This journalist never met another one who supported Trump
Talk about living in echo chambers.
Jay Caspian Kang, a staff writer for The New Yorker, ascribed media bias not to a conspiracy among journalists, but to the fact that the overwhelming majority of journalists are left-leaning.
Kang wrote a piece for The New Yorker, “How Biased Is the Media, Really?” in response to a recent Gallup poll showing that Americans’ trust in mass media remains not only historically low, but consistently abysmal for the third year in a row.
He responded by addressing multiple common critiques from Americans on both sides of the political spectrum, including the accusation that “Every news organization that feigns objectivity is actually heavily slanted toward the left. Not only that; the media is actively working with the Democrats to defeat Donald Trump.”
“The most obvious explanation for this impression is that the press corps is mostly made up of liberals,” he wrote in the piece, adding that “At prestige outlets—many of which do don the armor of impartiality—the imbalance skews a lot further to the left than what many outsiders might imagine.”
Actually, no. We imagine it quite well, I can assure you.
Kang adds:
I have mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: in the course of a fifteen-year career that has included stints at radio shows, print outlets, digital media and television, I have yet to meet a Trump supporter at work.
He attributes this, strangely enough, not to selection for political uniformity but to demographics: they’re all urban, college-educated, upper middle class. Guess what, though? Although such groups are indeed overwhelmingly Democrats and left-leaning or leftists, there are plenty of people who fit that description who could be hired but are not hired and never will be hired. Or they’re forced out, like Bari Weiss.
It would be easy to meet a Trump-supporting journalist, though, if Kang actually wanted to do so. He could toddle on over to a conservative publication and suggest going out to lunch to talk. Or, find a great conservative writer on Substack. Or drop me a line.
Want to be a “journalist?”
Go to a college with a “journalism” school. There around 400 of them in the US.
What is the percentage of Leftist Profs in Journalism schools?
It’s 20 to 1 as of 2017:
https://www.natcom.org/sites/default/files/publications/NCA_C-Brief_2017_March.pdf
Now, imagine what and how journalism is taught in these ‘journalism” schools.
and thus your answer.
There are journalists:
Tommy Robinson in the UK and tomorrow he may be imprisoned for life
Tucker Carlson
James O’ Keefe
Greg Gutfeld
and thousands of others who have blogs but they do not work in legacy media
Pauline Kael, call your office . . .
“I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”
— — —
(Do I sniff whiffs of
“Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support” . . . ?)
Kang of The New Yorker
Neo
Yes, we imagine it quite well. And like Neo says, we are quite aware of how journalists who do not echo the lefty/progressive narrative de jour get treated.
Coincidentally, I have been reading a New Yorker issue from the summer–free magazines @ the library. There are some interesting articles: on the Stasi, on a Detroit Pistons’ general manager, on a character who was able to squeeze $690 million from suckers in his Ponzi scheme. Then there is the troll at Trump rallies who admits that she felt bad at displaying a “Trump is a Nazi” sign w swastika at Trump rallies. She said that Jewish Trump supporters “told me that I didn’t know anything about the Nazis or the Holocaust.” Fancy that! 🙂
She promises she will “tone it down.”
Yeah, right.
M J R, a lot of us have LONG memories.
res ipsa loquitur
Only the willfully blind can ‘honestly’ deny what has become inescapably obvious. A recent poll revealed that 12% of self-identified ‘republicans’ still trust the mass media’s ‘reportage’.
The democrat party is effectively an ongoing criminal conspiracy. Those who vote for it make themselves complicit in that criminality.
Complicit: adjective
“involved with others in an illegal activity or wrongdoing.”
To be meaningful and effective, consequence must be personal and, consequence and accountability are two sides of the same ‘coin’.
One must also remember that the J Schools students tend to come from the bottom quintile of students intellectually.
SCOTTtheBADGER
One must also remember that the J Schools students tend to come from the bottom quintile of students intellectually.
