Regarding Media: Affluence remakes the newsroom
The late Murray Kempton once described editorial
writers as "the people who come down from the hills
after the battle to shoot the wounded."
Had Kempton lived to suffer through American
journalism's current age of anxiety, he might have
reserved that description for the media critics who seem
to proliferate like one of those exotic species with no
natural enemies to hold it in check — say, zebra
mussels.
But in our system, unfortunately, irrelevance is no
guarantee of silence. And, these days, this nattering
class is loudly obsessed with the political bias that
purportedly suffuses the news media from top to
bottom.
To hear many of these people tell it, the average
American newsroom is something like Barcelona in
1937: wall-to-wall revolutionary cabals buffeted by
right-wing reaction. The only way forward is for every
news story to be topped not only by reporters' bylines
but also by their party registration, religious affiliation —
or lack thereof — age, ethnicity and a quick checklist
of their personal positions on issues ranging from free trade to same-sex marriage.
As our understanding of genetic determinism expands, we'll probably also require
a thumbnail sketch of their DNA.
All this makes for lively arguments, but it won't make for better journalism
because it's an analysis and a solution in search of a problem. Programmatic
politics of any sort are at best a vestigial presence in all but a handful of American
newsrooms.
To the extent any bias is generally operative in the news media today, it is the
middle-class quietism that the majority of reporters and editors share with other
Americans. They are the suburban voters who now cast the majority of ballots in
our presidential elections — mildly libertarian on social issues, mildly conservative
on fiscal matters, preoccupied with issues of personal and financial security. They
are suspicious of ideology with its sweaty urgency and wearying demands for
consistency.
The clearest and most concise statement of how this state of affairs came to be
can be found in a brief note retired New York Times columnist Russell Baker has
written for the letters column of the New York Review of Books' current issue.
A reader's letter wondered whether a review Baker had written underestimated
journalists' willingness to modify their opinions to please the media's corporate
owners and, thereby, hold on to their jobs.
Baker responded that "something more fundamental than household economics
may be reshaping journalistic attitudes toward public issues. Today's top-drawer
Washington news people are part of a highly educated, upper-middle-class elite;
they belong to the culture for which the American political system works
exceedingly well. Which is to say, they are, in the pure sense of the word,
extremely conservative.
"Most probably passed childhood in economically sheltered times, came to
adulthood in the years of plenty, went to good colleges where they developed
conventionally progressive social consciences, and have now inherited the
comforting benefits that 60 years of liberal government have created for the
middle class.
"This is not a background likely to produce angry reporters and aggressive
editors. If few made much fuss about President Bush's granting boons to those
already rolling in money, their silence may not have been because they feared the
vengeance of bosses, but only because the capacity for outrage had been bred
out of them…."
These are not, in other words, ideologues afire with countercultural fervor but the
sort of 401(k) voters who now make up America's electoral majority.
In a telephone conversation from his home in northern Virginia, Baker, 78, wryly
mused that "generalizations about journalism do nothing but get you into trouble,
and mine are drawn from observing the rather elite group of journalists with
whom I'm familiar, particularly those who cover Washington. These are people
who have been to rather good colleges, who come out of that secure,
upper-middle-class culture that has flourished in the United States with the help of
Franklin D. Roosevelt and the GI Bill of Rights. It's now easy in this country to
become substantially educated and, therefore, well paid.
"I was a journalist for 50 years and hate to pronounce, but these are not
adventuresome people. How could they be? Most have been to college and then
have gone directly into journalism. What can you expect with that sort of
background?"
What you get, in fact, is rather conventional careerism. In Washington, Baker
said, that means journalists "who work hard; everybody in Washington works
hard. But they lack empathy for the rest of the country. If you've never lacked
health insurance — and most reporters and editors never have — you don't
understand what it means for the 43 million Americans who are doing without it,
any more than the Congress does."
In the New York Review, Baker wrote: "The accelerating collapse of the
American health care system may illustrate how journalism's disconnection from
the masses will produce an inert state. If every journalist in the District of
Columbia had to have his health insurance canceled as a requirement for
practicing journalism in Washington, quite a few might … get to know what anger
is, and discover that something is catastrophically wrong with the health care
system."
For Baker, the general lack of empathy that precludes such anger is a far more
powerful force in contemporary journalism than any covert political bias.
"It's like working at Wal-Mart," he said, "which I suppose is the survival form of
poverty in today's economy. If you don't have to do it and nobody you know has
to do it, you just don't think about it. Most people in journalism today don't
anticipate ever being in a Wal-Mart as anything but a shopper."
It wasn't always so. Baker recalled that, as a young political reporter, he traveled
around the country meeting other journalists. "The old-timers I met on those trips
were an odd mixture. Many had only high school educations. One very good
correspondent for the Scripps chain had spent the Depression pounding out tunes
on a piano in a five-and-dime. They had a raffish but informative experience of
the world that is very hard for journalists to acquire now.
"When I started out as a police reporter, I lived next door to a cop. Reporters
don't come out of those neighborhoods nowadays. We've all moved uptown.
Today, reporters join clubs. They play golf."
It's a long way from the 19th hole to the Revolution. Especially when what you've
got on your mind is not politics — left or right — but where the Nasdaq closed
and your carpool.
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