Why People Hate Journalists
Every once in a while a serious, blue-chip journalist draws a troubled breath and tells us something everyone already knew. Sunday's Los Angeles Times featured just such a piece by its media reporter, David Shaw. Entitled "Journalists are losing touch with the man on the street," it proves by various demographic measures that most mainstream journos know little and care less about the American working class. This excerpt sums it up:
"We don't write about them because we no longer live like them," says Martin Baron, editor of the Boston Globe. "We live in other neighborhoods, and we don't visit theirs. And I fear that there is a subtle disdain for their lives, their lifestyles, their material and spiritual aspirations."
Today's sophisticated, well-paid, well-educated journalists often have more in common with their sources -- government officials, university scientists, high-powered lawyers and businessmen -- than they do with their readers.
Do tell. William Greider said this years ago, in his book Who Will Tell the People? But the most apt expression of the problem I have yet encountered is still in a little-known 1991 study by a civics think tank called the Kettering Foundation. Summarizing the results of public discussion groups held around the country, the authors of Citizens and Politics: A View from Main Street America wrote thus: "People know exactly who dislodged them from their rightful place in American democracy. They point their fingers at politicians, at powerful lobbyists, and--this came as a surprise--at people in the media. They see these three groups as a political class, the rulers of an oligarchy that has replaced democracy."
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