fact is,” she writes, “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…”
“What’s interesting about it,” African American filmmaker Eli Steele tells Ungar-Sargon, “is that we’re further away from segregation and slavery than ever before. Racism on almost every metric is lower.” Among a mountain of evidence marshalled in support of this claim, Ungar-Sargon cites an article Rav Arora wrote for Quillette in which he noted that American women of Iranian, Turkish, and Asian descent all out-earn white American males. So why do America’s elite journalists see racism everywhere? Liberal and left-wing journalists and media outlets accuse working class people of racism, says Ungar-Sargon, “not for actual racism, but for things that have increasingly been lumped under the ever expanding category of what counts as racism.” These include opposition to immigration, opposition to affirmative action, and criticism of any black person.
Curiously, many African-Americans, particularly of the working class, wouldn’t fare very well in a study of racial animus. More often than not, she writes, “what they measure is insufficient liberalism on questions of race. For example, to measure the alleged racism of Trump supporters, one study determined people’s racism according to whether they support affirmative action or not, even though over half of black Americans don’t. Can something that splits the black community down the middle really measure racism?” Likewise, she cites a Harvard CAPS-Harris poll which found that 85 percent of black Americans want less immigration...
Opposition to immigration was a mainstream—nay, a left-wing—stance just a few years ago. In 2016, Democratic Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders campaigned for the presidency by denouncing the idea of open borders, deeming it “a Koch Brothers proposal” that “would make everybody in America poorer.” Today, if a member of the white working class were to express such sentiments to a reporter for the Atlantic, the Times, or NPR, he would almost certainly be branded a racist.
Ungar-Sargon reminds us that America once had a vibrant populist press which spoke up on behalf of the working class...
Alas, this model of journalism wouldn’t last, and this is where one of the villains of Ungar-Sargon’s story appears: the New York Times. She spends an entire chapter detailing how the Times, since its inception in 1851, has largely eschewed the concerns of common people in order to court deep-pocketed subscribers. The financial model of the Times has always been reliant on selling expensive advertising space to corporations that produce luxury brands. To do this, the Times has had to convince those corporations that its subscribers are, for the most part, much wealthier than the average American...
Another villain in Ungar-Sargon’s tale is Walter Lippmann (1889–1974), a Harvard-educated journalist and media critic who deplored the fact that so many of the professional journalists of his day lacked an elite education. He called these reporters “accidental witnesses” to the events of the world and complained that they were men of “small caliber,” who couldn’t be trusted to report the truth. He wanted only highly educated men to cover the news, and he wanted to make a degree in journalism from an elite institution a “necessary condition for the practice of reporting.” Lippmann, Ungar-Sargon writes, “would soon get his wish. Today, 92 percent of journalists are college educated, thanks to an extreme class chasm that has opened in America. And yet it would be a mistake to view this in the context of journalistic ethics. While the labor of distinguishing truth from fiction is a crucial part of the job of a journalist, there is absolutely no evidence that having a college degree makes one better at this…”
Ungar-Sargon cites a study from the 1930s showing that only about 40 percent of American journalists at that time possessed a college degree, and nearly 10 percent of journalists hadn’t even attended high school. She supplies a quote from Richard Harwood, a long-time reporter for the Washington Post: “In the early times, we were not only describing the life of normal people, we were participating in it. Most of the reporters came from the lower middle class, which is where the readers and most of the subjects came from too. We were more or less on the same level with the people we dealt with. We lived in the same neighborhood. Reporters regarded themselves as working class.” Ironically, the quote comes from a book by Atlantic journalist James Fallows, who these days travels the country in his own private plane in order to write about how ordinary working folk live. The days when reporters were mostly just working-class drudges themselves are long gone.
