In my last few posts I've referred to media elitism and class consciousness, especially with regard to Iraq and the uproar over Fahrenheit 9/11. I've also mentioned the response of the establishment media to historian Howard Zinn, who admits to growing up class conscious, acknowledging that the circumstances of his upbringing have affected his approach to writing "bottom-up" history.
This article in the Columbia Journalism Review supports the contention that most journalists don't relate well to poor and working class Americans. They're too well-off and culturally distant:
"The class divide between journalists and the poor and working-class Americans many of us claim to write for and about is real, though it has little to do with political ideology and is more complicated than the faux populists of the Right would have us believe. Russell Baker, the former New York Times columnist, got closer to the mark in the December 18 issue of The New York Review of Books. 'Today’s top-drawer Washington news- people . . . belong to the culture for which the American political system works exceedingly well,' he wrote. 'The capacity for outrage had been bred out of them.'
"So much for comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. As Baker points out, we are the comfortable. The demographics confirm it. We are part of the professional class, reasonably affluent and well educated. By 1996, for example, the last time the American Society of Newspaper Editors conducted a broad survey of the U.S. newsroom, 89 percent of journalists had finished college. Meanwhile, only 27 percent of all Americans have four or more years of college, according to the latest census."
Columbia University is, ironically, the perfect symbol of the class divide in this country. The Ivy League school is perched high on a bluff in Manhattan overlooking Morningside Park in Harlem. It is also the alma
mater of the people's historian, Howard Zinn, who in this interview with David Barsamian explains why the Marxist proletarian revolution and the collapse of capitalism never occurred as Marx predicted in the mid nineteenth century:
"There’s a big difference between having a working class that is 80 percent of the population and seething with anger at the system and a working class of which half has been given enough goodies to be content, leaving a minority in desperate poverty. The minority may be an important one, in the U.S. it may be 40 million people who are in desperate circumstances without health care, with a high incidence of child mortality, but still not enough to make the kind of workers’ revolution that Marx and Engels were hoping for."
Back to the media. George Monbiot explains media bias as a byproduct of "greasing up to power", which is the British equivalent, I guess, of "sucking up to", or brownnosing:
"Another is that, as in all professions, you are rewarded for greasing up to power. The people who are favoured with special information are those who have ingratiated themselves with the government. This leads to the paradoxical result that some of our most famous and successful journalists are also the profession’s most credulous sycophants."
He continues:
"While you are rewarded for flattery, you are punished for courage. The US, British and Israeli governments can make life very difficult for media organisations which upset them, as the BBC found during the Gilligan affair. The Palestinians and the people of Iraq have much less lobbying power. All the media are terrified of upsetting the Israeli government, for fear of being branded anti-semitic. Powerful governments can call on the rightwing press for support. Rupert Murdoch, who has a commercial interest in the destruction of the BBC, is always happy to oblige."
As usual, any discussion of class and media bias leads back to Michael Moore and his movie, Fahrenheit 9/11. Monbiot is no exception. Although he criticizes the movie as "crude and sometimes patronising" and at times "clumsy and incoherent", he ended up applauding it for "asking the questions which should have been asked the past four years. The success of his film testifies to the rest of the media's failure."
He concludes:
"When most of our journalists fail us, it’s hardly surprising that the few who are brave enough to expose the lies of the powerful become heroes, even if their work is pretty coarse. When a scruffy comedian from Michigan can bring us closer to the truth than the BBC, it’s time for a serious examination of why news has become the propaganda of the victor."
Recent Comments