How journalists today are lazy and wimpish, and why it has to do with the class divide

Here's a great article in the NY Review by Michael Massing about how journalists are increasingly timid in presenting views that are unpopular with the Bush administration and, to some extent, with the public at large.  We already knew this, right?  Well, it's even worse than we thought. 

There are lots of fun (read: terrifying) points in Massing's lively essay, but one to focus on is his argument that the press is becoming more and more removed from blue collar workers and Midwesterners.  Along with media's dependency on market shares, which drives reporters to produce stories and shows that sell, Massing is also concerned that the press is writing for themselves and people like them.  This seems certainly to be true, but the hole in this argument is that most reporters are liberal, and most press services are also liberal.  So why the show of not caring?

Massing begins his article with an anecdote about a LA Times reporter, Ken Silverstein, who covered Republican efforts to prevent democratic voters from voting in the 2004 presidential election only to find his story twisted into the headline "Partisan Suspicions Run High in Swing States."  In the aftermath of that messy affair that was the 2004 prezzies, it has become pretty clear that Republican efforts to stop Dem votes were much more concerted and strategic than the other way around.  In other words, we've confirmed what Ken Silverstein saw.  The paper's attempt to produce "balanced" reporting resulted in weak, yuck, nothing reporting.  Well, let's actually call it Bad Reporting.  In a letter to his editors, Silverstein wrote, "God forbid we should...attempt to fairly assess what we see with our own eyes."

Massing uses this anecdote to talk about how the press is steering clear of having an opinion.  But he doesn't exactly say why they're doing this.  We could all take an educated guess: maybe it's because the press is afraid of looking liberal.   This makes sense, right?  The press is so often accused of liberal bias that they're moving in the opposite direction.  We saw this when Bush was making the case for Iraq: the press sat there stupidly, too afraid to make a move.  Analytical, investigatory practice went down the tubes.

How does this have to do with the class divide?  Massing later discusses the shortage of labor coverage in American newspapers.  Has anyone else noticed that when companies cut thousands of jobs, the news ends up in the Business section?  As Massing writes, "the business sections are addressed to members of the business world and are mainly concerned to provide them with information they can use to invest their money, manage their companies, and understand Wall Street trends."  So, sure, papers cover corporations.  They just don't investigate them, criticize them, or think at all analytically about them.  They just write about them so we'll know when to sell our stock. 

The problem, identified by ex-labor reporter Nancy Cleeland (she used to be the lone labor reporter at the LA Times, like Stephen Greenhouse for the NY Times) is that her editors didn't care about labor for labor's sake.   "They were always looking at labor from a management and business perspective -- 'how do we deal with these guys?'"  It's not exactly that the press doesn't care about the working class, they just don't have real empathy: "They don't consider themselves hostile to working-class concerns, but they're all making too much money to relate to the problems that working-class people are facing."   

The connection is there but Massing doesn't actually quite make it.  The press has so little personal grasp of blue collar Americans or Midwesterners, that they're letting conservatives define these Americans and dictate what they want to hear.  They're timid because they don't know what Red America looks like, except for the picture Republicans have painted.  (Not to conflate Red America with blue-collar America, but you can see where I'm going with this.)

When the class divide widens, people stake claims, and often, become spokespeople.  Suddenly, George Bush knows more about working class people in the Midwest than labor reporters do.  Suddenly, big business republicans get to have a monopoly on working-class and middle-class values.  Losing real empathy with working-class Americans, as Massing claims the liberal American press is doing, means losing touch with the ways that a political position speaks to them.  "Balanced reporting" is bad not only because it favors the Republicans, but because it obscures the ways that working-class Americans are being duped by the Right (the majority of Dems barred from the polls on September 2nd were working-class minorities).  If the press is so scared of the hold conservatives have over Red America that they can't produce good news that reveals this hold, and they can't envision how their politics is relevant to others not in their demographic, they might as well abandon everything beyond the Upper West Side to the Republicans once and for all.

Comments

[grump as fuck]

Thank you Bexster for your earnest consideration packaged in engaging prose! I read that article too, and loved it. It made me wonder if Michael Massing is as cute as Anderson Cooper.

Your website is goregeous, by the way.