Class taboo
The class taboo
When journalism went white-collar, it became class-blind
| Jan 29 | Subscriber's post | 22 | 3 |
Image by Alex Hanson
“Journalism has evolved into a career with significant entry barriers, one of which is the unpaid internship. This makes the profession whiter, wealthier… and less concerned with public policy issues that affect the poor and even the middle class.”
– Dana Goldstein, The American Prospect
In the late 2000s, the British Cabinet Office issued a report called “Unleashing Aspirations.” It found journalism to be one of the most socially exclusive professions in the country, noting:
■ 98% of journalists born since 1970 were college-educated
■ Less than 10% came from working-class backgrounds
■ A journalist on average grew up in a family in the upper 25th percentile by wealth
In America the change came in stages. When journalism became cool after All The President’s Men, suddenly upper-class kids wanted in. Previously a rich American kid wouldn’t have wiped his tuchus with a reporter.
Ironically, All the President’s Men, which made reporting glamorous, was about adversarial journalism. But the next generation of national political reporters viewed people in power as cultural soul mates, because, well, they were — socially, anyway.
While sportswriters for a while remained hardscrabble, cigar-chewing types who hammered team owners and managers for every tiny mistake, political reporters became professional apologists, constantly telling us how hard it is for politicians to win elections and run things.
By the 1990s and 2000s, the new model for political reporting was found in books like Primary Colors or Game Change, which celebrated politicians and their aides, and looked at things from their point of view. Leadership was hard! If a candidate had to fib or back off a campaign promise, the new generation of scribes explained a politician’s job was to accept the “burden of morally ambiguous compromise.”
Reporters were forever trying to re-create the American Camelot. In each presidential race, any halfway decent-looking young Democrat was described as “Kennedyesque.” In 2004 both Democratic candidates, John Kerry and running mate John Edwards, won the moniker (the newspapers’ current Kennedy-to-be is Beto O’Rourke).
In the next Camelot, reporters this time around wanted to be counted with the Best and the Brightest. They wanted, literally, to be courtiers.
By the time Barack Obama ran for president the transformation was complete. Obama, most everyone in the national press corps agreed, was our generation’s long-awaited Kennedy (German reporter Christoph von Marschall even wrote a book called Der schwarze Kennedy about Obama). Those who followed his campaign wanted to be passengers on his ride, “part of history.”
I remember stepping on Obama’s campaign plane for the first time and seeing the press section plastered in photos. It looked like a high school yearbook office at the end of a semester. Apparently, there was a tradition of reporters taking pictures of themselves covering Obama. The often posed with the candidate, and pasted the pics on the plane walls.
I liked Obama well enough at the time, but thought: “This is not a good look.” A reporter who allows himself or herself to be photographed arm in arm with a politician is asking for trouble. If I did it, I knew, police would find 100 bodies buried under the candidate’s lawn the next day.
There was something to the whole courtier thing, however. By that time in history, to even get on the plane as a reporter, you had to jump over a slew of cultural/financial obstacles.
The aforementioned unpaid internship was just one. Another was travel cost: the price tag for a news organization to send a reporter on the campaign trail was thousands of dollars a day, which limited traveling press to the richest corporate outlets. There are no alt-weeklies on the trail.
The Internet accelerated the class divide. Big regional newspapers increasingly became national or even global in mindset. In the digital age it made more sense to design coverage for a sliver of upper-class readers across the country (who could afford subscriptions and responded to ads) than the whole bulk of readers in in a geographic area around Boston, New York, Washington, or L.A.
Because news organizations were targeting those audiences, it made sense to pick reporters who came from those ranks as well. By the mid-2000s journalists at the top national papers almost all belonged to the same general cultural profile: liberal arts grads from top schools who lived in a few big cities on the east and west coasts. (Note: this was not true of reporters at more regional newspapers, who very often were more adversarial and took on local industries and politicians with more gusto than national counterparts).
The only variable was their approach to the job. But that was about to become uniform, too.