There were four high school peers of mine or of my brother who pursued careers in journalism. I know that three of them were Merit Finalists, which is top 0.5 percentile. The fourth–don’t know his Merit status, but he graduated from Columbia and his brilliance–more focused on what he was interested in than on school work–was apparent at an early age. He and another high school peer won a Pulitzer Prize in journalism.
Maybe today, journalism students are dummies. I don’t know. But those 4 from my high school who pursued journalism were brilliant– definitely brighter than I, and I am no dummy.
Gringo:
Maybe today, journalism students are dummies. I don’t know. But those 4 from my high school who pursued journalism were brilliant– definitely brighter than I, and I am no dummy.
Yeah, I wonder if SCOTTtheBADGER is accidentally mixing in the statistics on education majors.
“The New Yorker”?
Sigh…is just another casualty of severe TDS—the journalistic equivalent of flesh-eating disease.
Alas…
“The New Yorker’s Fact Crisis;
“Is Masha Gessen’s performative anti-Zionism an exception to the magazine’s commitment to factual accuracy and independent style, or a reflection of broader decay?“—
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/fact-crisis-at-the-new-yorker
The bias is unfortunate. The smug hostility is worse. The deal-breaker is the 24/7 lying.
If it were just that a biased reporter consistently left out facts that I think belong in the report, I could make up for it by combining reports from various viewpoints. I could also hold my nose and ignore the insults. What is intolerable is no longer being able to give any leftist reporters the benefit of the doubt. I’ve caught them lying to me far too many times, and too many have been caught on video or in print admitting that they think lying to the public is justified. That makes attending to their reports a waste of time other than to prepare to combat filthy tactics.
Fully agree Neo but the term ‘Liberal ” is way out of date. When you want a forceful compliance from everyone in society something stronger is needed.
The media self-isolating from everyday Americans cannot go on or it will tear the country apart. It would be one thing if they all still revered our Constitution, the First Amendment in particular, which would ensure the other side still had a voice at the table. But their open advocacy for restricting many of our freedoms becomes a toxic cocktail when mixed with the one-sided reporting.
If Kamala wins and starts going after Elon Musk and X it will send a chilling message to all others wanting to criticize her radical policies. It’ll be the slow death of American freedom. The people need balanced media to make informed decisions about the country’s course. Checks and balances, etc.
The ignorance is astounding. I also mean that in the sense of the root, “ignore.”
It’s like being on the Titanic. You see a few people heading towards lifeboats and hear them discuss a hole in the hull. You think to yourself, “Poor silly, uneducated fools from below deck. They are incapable of understanding this ship’s superior engineering and so they act foolishly, thinking it can sink.”
But eventually the people heading for the boats becomes a mass of humanity. Yet you still refuse to acknowledge what your senses are telling you.
How can they not pause and consider, “Why does Barri Weiss now have more readers and paying subscribers than when she worked at the Times?” “Why does a stand-up comic and MMA announcer have more viewers than CNN primetime?”
These people are also incredibly boring and the old media outlets have become incredibly boring.
The late night talk shows are incredibly boring.
The panel news shows with 8 heads in boxes screaming “Trump’s a fascist” are boring.
Jay Caspian Kang is boring.
Mark V.,
I don’t think it will tear the country apart. Many in the country have already left corporate media and the trend continues. Here’s an analogy:
I enjoy playing sports, but I don’t have the patience to sit and watch sports on television and I’m not super interested in statistics, standings and stats unless one of the professional teams I support is having a good season.
When I entered the workforce after College I began to notice that a lot of male water cooler talk centered on the current landscape of whatever professional sport was in season at the time. So I began reading the sports page. My interest had not changed, and it never has, but I understood that to participate in conversations with my co-workers and our supervisors and the men who would make decisions on who was promoted I needed to know what was going on in the professional sports world.
It’s getting that way with alternative media. I think today is the day Trump is going on Joe Rogan’s podcast. If you are a professional attorney, journalist, executive, salesman or woman… You had better listen to that show, or at least read a summary and be able to discuss it around the modern equivalent of the water cooler.