As radio, and then television, made journalism a trade that could bring national recognition to its practitioners, it began to attract a more affluent and educated workforce. “But,” writes Ungar-Sargon, “the thing that really jump-started the status revolution in journalism was the Watergate scandal, and—just as importantly—its treatment in the Hollywood film All the President’s Men. The movie suddenly made journalism seem like a very glamorous endeavor, at its peak a David and Goliath tale where plucky sexpots, played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, could bring down the most powerful—and most unpopular—man on the planet. … It created a feedback loop where better educated people became reporters, and demanded more money, whereupon even more educated people applied.”
Since then, journalists have become an elite caste. Almost all of them have at least a bachelor’s degree, whereas only about a third of Americans do. “Back in the day, Ungar-Sargon writes, “when national media outlets were dwarfed by the number of local television and radio stations, papers, and magazines, you could count on a sizable number of journalists to still be living in smaller American cities, some of them attending church and synagogue alongside their readers, viewers, and listeners. Not so today.” She writes that 73 percent of today’s internet publishing jobs are in places that voted for Hilary Clinton for president in 2016. “Those digital media jobs,” she remarks, “located in the most expensive cities in America, pay entry-level wages of $35,000–$40,000 a year. Because that’s not a living wage in these cities, more often than not, someone else is paying the rent for these young journalists. In other words, journalism is now a rich kid’s job.”
Whereas the Times used to boast about how exclusive its readership was, it now boasts about how exclusive its newsroom is. Theodore Kim, the man in charge of newsroom internships and fellowships there, boasted in a (since deleted) tweet a few years ago that he drew his interns and fellows mostly from just four universities: Columbia, Northwestern, Yale, and UC Berkeley. “In listing these schools that ‘churn out’ the ‘most consistently productive candidates,’ Kim said the quiet part out loud: He, as the gatekeeper to the internship program at the New York Times—the most desirable pathway to success in an ever more competitive field—was admitting that unless you come from the kind of background that can pay $70,000 for a vanity degree, you need not apply,” writes Ungar-Sargon (who holds a doctorate from UC Berkeley)...
New York Times columnist and co-founder of Vox, Ezra Klein, is a minor villain in Bad News. “If you’ve never heard of Vox,” writes Ungar-Sargon, “that’s probably because it’s not for you; from its inception, the site had a very specific audience in mind: young, affluent, and highly educated. … Vox’s trademark style would be a cheeky, barely concealed smugness that flatters its readers into believing that by reading the website—which, not coincidentally, would sustain all of the liberal opinions that young, affluent, educated people already hold—they can rest assured that they are among the ranks of the correct, the informed, rather than one of the stupids.” Klein and his wife, Atlantic reporter Annie Lowrey, both write frequently about the poor and the working class without evincing much understanding of either. Lowrey was one of the first elite journalists to produce an article defending the activist slogan, “Defund The Police”—a position few poor and working-class people actually support. As Ungar-Sargon notes, “[T]he abandonment of objectivity in favor of a woke moral panic isn’t really about representing black people but about pandering to white readers. It is they who are clicking on stories calling for defunding the police—a view rejected by 81 percent of black respondents in a Gallup poll.”
At the New York Times, the problem worsened during the great recession. As Ungar-Sargon writes:
Between 2008 and 2015, there were a series of buyouts at the paper, sometimes leading to hundreds of reporters at a time leaving or retiring. These reductions disproportionately cleared out senior ranks of reporters who had a more traditional view of journalism, in which a big part of the mandate, the meaning, and the fun of being a journalist was exposing yourself and your readers to other cultures and other people, and helping others to understand them. In the buyouts, these reporters were replaced by a younger generation of digital natives, some journalists, some in ancillary digital roles, who were educated at elite institutions and viewed their roles less as understanding their subjects and more as sitting in judgment over those they disagreed with.