I first met Thomas Frank in the third week August of 2008, in Denver, Colorado, at the Democratic National Convention. I was covering the campaign for Rolling Stone and was thrilled to meet the author of What’s the Matter With Kansas?, a best-seller I’d admired for its originality and quick-witted prose.
I was in my mid-thirties and Frank, a bit older, was holding forth at a lunch table full of writers and Democratic aides.
The backdrop was the coming coronation of Obama, a politician who for many at the table (at the time, anyway) represented something optimistic and new. Frank, the bestselling writer, was ripping off one one-liner after another, holding everyone’s attention.
I don’t remember the conversation, but I do remember Frank giving me his business card. He had a smile that stretched from ear to ear as he put it in my palm and pointed: “It’s in the shape of Kansas!”
I looked down, felt the irregular edges of the card, and burst out laughing. Frank had another quality national political writers increasingly lacked: he was funny.
What’s the Matter With Kansas? was an engaging book with a serious premise. It was designed to be the answer to a question that a lot of self-described liberals were asking at the time: why had working-class Americans abandoned the party of Roosevelt to vote Republican in such huge numbers?
Frank answered the question through the perspective of his home state, attempting to describe the complicated and often anguished thinking of working-class Kansans. In his eyes, the conquest of such voters by the Reagan Revolution had been a historic switcheroo:
The great dream of conservatives ever since the thirties has been a working-class movement that for once takes their side of the issues… In the starkly divided red/blue map of 2000 they thought they saw it being realized: the old Democratic regions of the South and the Great Plains were on their team now, solid masses of uninterrupted red, while the Democrats were restricted to the old-line, blueblood states of the Northeast, along with the hedonist left coast.
Neither caricatured nor lecturing, What’s the Matter With Kansas? explained countless resentments built up among working-class voters over religion, education, economic inequities, and other issues. Many of these resentments were understandable, even if they’d also been carefully stoked by GOP strategists.
The latter had wasted no time stepping in when Democrats, in a moment of insanity that has now stretched across decades, decided in the eighties to punt away their working-class base:
The Republicans... were industriously fabricating their own class-based language of the right, and while they made their populist appeal to blue-collar voters, Democrats were giving those same voters… the big brush-off, ousting their representatives from positions within the party and consigning their issues, with a laugh and a sneer, to the dustbin of history.
What’s the Matter With Kansas? was a prescient portrait of a Democratic Party that was transforming into what Frank would later term a “party of the professional class” – urban, obsessed with its own smartness, worshipful of meritocracy and credentialing, and exquisitely vulnerable to accusations of elitism.
The book was no cookie-cutter analysis. It wasn’t typical Republicans Suck/Democrats Suck marketing (drearily, there was one shelf for each in most bookstores back then). He came to painful conclusions, including many about his own party, and was unafraid to communicate them to readers.
This to me was what journalism was supposed to be about, asking why things happen and being willing to be surprised or even upset by the answers. If Democrats could hear hard truths like the ones in What’s the Matter With Kansas? they were in good intellectual health.
Years later, it looks like some of that was a mirage. Frank today suspects the more difficult parts of What’s the Matter With Kansas? were just overlooked.
“Everyone remembers the first few pages,” he says, which were about the failures of the Reagan revolution. The thornier sections about the strategic and moral errors of the Democratic Party were closer to the end.
“Nobody read it all the way through,” he says now, laughing.
It’s the third week of August, 2016, almost eight years to the day from the 2008 Democratic convention. I’m in Des Moines, Iowa, listening to Donald Trump speak on the dirt floor of the State Fairgrounds. It smells of pigs and horses in the building. Trump is preaching to a crowd that seems half-biker, half farmer.
It’s not Kansas, but I’m reminded of Thomas Frank.
Trump’s speech is almost word for word a recitation of the talking points Frank had warned in What’s the Matter With Kansas? were in danger of being lost forever to the Democratic Party. The New York billionaire is, of all things, appropriating the language of the original Populist movement.
“The White House will soon become the People’s House,” he said. “This campaign… it’s going to help everyone. These are people who work hard and don’t have a voice. Their voice has been taken away.”
