When was it that Hill Street Blues was in first run on TV? Thirty years ago? I didn’t watch it faithfully but did so occasionally and played a sort of game. The show’s writers were cagey about exactly where it was supposed to take place but it was explicitly supposed to be in a big city on the East Coast or Midwest. The game was to count the number of palm trees, eucalyptus trees, and shots of mountains in the distance. The “media bubble” Jack Schafer and Tucker Dougherty write about in this Politico article isn’t new:
The answer to the press’ myopia lies elsewhere, and nobody has produced a better argument for how the national media missed the Trump story than FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, who pointed out that the ideological clustering in top newsrooms led to groupthink. “As of 2013, only 7 percent of [journalists] identified as Republicans,†Silver wrote in March, chiding the press for its political homogeneity. Just after the election, presidential strategist Steve Bannon savaged the press on the same point but with a heartier vocabulary. “The media bubble is the ultimate symbol of what’s wrong with this country,†Bannon said.
Television news production has been concentrated in New York, Los Angeles, or Washington for what? The last fifty years? That’s why every time it snows in New York it’s big news while blizzards in Cleveland go unnoticed. TV reporters cover what’s easy to cover and what affects them. It seems like a big story so it must be a big story.
Meanwhile, have you noticed how many Americans on television have Canadian “ehs”?