Even people uninterested in new media will eventually need to pay attention to it. That’s how culture works.
There are many things I have no interest in; Taylor Swift, “Game of Thrones,” “The Sopranos,” “Thai Food,” mixed martial arts, Rap music… that I know a fair amount about simply through osmosis and living in the U.S. in 2024. I’ve never watched an episode of the U.S. version of “The Office,” but my younger co-workers make references to it all the time and share memes on the company message board. Even never seeing an episode I now know a fair amount about the show.
If you ask someone under the age of 40 what “60 Minutes,” “Face the Nation,” “Meet the Press,” CBS/NBC/ABC Nightly News… are they’ll tell you those are the channels they hear blaring loudly as they walk by the rooms in the hall of the retirement home when they visit their grandmother.
Neo, they would not dare “drop you a line” as they could not withstand the gale force of facts and logic redirected their way.
Wendy: “The bias is unfortunate. The smug hostility is worse.” That is the crux of the matter – we can forgive honest mistakes now and then, but not intentional falsity. We evolved
specific social capabilities to check for free riders and cheaters/liars in our group (or in “the other” groups, too).
I don’t know if Scott or Gringo is closer to the truth on “journalists” level of intelligence, but growing up I always considered “reporters” to be a white collar job, thus most likely requiring a college education, especially on the larger newspapers or national publications. Only later did I see remarks about them initially being a “common man” type “job” vs. a “profession”.
Whatever educational exposure they do receive, it seems it includes a real “puff up” aspect to make them believe they know more than the “common man” and deserve extra privileges and accord because of this background.
Given the way too many articles mix measurement types (fraction, %, actual numbers/counts, multiples such as “3 fold bigger”, etc.), making it hard to compare one side or aspect vs. another, requiring continual mental conversions among them. There must be a special class in journalism school that directs them to write that way.
Mark V “it will tear the country apart” vs. RTF suggesting otherwise.
The country is already torn apart, given our near 50-50 or 48 – 48 – 4 breakdowns. Our urban vs. rural blue-red political mixing, coupled with our extensive economic interrelatedness, is why this balancing act continues. If we could evolve distinct red vs. blue economic solutions, we would be further apart than we are already. There may be more to this kind of separation than Sowell’s conflict of visions, but it seems to explain a lot of what we see today.
Mark is asking the right question of just how do we come back together if we cannot agree on the merits and limits provided by the Constitution as our foundational source of law. Plus we can note that it was achieved by Founders/Framers who well knew human nature and were clearly closer to constrained vision holders.
On the aspect of boring news sources, I suspect some of that is related to our/ my growing impatience after years of surfing the internet and being dragged or invited down many hyperlink rabbit holes. Also, too few essayists today provide a core “tell me what you are going to tell, tell me that, and then summarize and conclude what you told me” approach to their writing. Lack of coherence in their presentation leads us (or me) astray or leaves me still confused and ignorant.
Because the times is terribly written forgot about the five constants of who what when why and were the hackneyed premises the uncuriosity
Of the media people you or I know, how many went to j-schools? How many of them majored in journalism in college? I don’t think that many have. J-schoolers are more the footsoldiers of the profession. Maybe it’s similar to ed. schools. If you actually know something, you study that, not journalism or education.
_________
The New Yorker. The recent issue has several full-page photos of Bowen Yang of Saturday Night Live cavorting like an idiot in various settings. Mr. Shawn would have been disconcerted and displeased. Mr. Ross would have been apoplectic.
_________
Yes, you probably do have to know something about Joe Rogan to talk with the guys at the watercooler. You don’t have to if you want to talk to the women at the watercooler. You probably shouldn’t mention his name with them. Civil War II: men vs. women?
It’s cause they are Commies or mini-Commies (aka fellow travellers.)
I’m one of those j-school grads. Journalism as a college degree is a fairly recent phenomenon. The first college to offer a Journalism degree was in 1908.
Historically it was a trade.