Populism has become a hot topic in recent years, with countless furious articlesdevoted to the subject. Big northeast dailies like the Times and the Post have devoted innumerable critiques of both current brands, the right-wing version pimped by Trump and the more traditional version, recently revived by the likes of Bernie Sanders.
The original Populists of the 1890s were a left-based movement of farmers and the working poor. They had fiery rhetoric but fairly modest goals. They sought a graduated income tax and public railroads, and railed against the “money power” of the Northeast.
Then as now, their movement was reviled as crude and uninformed by the upper-crust voices of papers like the New York Times. The really devastating criticism came from celebrated writer William Allen White, who penned an essay about the state most associated with the movement, called… What’s the Matter With Kansas?
The essay, which Frank of course ironically referenced in his book, denounced with thick sarcasm the efforts of the less equal animals in the American barn to try to govern themselves. White’s position was that fist-shaking Midwestern ignorants needed grownups with degrees to run things for them. White particularly thought Populists should keep their calloused hands off the economy:
What we need is not more money, but less capital, fewer white shirts and brains, fewer men with business judgment, and more of those fellows who boast that they are ‘just ordinary clodhoppers…’
White’s essay might as well have been written today, perhaps by a writer like Max Boot of the Washington Post, who recently tweeted:
What’s wrong with elitism? Shouldn’t we want the best qualified people to run government just as we want the best qualified to fly airplanes, perform surgery, design buildings, etc?
Trump politically was and is a million miles from the ideals of the original Populists. However, in 2016, he constantly invited ridicule from smarty-pants national media figures of the Boot type, knowing it could only burnish his “populist” credentials.
That August, with Steve Bannon as his campaign manager, he’d added a twist, selling himself to audiences as a savior of African-Americans.
“I thought about Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln is a pretty good Republican,” Trump cracked that day in Iowa. “It brings me to a subject that is important and personal for me. Nothing means more to me than making our party the home of the African-American vote…”
Snickers shot through the press section. As that summer wore on, I’d noticed the traveling press seemed only able to deal with Trump on two levels, disgust and ridicule. Which made sense, maybe, if you were only focusing on Trump the TV personality.
But presidential campaigns are not all about candidates. They’re more about the people who vote for candidates. Movements often precede their eventual leaders.
The challenge in covering Trump ought to have been to ask: what predisposed people to this person’s appeals? What created Trump’s opening?
For nearly a year on the trail I’d been astonished that the answers to this question seemed so elusive to colleagues. About the racial/nativist element we all know: this was heavily covered, from the “they’re bringing rapists” episode on day one of Trump’s campaign to his confrontation with Univision anchor Jorge Ramos.
But there were many other things going on, and they weren’t exactly hidden. It took about two minutes of surveying any Trump audience to hear comments like, “Fuck it, why not?” and “I’ll vote for anyone who isn’t a politician,” or, “We have to try something.”
This spoke to a profound pessimism and disillusionment that preceded Trump, whose appeals were clearly designed to hoover up long-simmering frustrations.
Contrary to what was reported, Trump speeches tended to be policy-based and often as much about class as race or nationality. He talked about exported jobs, soaring drug costs, and the conspiracy of bought-off pols in both parties who made these problems possible.
Whether he was a realistic solution to these or any problems was a completely different question. But his pitch was working. Why?
In the summer of 2016, hundreds of reporters descended into the hollowed out ex-industrial towns where Trump was finding success, ostensibly to answer that question. These places were often in states of near-devastation, overrun with unemployment, debt, an opiate crisis, and, unique in industrialized countries, declining rates of life expectancy. People in these places were pissed, and had been for a while.
But newspapers rarely commented on this. By the summer of 2016, Trumpism became very nearly synonymous with terrorism, i.e. something whose origins you didn’t need to ask about if you were a good citizen. Terrorists hated us for our freedom, Donald Trump won votes because he was racist, and that was all we needed to know.
