From Nieman Labs there’s a transcript of a Harvard colloquium on journalism in a post-truth era. I want to highlight this quote from Lydia Polgreen, editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post:
I actually think that what we’re seeing right now is a collapse of empathy in journalism. I feel as though journalism has become a highly elite profession that feels extremely distant from the experiences of the people that we write about. There was a lot of handwringing after the election about, did we do enough to cover the sentiments that were leading people to vote for Trump. I feel like I read so much of that coverage.
The problem wasn’t that we didn’t write about them, it’s that we didn’t write for them. There are so many journalistic products that are aimed at highly educated, affluent people. I spent almost 15 years working at The New York Times, which produces the most marvelous journalistic product I think the world has ever known. But it’s speaking to a particular audience and I think that what it fundamentally comes down to is this question of audience and who you’re speaking to.
Having that ability to speak not just about, but really speak to, the experiences of people who fundamentally feel that the economic and political arrangements that govern our lives are unfair, is really a huge part of the problem. And I feel that institutions like The New York Times, institutions like The Wall Street Journal, have a hard time getting access to that audience. And there are very powerful institutions that call themselves journalistic institutions that are building products that are directly targeted at that audience. They’re organizations like Fox News and like Breitbart. So I look back to a period in the 1970s, when you had columnists like Mike Royko working, Jimmy Breslin — people who had a real deep connection to people who who felt disenfranchised from the establishments of power.
Who’s the Mike Royko of the gig economy today? Chances are it would be a woman. Perhaps it would be a person of color. But I think that journalism needs to rediscover its roots as a blue-collar profession, and find a way to get back in touch with empathic storytelling.
There’s lots of other great stuff in the exchange but I wanted to highlight that. It might be familiar to you because that’s what I’ve been saying for years.
The major news outlets aren’t on the side of the people anymore but on the side of the elite, not surprising since that’s who their editors went to school with, live among, and socialize with. How they can get back to the ordinary Americans when the entire thrust of the J-schools is that journalism is a profession not a trade or a craft and professionals are about 3% of the population isn’t entirely clear to me.
Well you missed it , Trump is our man , and, STFUP
Yes, we need more journalists writing for illiterates who live in an alternate reality.
There are more words for more niche markets than ever before in human history. That’s part of the problem, people can ignore reality and live entirely on regurgitated lies. I used to read a blogger who wrote about his daily experiences as a waiter – nothing like that was around when I was waiting tables. In addition to that there is an endless proliferation of religious texts tailored to whatever floats your trailer. There are TV shows aimed at working class people. There are movies. Paul Blart: Mall Cop is not for coastal elites.
The complaint in the OP is without basis in fact. We have quite the opposite problem: too much pandering to morons.
I love Mike Royko. But the Mike Roykos who are alive today are writing for Jacobin or someplace similar and their audience is going to be smeared as the elite too.
Tons of money has been thrown at right-wing outlets aimed at taking down the elites. The result has been Breitbart and The Federalist; basically things Mike Royko would not have wiped his ass with. The American Conservative has Larison and a few halfway rational academics, maybe.
The bottom line is that 99% of the journalists who have talent and curiosity end up writing for select magazines or far-left sources like Jacobin or N plus 1. That’s it.
Maybe we should just have the Average Joe slaughtered, to be fed to the dogs of elite owners.
I have a friend who grew up in DC. She and her brother were fairly wild; her brother was also gay. Her parents were pretty well-off Catholics. Her brother coming out as gay did something to them, so they had three more kids, eighteen years after they had their last child. They homeschooled them, and went way to the right. Now my friend’s younger sister is in her early 20s. She’s very intelligent and completely brainwashed (in my friend’s kind words), and she works for Townhall.com. These are the types of people who end up connecting with Trump voters–the educated children of wealthy parents who decided to brainwash their children because an older sibling turned out to be gay.
It’s funny how all conservatives believe that when the dad they had who went out for some smokes 25 years ago finally came back after a long absence he would sit down and sympathize with their sad story about how they were insulted once online by the ‘elite’.
Just saw this on youtube, thought it was appropriate for this thread:
https://youtu.be/d2ntzveJfuM
Glad to see more journalists thinking alone these lines.