Epoch INSIGHT Issue 12

Nation Profile

THOUGHT LEADERS

MORAL PANIC, CLASS, AND OUR ‘WOKE’ MEDIA Journalism used to be a blue-collar trade, but today’s elite media have abandoned the working class, says Batya Ungar-Sargon

O

nce a tool to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable, today American journalism comforts the comfortable, speaks power to truth, and insists on an orthodoxy that protects the interests of the elites in the language of a culture war whose burden is given to the working class to bear,” writes Batya Ungar-Sargon in her new book.

On a recent episode of “American Thought Leaders,” host Jan Jekielek discussed race, class, and our elite media’s abandonment of U.S. workers with Batya Ungar-Sargon, deputy opinion editor at Newsweek and author of the book, “Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy.”

JAN JEKIELEK: I’m read-

ing your book, which is fan52 I N S I G H T January 14 – 20, 2022

tastic. So let’s start with this question: What happened to journalism?

BATYA UNGAR-SARGON:

American journalism really began in the 19th century.

Benjamin Day and Joseph Pulitzer were two journalists who showed up when America was deeply divided along income lines.

They noticed that the vast majority of working-class and poor Americans were literate, so they started the Penny Press. They started selling newspapers for one penny apiece, and they got rich because so many poor and working-class people were hungry for news.

This was really the birth of American journalism.

Then, in the course of the 20th century, journalists underwent a status revolution. In 1937, the vast majority of American journalists didn’t have a college degree.

Journalism was considered