Articles began to appear attempting to prove no other rational explanations existed for the Trump phenomenon. People who had real economic issues – or who had other legitimate gripes, like war vets returned from the Middle East – preferred Democrats, we were told. The term “economic insecurity” began to be laughed at that summer, and before long its very use was denounced as, itself, a coded form of racism. “White working class” would join its ranks later.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton was struggling. Only once during the general election did she attract a crowd bigger than 10,000 people (in Arizona, where her campaign was delusionally devoting resources, instead of focusing on places like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin). This was a semi-regular occurrence for Trump.
Absurdly, instead of asking the people in these crowds why they were there, reporters more often dialed long distance to ask other big-city pundits and academics to explain what was going on.
The explanations that came back were bizarre. “Trump [is] regularly… going to places where he is most beloved, not where the ground game is most competitive,” GWU professor Lara Brown said.
The Clinton campaign claimed the small crowds were intentional. Reporters actually bought this.
“We’ve gone into the less populous areas for a reason,” said Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri, insisting they were targeting key voters who just happened to live in sparsely populated regions.
In the rare cases when mainstream American news outlets even mentioned the seeming lack of enthusiasm for the Democratic campaign, they dismissed it with bizarre tautologies.
“Trump is trying to get massive crowds,” explained Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post. “So no one should be surprised when he gets them.”
Apparently Hillary Clinton wasn’t trying. So, no big deal. That Trump would later be ridiculed for his delusions about crowd size was beyond ironic, considering how much time those same press critics spent explaining away the enthusiasm gap in 2015–2016.
There was another explanation out there for the enthusiasm problem, but no one wanted to hear it.
Thomas Frank published Listen, Liberal, in March, 2016, just as Trump was wrapping up the Republican nomination. It was written at a time when Clinton was expected to be the next president.
The book warned, however, that even with victory probably ahead, the Democratic Party had serious unresolved problems. These began with the fact that there was a major disconnect between perception and reality among the national press about the financial situation “out there”:
According to official measurements, the last few years have been a time of brisk prosperity, with unemployment down and the stock market up. Productivity advances all the time. For those who work for a living, however, nothing seems to improve. Wages do not grow. Median income is still well below where it was in 2007…
Every page of Listen, Liberal contained similar warnings that voters were not doing as well as newspapers insisted, and this discontent would eventually express itself.
When Trump defied expectations and won, Frank composed an afterword to Listen, Liberal. It pointed to the curious press myopia about the election:
[Reporters] persistently overlooked what was driving his uprising. Stories marveling at the stupidity of Trump voters were published nearly every day during the campaign. Articles accusing Trump’s followers of being bigots appeared by the hundreds, if not the thousands...
Frank wasn’t saying bigotry didn’t exist, just that it was only part of the story. “Trump was a bigot, yes, and this was inexcusable, but he also talked about trade,” he wrote.
Frank noted the hypocrisy of Trump, whose own brand of shirts and ties were made overseas. But he was “giving voice to people’s economic frustration.”
The reaction to Listen, Liberal was different from the reaction to What’s the Matter With Kansas? Even though the new book sold well, and foreign news outlets were as interested in his work as ever, American media colleagues reacted with curious diffidence.
The book was reviewed a bit less, discussed on public radio a bit less. Cable news more or less stopped calling Frank to be a guest. He wasn’t bitter about it, just puzzled.
"I’m not complaining. I’m happy with how the book was received,” he says. “But compared to the interest they used to have in my writing, and compared to the interest from foreign media, it’s a noticeable drop-off. That is a fact. I felt like I was saying something they didn’t want to hear.”
Frank’s 2016 experience was a part of that big cultural change in the business. However, it was more like the last chapter in a story than the first.
“There’s been a huge die-off of journalists of a certain type,” explains Frank. “Remember Mike Royko, the columnist from Chicago? He wrote from a blue-collar perspective, in a blue-collar voice.” He pauses. “There are no more Roykos. That’s gone. It’s a dead genre.”
The tough-talking, bard-of-the-streets, people’s columnist of the Royko or Jimmy Breslin school once held exalted positions in most big cities. These larger-than-life figures had begun to vanish from American newspapers in the eighties and nineties.
