Lying Liars Of The Ruling ClassBy Rod Dreher
June 23, 2022
Another day in the life of Felicia Sonmez’s former employer:
https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1539982604287545348These people live in a bubble. Joe Concha writes:
To say there’s a disconnect between many journalists and the public they serve is a gross understatement, according to a new in-depth survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.
Per Pew, 65 percent of the nearly 12,000 journalists surveyed say the media do a solid job of “covering the most important stories of the day” and reporting news accurately. But a solid majority of the American public at large has the opposite view, with just 35 percent feeling the same way. That’s a 30-point perception gap.
When asked if journalists perform well when “serving as a watchdog over elected leaders,” 52 percent of journalists agreed. But the number dropped precipitously again when the general public was asked, with less than 3 in 10 agreeing with the assessment.
When asked if journalists manage and correct misinformation consistently, 43 percent of those in the industry said yes, while just 25 percent of the general public agreed.
Almost half (46 percent) of journalists said they felt connected to their readers and viewers, while just one-quarter of the public says they feel connected to the media outlets from which they get their news.
So why the disconnect? Perhaps it’s like the old saying about the key to good real estate: Location, location location. Most of the national media are located in two places: New York City and Washington, D.C.
In the 2020 election, just 9 percent of Manhattan voters voted for Donald Trump. In D.C., the Trump support was just 5.4 percent, underscoring that those who live in or near these cities exist in overwhelmingly liberal silos. It’s only human nature that a journalist’s perception of issues will generally conform to the places and people with whom he works and lives.
Concha goes on to say that the loss of local newspapers in the media consolidation wave of the Internet era is to blame. I think he’s overstating it. I’ve worked at several mainstream papers, and two papers — the Washington Times and the New York Post — that were self-consciously conservative (though the NYPost‘s conservatism was different from the Washington Times‘s). The newsrooms were all fairly liberal. In fact, one of the rare newsroom conservatives at The Dallas Morning News used to joke with me that if the entire newspaper building were to magically relocate itself to Harvard Square in Cambridge, Mass., the newsroom wouldn’t notice. With the exception of the bureaus, nearly everybody who worked in that newsroom when I was there (2003-09) lived in the DFW area, and the views of the staff were heavily liberal. And it showed in the coverage.
* * *
In my time here in England this past week, I have gotten to be friends with an Oxbridge academic who grew up working class in a poor and violent part of a major city. We were talking this morning about what idiots people in our professional milieus can be — thinking of themselves as worldly and knowledgeable, but actually shockingly ignorant of the world outside their bubbles, and more damnably, utterly without curiosity about it. They mistake managing a narrative to skew it towards left-wing conclusions for actually doing journalism or scholarship.
In Oxford, I ran into a retired journalist of the old-school, a leftie who was rightly furious over the collapse of journalistic standards in the younger generation. He said something close to, “They think journalism is simply shifting information from one screen to another. They don’t want to go out and meet actual people, and see what’s going on in the real world.”
* * *
The point is that these people who run our media are increasingly only talking to themselves. Remember how, for five minutes after Donald Trump’s win, the ruling class decided that it was going to think really hard about how it missed him coming. That was fun, wasn’t it? This echo chamber is a disease of our elites. I don’t know if you can read N.S. Lyons’s invaluable Substack without a subscription, but here’s a clip from his latest, in which he interprets a US State Department communiqué:
* * *
Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/lying-liars-of-the-ruling-class-wokeness/