At a 2019 meeting, one of the paper’s young reporters asked its executive editor, Dean Baquet, “I’m wondering to what extent you think that the fact of racism and white supremacy being sort of the foundation of this country should play into our reporting. Just because it feels to me like it should be a starting point, you know? Like these conversations about what is racist, what isn’t racist. I just feel like racism is everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting.” Needless to say, Baquet heartily agreed with this sentiment, and Ungar-Sargon’s book provides a graph which charts the recent exponential proliferation of the words “racist” and “racism” in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Post, and on National Public Radio. Another graph illustrates a similar recent increase in references to the pre-Civil War slave trade in those same media venues, despite the fact that said trade ended about 170 years ago.
So, where did all this come from? Ungar-Sargon contends that it started in academia, and spends a chapter describing how American universities, beginning about five decades ago, underwent “a shift away from facts and grand narratives and toward relativism.” It took several decades for this new trend to take hold of American journalism. First, all of the older journalists, who took up the trade prior to the Vietnam War era, had to die or retire. Then, major journalistic venues such as the Times and the Post had to hire only those journalists who had been educated at expensive, elite universities. After that, according to Ungar-Sargon, “All roads led to a culture war around race.”
Just as New York newspapers of the early 19th century generally ignored street crime because it didn’t much interest their upscale readers, today’s progressive media largely ignore black-on-black crime, because it doesn’t interest theirs. In Bad News, Ungar-Sargon quotes journalist Zaid Jilani, who points out that massive amounts of blood were shed in black neighborhoods across America in the summer of 2020, but this was largely ignored by the left-wing media because it was caused by other black Americans not by violent white police officers.
Only about seven or eight percent of the people who get their news from the Times or NPR lack any college education at all, and this is by design. Media venues like to show their advertisers just how wealthy and educated their content consumers are. New York magazine boasts to its advertisers that it has 2,224,000 “affluent magazine readers monthly.” Likewise, Ungar-Sargon writes, “The Wall Street Journal reports in its media kit that four out of five readers have a bachelor’s degree or higher, and half are affluent, meaning they own liquid assets of $1 million or more. In a now-deleted media kit, the New York Times boasted a print readership who were ‘elite,’ ‘affluent,’ and ‘influential’; more likely to be millionaires, C-suite executives, or business decision makers than ‘the average affluent adult’; and claimed a median household income of $191,000, with digital readers coming in at $96,000.”
With the Times and its ilk focusing so much attention on wooing the wealthy, middle- and working-class Americans were left largely unrepresented. Into this vacuum stepped Rupert Murdoch and his minions... The channel went all in on the culture wars, abandoning the working-class’s economic interests entirely to unite rich and poor conservative Americans around the cultural front without threatening the status of its rich viewership.”
But half a loaf is better than what the liberal press has been offering working-class media consumers. As Ungar-Sargon puts it, “[I]f the working class in America is an amalgam of cultural and economic factors, the liberal media has abandoned both sides of this equation, while conservative media delivers on one of them; at least Fox News doesn’t sneer at working-class values while abandoning working-class viewers economically.”
It’s easy to understand why an upwardly mobile class of journalists might prefer to focus on race and gender issues rather than on the woes of the working class. What’s odd is that this even seems to trump solidarity with their own class of elite laborers. When Andrew Sullivan was run out of New York magazine for his heterodox views, none of his fellow writers stood up for him. In February of 2021, Donald McNeil, a longtime science reporter for the Times, was pressured to resign after it was discovered that, two years earlier, he had used a racial slur in a neutral way during a casual discussion about said slur. When McNeil took to Medium to write his side of the story, the Times covered it with a headline that read: “Ex-Times Reporter Who Used Racial Slur Publishes a Lengthy Defense.” That’s a rather cold description of a 45-year former colleague who had earned numerous awards for his reporting.
But Ungar-Sargon reminds us that McNeil was not only backstabbed by his former employer but also by the labor union whose job it was to defend him...
