In the US and in media throughout the West the economic trench between reporter and reported on has never been more wide. Economic wealth (the Media) sneer
at the rest of those they believe are impoverished in character, sensibility and morals.
Talk about judgemental.
The main reason that national media outlets have a blind spot in matters of class is the lack of socioeconomic diversity within their ranks.
Few people born to deprivation end up working in newsrooms or publishing books.
American journalism has been willfully obtuse about the grievances on Main Streets for decades – surely a factor in digging the hole of resentment that Trump’s venom now fills. That the term “populism” has become a pejorative among prominent liberal commentators should give us great pause. A journalism that embodies the plutocracy it’s supposed to critique has failed its watchdog duty and lost the respect of people who call 'FAKE' when they see it.
tHE MEDIA, who patronise downwards. would stereotype a group of people by presuming to guess their politics or deeming them inferior to yourself – say, the ones who mopped a McDonald’s bathroom while others drank craft beer at trendy bars; the ones who came back from the Middle East in caskets while others wrote op-eds about foreign policy – then consider that you might have more in common with Trump than you would like to admit.
Such media derision of those who are 'others' is so pervasive that it’s often imperceptible to the economically privileged journalists. Those who write, discuss, and publish newspapers, books, and magazines with best intentions, sanitised as they are
by a liberal 'education' have an achilles' heel called obliviousness.
One-dimensional stereotypes fester where journalism fails to tread. if we’re examining economically driven bitterness among the working class, stories about the Democratic lawmakers who in recent decades ended welfare as we knew it, hopped in the sack with Wall Street and forgot American labor in their global trade agreements abound.
at the rest of those they believe are impoverished in character, sensibility and morals.
Talk about judgemental.
The main reason that national media outlets have a blind spot in matters of class is the lack of socioeconomic diversity within their ranks.
Few people born to deprivation end up working in newsrooms or publishing books.
American journalism has been willfully obtuse about the grievances on Main Streets for decades – surely a factor in digging the hole of resentment that Trump’s venom now fills. That the term “populism” has become a pejorative among prominent liberal commentators should give us great pause. A journalism that embodies the plutocracy it’s supposed to critique has failed its watchdog duty and lost the respect of people who call 'FAKE' when they see it.
tHE MEDIA, who patronise downwards. would stereotype a group of people by presuming to guess their politics or deeming them inferior to yourself – say, the ones who mopped a McDonald’s bathroom while others drank craft beer at trendy bars; the ones who came back from the Middle East in caskets while others wrote op-eds about foreign policy – then consider that you might have more in common with Trump than you would like to admit.
Such media derision of those who are 'others' is so pervasive that it’s often imperceptible to the economically privileged journalists. Those who write, discuss, and publish newspapers, books, and magazines with best intentions, sanitised as they are
by a liberal 'education' have an achilles' heel called obliviousness.
One-dimensional stereotypes fester where journalism fails to tread. if we’re examining economically driven bitterness among the working class, stories about the Democratic lawmakers who in recent decades ended welfare as we knew it, hopped in the sack with Wall Street and forgot American labor in their global trade agreements abound.
But, for national media outlets comprised largely of middle- and upper-class liberals, that would mean looking their own class in the face. The faces journalists do train the cameras on – hateful ones screaming sexist vitriol next to Confederate flags – must receive coverage but do not speak for the communities that most people know. Communities that the media industry ignored for so long has left a vacuum of understanding in which the first glimpse of an economically downtrodden white is presumed to represent the whole.
But as Gladstone reflected “the poor are no more monolithic than the rest of us.”
We don’t need their analysis, and we sure don’t need their tears. What we need is to have our stories told
But as Gladstone reflected “the poor are no more monolithic than the rest of us.”
We don’t need their analysis, and we sure don’t need their tears. What we need is to have our stories told
Last month, results of 87,000 interviews conducted by Gallup showed that those who liked Trump were under no more economic distress or immigration-related anxiety than those who opposed him.
January, political scientist Matthew MacWilliams reported findings that a penchant for authoritarianism – not income, education, gender, age or race –predicted Trump support. But for the media such divergence of people do not dwell in their mental landscape
These facts haven’t stopped pundits and journalists from pushing story after story about the white working class’s giddy embrace of a bloviating (talk at length, especially in an inflated way).demagogue.
Another ad hominen device (think the smirking Bill Maher) is to blam it (Trump) of religious affiliation; ever the go-to scapegoat of the befuddled secular liberal.
Earlier this year, primary exit polls revealed that Trump voters were, in fact, more affluent than most Americans, with a median household income of $72,000 – higher than that of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders supporters. Forty-four percent of them had college degrees, well above the average,
Yet among liberal friends, I frequently heard, ‘No one in their right mind would vote for Trump.’
Perhaps they should get out more.
Perhaps they should get out more.
The media spend so much time in their compound with the cordon sanitaire of soi disant 'Education' insulating the as the tell each other how enlightened they are; but as they preach to the converted
they are polluting the message and now we are literally looking at the real possibility of an absolute catastrophe in the US already there exists a tacit civil war between left and right.
However all these really smart people (the media/talkers/experts missed the Trump ascendancy — surely that must cause at least the teeniest bit of humility? But no. That maybe they all saw something happening that the gimlet-eyed columnists missed because they were using their columns to get in the first shots at the upstart riffraff (CULTURAL SNOBBISM) and blazing away with their high-brow put downs
they are polluting the message and now we are literally looking at the real possibility of an absolute catastrophe in the US already there exists a tacit civil war between left and right.
However all these really smart people (the media/talkers/experts missed the Trump ascendancy — surely that must cause at least the teeniest bit of humility? But no. That maybe they all saw something happening that the gimlet-eyed columnists missed because they were using their columns to get in the first shots at the upstart riffraff (CULTURAL SNOBBISM) and blazing away with their high-brow put downs
The classification of 99% of Trump voters as “gullible, ignorant, disaffected and mean-spirited” is another opinion Kleinzahler might have done well to keep to himself.
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