Power of the elite press
Lib media, pols hand-in-hand
CHRIS Cuomo has been suspended indefinitely by CNN, after subpoenaed records revealed how far he went to help his brother, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who was being accused by multiple women of sexual harassment and groping. The new records included text messages in which Chris leveraged his journalistic connections to seek out information about Andrew’s accusers — even following up on a lead to compromise one of them.
The documents revealed a serious breach of journalistic ethics, though by no means Chris Cuomo’s worst. His coverage of the pandemic included staging a fake emergence from quarantine and turning interviews with his brother, then governor, into a family joshing session, even as his brother was overseeing the deaths of 20,000 elderly and developmentally disabled New York- ers through an edict that forced the COVID-positive back into nursing homes.
There’s a deeper truth here about the interconnection of our political and journalistic elites. Because Chris Cuomo using his journalistic star power to protect his brother, who was using his political star power to harass and grope women and sentence seniors and the developmentally disabled to death, is not an aberration of how these two sectors of America’s elites operate. It is instead a perfect literalization of the role our elite chattering class plays consolidating the power of its chosen celebrity politicians.
In this case, the politician and the journalist were literally related, but this is happening across the media at a more symbolic level.
It was not always so: American journalists used to be blue-collar tradesmen, outsiders demanding justice from the powerful on behalf of the little guy. But over the course of the 20th century, journalism underwent a status revolution, taking a working-class trade
and catapulting it into the celebrity stratosphere. What was once a source of upward mobility for high school grads has morphed into an elite profession for the highly educated.
In the 1930s, just three in 10 journalists had finished college; by 2015, just 8 percent hadn’t been to college. The majority have graduate degrees. And though the starting salary is low, mid-career journalists make significantly more than the average American, to say nothing of stars like Chris Cuomo.
“Yesteryear’s ragtag muckrakers, who tirelessly championed the little guy against powerful insiders, have become insiders themselves,” wrote three social
scientists surveying America’s journalists back in 1980. “Newsmen had long cherished the vantage point of the outsiders who keep the insiders straight. But now, leading journalists are courted by politicians, studied by scholars and known to millions through their bylines and televised images.”
If once America’s journalists spoke truth to power, today, America’s journalists are the powerful, a tightly knit caste both highly educated and affluent.
“Elite journalists resemble Senators, billionaires, and World Economic Forum attendees in terms of educational attainment,” a recent study found.
Politicians and journalists go to the same schools and live in the same neighborhoods — especially liberal journalists.
As Jack Shafer and Tucker Doherty put it in a 2017 data analysis of the media bubble in Politico, “If you’re a working journalist, odds aren’t just that you work in a proClinton county — odds are that you reside in one of the nation’s most pro-Clinton counties.”
They also go to the most elite schools: 65 percent of the 150 news interns who worked at The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, NPR, Politico,
and the Chicago Tribune in the summer of 2018 came from a tiny group of highly selective universities, another study found. For The New York Times, the figures were even worse: 75 percent of its 32 summer interns in 2018 came from intensively selective universities. One in five came from the top 1 percent of America’s colleges.
And as part of the American elites, journalists now tend to do what elites do: They work to defend the status quo — though these days, this is accomplished under a patina of “social justice” wokeisms. And far from holding journalists to account, their target audience — often consisting of the same highly educated progressive elites, thanks to the digitalmedia business model — rewards them for catering to their shared interests.
Reporters didn’t used to be celebrities. But cable news and now Twitter have changed the equation. Social media offer journalists a lower-grade but still-fulfilling form of attention, the ersatz celebrity of our age — Internet fame — provided you can write the kind of stories that will go viral, the kind that flatter the vanity of affluent liberals without pointing out how much they’ve benefited from inequality.
What Chris Cuomo did was a real dereliction of journalistic ethics, and it’s astonishing how long CNN let it go on. But the problem goes so much deeper. It’s what happens when the Fourth Estate is part of the elite, made up of the highly educated and affluent. They are quite literally on the side of powerful liberal politicians. And that’s how they see themselves and how they report the news.
Batya Ungar-Sargon is the deputy opinion editor of Newsweek and the author of “Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy.”