In Bad News, Ungar-Sargon cites various journalists who date the current moral panic to roughly the middle of the Obama presidency, when it became clear that having a black man in the White House wasn’t going to be quite the panacea progressives hoped. Conor Friedersdorf, a reporter for the Atlantic, dates the “Great Awokening” to about 2014. He tells Ungar-Sargon, “I started writing about what people now call wokeness at least as early as 2014. It seemed to me that there was some new moral thing in the air that I did not recognize from when I was in college. I didn’t yet see it in journalism, at least not like it’s there today.” To Friedersdorf’s credit, when an outcry among the staff of the Atlantic led editor Jeffrey Goldberg to rescind a job offer he’d made to firebrand conservative writer Kevin Williamson, he objected publicly, and in the pages of the Atlantic itself.
But 2014 now seems like a long-gone era in American journalism. “Back in 2014,” writes Ungar-Sargon, “journalists were able to cover wokeness because it hadn’t yet become their own ideology.” Not any more. Thomas Chatterton Williams, a journalist who also dates the Great Awokening to the second Obama term, told Ungar-Sargon, “That’s when the idea that white supremacy is hard wired into the DNA of America began to be popularized by writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates. … I’m convinced part of why [it is happening] now is because things are better than they’ve ever been. You don’t get this level of complaint until much more fundamental concerns and obstacles have been taken care of.”
Ungar-Sargon cites the work of political scientist Zach Goldberg, who found that, from 2012 to 2016, “media outlets like the Times, the Huffington Post, and BuzzFeed began covering topics like white privilege, social justice, and institutional racism with exponential regularity…” This increase began right when the New York Times erected an online paywall to keep non-subscribers from reading its articles—a move sure to keep out lower-income readers. This meant that the Times, now more than ever, had to tailor its pages to a more educated, more affluent readership—exactly the kind of people likely to get excited by articles on intersectionality and systemic racism. “Goldberg further found that between 2013 and 2019, the frequency of words like ‘white’ and ‘racial privilege’ grew by an astonishing 1,200 percent in the Times, and by 1,500 percent in the Washington Post. The term ‘white supremacy’ was used fewer than seventy-five times in 2010 in the Washington Post and the New York Times, but over seven hundred times in 2020 alone; at NPR it was used 2,400 times,” or roughly 200 times per month!
The situation became much worse when Donald Trump entered the political arena. Executives at CBS, MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, and elsewhere realized that Trump was a veritable goldmine. Once upon a time, the newsrooms and advertising departments at most media outlets maintained at least a semblance of independence from each other. But Trump’s ascent made young journalists at elite outlets want to do nothing but publish negative stories about him all day long. And this was exactly what the advertising department wanted as well, because the name Trump in an online headline pretty much guaranteed millions of clicks. “With the incentives so aligned,” writes Ungar-Sargon, “there wasn’t even really a need to break down whatever was left of the wall between advertising and editorial; it happened on its own. … It can both be the case—indeed, it is both the case—that Trump made a lot of very real mistakes as a candidate and president and that the media’s obsession with him went beyond all proportion due to an unignorable profit motive. … Trump drove sales, so Trump drove editorial.”
She notes that if you type “Trump” and “Russia” into their search engines, the Times’s website will return over 15,000 results and the Post’s website will bring up more than 27,000, despite the fact that the Mueller investigation turned up no hard evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. If you enter the phrases “opioid crisis” or “homelessness” or “income inequality” into the search engines of the Times or the Post, you’ll get a tiny fraction of the number of hits that “Trump” and “Russia” bring up. Elite journalists leaned into Trump’s alleged (and actual) wrongdoings because it gave them an excuse to focus on him and not on the problems of the white working class, whom they have largely abandoned...