They were replaced, en masse, by representatives of what Frank calls “Ivy League monoculture,” pundits like Boot and David Brooks and E.J. Dionne and Ross Douthat, whose ideas about politics were tied up more with modernity than class. These were voices for the yuppie set, urban, educated, white collar, in perpetual awe of productivity and corporate innovation.
Frank didn’t really belong to the Royko tradition. He grew up in Mission Hills, Kansas, which he described in What’s the Matter With Kansas? as “the wealthiest town in the state.” He had a doctorate in history from the University of Chicago.
He was, in other words, exactly the kind of smart-setter chosen to replace the provincial Roykos, Breslins, Terkels, and Herb Caens when a new wave of editorialists began appearing in the nineties and early 2000s. (As a private school kid from Massachusetts, I was part of the same phenomenon.)
The Royko era was no panacea. Though journalism always found a few homes for women like Nellie Bly or African-Americans like Les Payne, the lead columnist job in the hometown paper was almost always a white guy, and it was a great thing when the business at least began to diversify.
But in fixing one problem, another was created. The blue-collar voices lost were not replaced.
Frank represented a link to that vanishing tradition because he at least tried to search out the perspective of working class voters. He was celebrated for this in the Bush years, when his work could be offered by upscale Democrats as evidence regular people were being conned by Reaganites into “voting against their interests.”
However, the moment his writing became too much of an indictment of the failures of the professional political class in general (read: Democrats as well as Republicans) he joined an increasingly long list of people whose point of view was no longer that much in demand, on TV or anywhere else.
Of course, there was no longer much space for alternative viewpoints of any kind. The 2016 race coincided with another mass die-off, the Ice Age of newspapers in general.
“By now, there are only two newspapers left, the New York Times and the Washington Post,” Frank says. “And they’re identical. They say the same things. It’s an incredibly limited ecosystem.”
A whole genre of journalism, what you might call the empathetic analysis, was disappearing. This approach was already mostly gone from conservative media by the early 2000s (none of those Ann Coulter-style books about treason featured much empathy for “liberals”) but post-Trump it began disappearing from blue-state media as well.
As a result of all these factors, the modern press spends a lot of time doing what papers did in the age of the original Populists, rolling eyes at “clodhoppers” in flyover country. The worship of urban experts is so out of control that asking rich city folk what’s good for the not-rich is normal practice. The following headline, for instance, is not from The Onion:
OCASIO-CORTEZ, WARREN TAX PLANS ANNIHILATE MIDDLE CLASS: FMR. BAIN CAPITAL MANAGING DIRECTOR
The sheer number of articles wondering if Trump’s win suggests there’s “too much democracy” these days conveys more about who is doing the analysis than it does about the political situation.
Politicians and journalists alike have absolved themselves of any responsibility for what’s gone wrong, settling instead for endless finger-pointing at people who are just irredeemably stupid and racist – who just “have bad souls,” as Frank puts it. This convenient catchall explanation makes the op-ed page the place where upscale readers go to be reassured they never have to change or examine past policy mistakes, even if it means continuing to lose elections.
In his latest book, Rendezvous With Oblivion, Frank calls this a “Utopia of Scolding”:
Who needs to win elections when you can personally reestablish the rightful social order every day on Twitter and Facebook? When you can scold, and scold, and scold, and scold. That’s their future, and it’s a satisfying one: a finger wagging in some vulgar proletarian’s face, forever.
The irony of 2016 is that it was the ultimate example of what happens when political leaders stop listening to voters. They’d been tuning them out for a generation, sticking them with the costs of pointless wars and dramatic economic changes like the vast wealth transfers caused by a succession of exploding financial bubbles. Ordinary people were told, not asked, how to deal with things like the NAFTA-sped export of the manufacturing economy. Finally, voters hit back with a monster surprise.
The media was supposed to help society self-correct by shining a light on the myopia that led to all of this. But reporters had spent so long trying to buddy up to politicians that by 2016, they were all in the tent together, equally blind. Which is why it won’t be a shock if they repeat the error. You can’t fix what you can’t see.
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