This was the beginning of turning the profession of reporting into a white collar/profession.
The history of journalism includes yellow sheet newspapers that made no effort to objectivity. Most major cities had a minimum of two papers which took sides.
My degree came pre-Woodward/Bernstein and a was very old-school, but the debate around advocacy journalism was gaining voice, though more in the broadcast side than the print side.
The goal was setting aside bias and presenting both side objectively and fairly. I still think it’s possible, but it’s harder than it might seem. It’s obvious at this point that the old school journalism is a relic. I mentioned Woodward/Bernstein and they fueled a whole generation of J-school students looking to topple the next king.
Here’s a synopsis at the Columbia Journalism Review, from 2003. Even this is showing it’s age as reporters in the story sometimes defend their bias as challenging the bias of their subjects.
Re-thinking Objectivity
https://www.cjr.org/feature/rethinking_objectivity.php
I think you can be biased and objective, if you also acknowledge your bias as part of your presentation. It takes work to look past your bias, gather the facts, outlooks, interpretations, and commentary from both sides [we see that often from Neo]. But when you can present the other side’s views fairly and openly, then your slant can also be treated as a more honest one than if you always just spout “the narrative of your side”.
I don’t follow Matt Taiabi much at all, but I gather he, Michael Shellenberger, and a few others do manage to do this on occasion, and their results are more powerful for doing it.
R2L, Yes you can put aside your biases and be objective and even fair.
The issue we face today is truth. It’s no longer “the truth”. Everyone gets their own truth, so there is no basis for a common framework. Your tribe may agree on your truth, but it certainly isn’t the same truth as the other tribe.
This wasn’t an issue when I was working as a reporter in the 70’s.
@ R2L > “I don’t follow Matt Taiabi much at all, but I gather he, Michael Shellenberger, and a few others do manage to do this on occasion, and their results are more powerful for doing it.”
You are correct. I read every post at Matt’s Substack plus his “subscriber only” emails, and his passion is reporting THE truth. He often remarks on how “getting the story” always meant finding out the facts and presenting them fairly, regardless of whose ox was gored.
@ M J R > “Pauline Kael, call your office .”
Absolutely the first think I thought of!
He’s still a nominal Democrat, but he is very unhappy with the lying.
Rufus T. Firefly & R2L:
Both very thoughtful responses. I agree the old media are dying, and that needs to happen (or they need to reinvent themselves and go back to their roots). But both the problem of the media shirking their primary duties and the general shrugging of shoulders about our Constitution stem from the same cultural and moral relativism permeating the populace.
This country needs a cultural foundation or it will not survive. Five thousand podcasts online aren’t the same as a quality broadsheet newspaper with internal checks and balances and a professional editorial board culling op-eds for logic and coherence (see the Darryl Cooper disaster). In addition, we need education which fosters reverence for the Constitution and its many blessings, including freedom of speech for a healthy public discourse. At its core, our problem is that we are culturally unmoored, and it will take more than just busting the media juggernaut to get the ship back on track.
I remember a few years ago when the Ford F150 was the highest selling vehicle in the country. Somebody did a survey of newsrooms asking if anybody owned a pickup or had owned a pickup or knew anyone who owned a pickup. Apparently all the answers were no. The story was slanted to show how much in a bubble the news people were. Yes, living in an urban area very few people need a pickup truck, but don’t these people travel all over the country? Don’t they have family and friends who don’t live in urban areas? They are really out of touch.
High recommendation for the current weekly podcast by Taibbi & Kirn.
In addition to addressing the decline of journalism into Democrats-with-bylines (my phrase), they discuss an old SF story hat has some unsettling implications for the internet era.
https://www.racket.news/p/america-this-week-october-25-2024
America This Week October 25, 2024: “I Wish I Had Hitler’s Editors”: Trump and The Atlantic
How to hide the ball in peculiarly-sourced stories.
Plus, “The Hanging Stranger,” another predictive sci-fi fable from Philip K. Dick