We should do what we can to end the current moral panic over race, not
because it distracts us from a more important battle over class, but
because moral panics are bad for us in their own right. But they can be
difficult to resist because they provide the allure of engagement in
righteous conflict which requires very little in the way of personal
sacrifice, but contributes massively to societal discord. As
Ungar-Sargon writes in one of her book's many perceptive passages: “When
you define racism as an omnipresent white-supremacist framework baked
into the heart of our nation that can never be solved or extracted, you
give people a culture war they can hammer away at forever, a perpetual
cudgel against those who disagree with them, even if those who disagree
with them are less affluent and less fortunate—the losers of the
economic and culture war.”"
It's no surprise that the middle of the Obama presidency was also when gay marriage got rammed through the US Supreme Court
Of course, only Fox News and the Daily Mail can be criticised. Anyone who criticises the left wing media is a threat to democracy
Woke media is bad news for democracy - spiked
"When I was in my mid-twenties and working at the New York Times as a clerk, I met a grizzled old New York Post reporter called Steve Dunleavy in a bar off Times Square. He had a fearsome reputation and was loathed by the city’s liberals, but when he heard what I did for a living he was sympathetic, even kind. I don’t remember the conversation word for word, but it was along the lines of: ‘Sorry kid, you’ve arrived too late to the newspaper party.’ The days of working your way up from the bottom were gone, he suggested, and they weren’t coming back. Journalism was a game for the wealthy and the well-connected...
I worked in the US media from the late 1990s until the mid-2000s. While I had many great experiences, and learned a lot from some of the best journalists in the business, I also noticed certain flawed tendencies among some of my peers. In particular, they seemed to invent fantasy scenarios in which they cast themselves as heroes in a sophomoric battle of justice versus injustice. At the time, I thought it was mostly just a problem among a small number of young, immature reporters. But in the decades since, I watched from the sidelines as this tendency morphed into what seemed like an industry-wide personality disorder...
Bad News is a tour de force of research, historical contextualisation and sheer gumption. Ungar-Sargon punctures the noxious bubble that so many elite journalists have been operating in, and provides a devastating takedown of American media. If you still believe in the ideal of the noble, crusading journalist, this book will disabuse you...
The Times and all of its cohorts in the corporate press are no longer in the business of reporting the news. They are in the business of selling the illusion of moral exoneration to a pampered elite, like the Catholic Church selling indulgences in the Middle Ages. But I read the New York Times – I can’t possibly be racist!
‘Wokeness perpetuates the economic interests of affluent white liberals’, writes Ungar-Sargon. It allows them to preserve their own and their children’s status while still allowing them to feel ‘like the heroes of a story about social justice… vastly superior to their conservative and even slightly less radical friends’.
Bad News is full of illuminating nuggets. In 2014 just seven per cent of journalists identified as Republican. In 2015 96 per cent of journalists who made donations to a political campaign contributed to Hillary Clinton’s run for president. And despite the Times making race a central feature of the paper in recent years, it has failed dismally to gain readership among black Democrats. ‘For all its woke posturing’, notes Ungar-Sargon, ‘the Times was only able to secure the readership of 12 per cent of black Democrats in 2019, at the height of Trump’s reign’.
When I worked at the Times, it was a place where the adults seemed very much in charge. Recent events – like the debacle over Republican senator Tom Cotton’s op-ed, which led to three journalists losing their jobs, and the departure of veteran science reporter Donald McNeil, who offended a group of teenage girls – have shown that is no longer the case.
‘This younger generation’, writes Ungar-Sargon, ‘armed with their judgments and accusations of racism and sexism, became the ones wielding immense influence over their older colleagues. Insiders at the Times describe an atmosphere in which an older generation of editors and staff has completely capitulated to a younger woke generation.’
The capitulation happened, argues Ungar-Sargon, in part because it generated revenue and buzz: ‘Young journalists, dazzled by the potential to be famous and anxious to be the good guys in a drama starring themselves, discovered they could push the ideology they’d picked up at their Ivy League universities and peddle it to the acclaim of Twitter activists with millions of followers… They simply could not have found a better way to drive traffic.’
Class is the major focus of Bad News, which is forthrightly populist in its sympathies...
