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June 12 - June 21, 2024
For hidden behind a story that looks like it’s about race is a story about class—even caste. The fact is, journalism has become a profession of astonishing privilege over the past century, metamorphosing from a blue-collar trade into one of the occupations with the most highly educated workforces in the United States. And along with this status revolution has come the radicalization of the profession on questions of identity, leaving in the dust anything commensurate to a similar concern with economic inequality.
The recent obsession with identity has allowed journalists to pretend—indeed to believe—they are still speaking truth to power, still fighting on behalf of the little guy, even after they have themselves ascended to the ranks of the powerful, even when they are speaking down to an audience who, in more cases than not, have less than them on every measurable scale.
instead of experiencing economic guilt about rising inequality and their status among America’s elite, members of the news media—along with other highly educated liberals—have come to believe that the only inequality that matters is racial inequality; the only guilt that matters is white guilt, the kind you can do absolutely nothing to fix, given that it’s based on something as immutable as your skin color.
Once a blue-collar trade, journalism has become something akin to an impenetrable caste. And what journalists have done with that power, perhaps inadvertently, is to wage a cultural battle that enhances their own economic interests against a less-educated and struggling American working class.
Once working-class warriors, the little guys taking on America’s powerful elites, journalists today are an American elite, a caste that has abandoned the working class and the poor as it rose to the status of American elite. And a moral panic around race has allowed them to mask this abandonment under the guise of “social justice.”
T magazine, the fashion magazine of the New York Times, recently showcased Angela Davis on the front cover and an ad for a Cartier watch on the back cover; these are not in tension with each other, but rather two sides of the same coin.
For a culture war to succeed, Frank wrote, it needs to be waged against a problem that can never be solved.
“As a culture war, the backlash was born to lose,” writes Frank. “Its goal is not to win cultural battles but to take offense, conspicuously, vocally, even flamboyantly. Indignation is the great aesthetic principle of backlash culture.”
Solutions are in fact anathema to this project because it views the very real vestiges of racism not as remaining problems to be solved but rather as proof that racism is baked into the DNA of America—even proof that racism is the DNA of America—as present and inescapable in the hearts of well-meaning whites as it is in the actions of avowed white nationalists.
They needed a way to be perpetually on what they saw as the right side of history without having to disrupt what was right for them and their children. A moral panic around race was the perfect solution: It took the guilt that they should have felt around their economic good fortune and political power—which they could have shared with the less fortunate had they cared to—and displaced it onto their whiteness, an immutable characteristic that they could do absolutely nothing to change.
Instead of asking why our elites have risen so far above the average American, they asked why the elites are so white. Instead of asking why working-class people of all races are so underrepresented in the halls of power, white liberals called the working class racist for voting for Trump. Instead of asking why New York City’s public school system is more segregated than Alabama’s, white liberals demanded diversity, equity, and inclusion training in their children’s exorbitantly priced prep schools.
In other words, wokeness provided the perfect ideology for affluent, liberal whites who didn’t truly want systemic change if it meant their children would have to sacrifice their own status, but who still wanted to feel like the heroes of a story about social justice, who still wanted to feel vastly superior to their conservative and even slightly less radical friends.
You do not have to support Trump to acknowledge that he exposed something dark about American journalism that was already underway when he surprised everyone by winning the presidency in 2016. He exposed the contempt the media has for middle America and for religion, the use of racism as a cudgel to protect class interests, the obfuscation of American unity on questions of equality, the elevation of a set of taste and class markers to the status of absolute truth, and the cultivation and mainstreaming of a moral panic about America as an enduring white-supremacist country, while corporate
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the real divide is cultural even more than it is economic. It is the working-class culture, one that values family, place, and faith over careers and resumes and credentials, that we have excised from the public square.
It was as a crusader that Pulitzer made his name and as a crusader that he made his money. What he figured out early on was that crusades sell.
if people knew that the working class and the poor read the Times, it would have devalued every ad he sold in the paper. He had done everything in his power to telegraph that his paper was for a much higher clientele. “In appealing to a larger audience, The Times by no means proposes to offend the taste or forfeit the confidence of the audience it now has,” Ochs wrote in the Times obsequiously.
Naturally, the move away from crime and City Hall and toward stories about mathematics and cybernetics meant that a higher class of reporter was necessary to cater to this higher class of reader; after all, reporters were now being asked not to interview people and tell readers what they learned, but to interpret what they learned in essay-length articles about cybernetics.
instead of recognizing that the polarization of the media is the result of its own class bias, liberal journalists dressed up their disgust with the working class as heroism.
The studies used to determine “racial animus” frequently fail to actually measure racism. More often what they measure is insufficient liberalism on questions of race.
By defining racism as both the worst character trait a person can have and a central, defining part of the DNA of America, omnipresent in every institution and every situation, the national news media was given a story that was both shocking and available in every nook and cranny in which their reporters should care to look. They simply could not have found a better way to drive traffic.
In other words, for all the talk about fighting for racial equality, the re-racialization of American life through a woke culture war was simply the next phase in the status revolution of journalists
After all, if the root of inequality lies in something as immutable as your whiteness, rather than any economic or political decision you have control over, you can’t do anything about it but feel guilty.
the enduring whiteness of America’s newsrooms stems more from the enduring whiteness of America’s rich than it does from the enduring racism of America’s journalists.
“America’s original sin is not slavery,” the elder Steele says in it. “It is simply the use of race as a means to power.”26 In other words, critical race theory is still committing this original sin.
The value that America has always placed on industry and social mobility has been replaced by a belief in immutable characteristics like race and the use of science, to justify a calcified class hierarchy that keeps some at the bottom and some at the top. And rather than replacing the missing steps on the staircase of social mobility, the tech oligarchy and its poets laureate, the liberal media, push for higher taxes and redistribution, a model Kotkin calls “oligarchical socialism.”12 In this elite fantasy, the working class would not be a self-sufficient countervailing power to the elites as
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instead of understanding their values and respecting them, liberals tend to ask why the lower classes vote against their own interests and refuse the beneficience of progressive policies. That what members of the working class actually want is a degree of autonomy over their own lives is unthinkable.
Journalists insulated from the pinch of economic anxiety were free to malign their less fortunate fellow Americans without even knowing they were doing so.
