Making the Liberal Media Journalism’s Class Transformation Since the 1960s

Making the Liberal Media: Journalism’s Class Transformation Since the 1960s In the weeks after November 8, 2016, journalists found themselves gripped by paroxysms of self-doubt. How could their entire industry have failed to anticipate Donald Trump’s Electoral College victory? Who exactly were his supporters, and where did they live? Had the media become so cloistered—too educated, too metropolitan, too self-satisfied—that they had lost touch with those “real” Americans? After decades of fending off conservative accusations of the media’s elite and liberal bias, some journalists were ready to admit that, just maybe, those critiques had a ring of truth. Margaret Sullivan, media columnist for The Washington Post, anatomized the profession’s nearsightedness on the morning after the election. “College-educated, urban” journalists, Sullivan wrote, may have “touched down in the big red states for a few days, or interviewed some coal miners or unemployed autoworkers in the Rust Belt. [But] we didn’t take them seriously. Or not seriously enough.”1 What those mea culpas were missing, however, was a sense of history that predated Trump’s arrival on the political landscape. Even now it remains unclear how journalism had changed since its mid-century apogee, when its relevance was nearly universal and its cultural authority almost unquestioned. What sort of social transformations had rendered the news and newsrooms so out of touch with the main currents of American life in the twenty-first century? And could those shifts in 1 Margaret Sullivan, “The media didn’t want to believe Trump could win. So they looked the other way,” The Washington Post, November 9, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-media-didnt-want-to-believe-trumpcould-win-so-they-looked-the-other-way/2016/11/09/d2ea1436-a623-11e6-8042f4d111c862d1_story.html, accessed September 12, 2022. For other examples of this voluminous discourse, see “Your Filter Bubble is Destroying Democracy,” Wired, November 18, 2016, https://www.wired.com/2016/11/filter-bubble-destroying-democracy/, accessed April 4, 2022; Nate Silver, “There Really Was A Liberal Media Bubble,” 538, March 10, 2017, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/there-really-was-a-liberal-media-bubble/, accessed April 4, 2022. journalism tell us something about how liberalism itself evolved over those decades, as it was remade by and for an emerging professional class? This chapter reveals how material and social changes remade the news industry since the 1960s, giving rise to a media infrastructure that can, in fact, be fairly characterized as elite and liberal in its institutional, demographic, and geographic base— and to a lesser extent, in the content of its coverage.2 Throughout the twentieth century, print journalism’s trajectory mirrored the changing face of American political economy. From the 1930s through the 1960s, the metropolitan newspaper had hewed to a Fordist business model, with large numbers of mostly unionized employees from diverse class backgrounds earning robust wages in large, centralized workplaces. Papers sought to appeal to the broadest possible audience, as advertisers hoped to capture the buying power of a growing American mass market. This arrangement would break down beginning in the 1960s. To pursue affluent readers and advertisers, who were moving in increasing numbers to the suburbs, publishers and editors ramped up their service and consumer coverage while cutting back on the labor beat. Newsrooms changed, too: college-educated journalists began to crowd out an older generation from more varied backgrounds. By the 1970s, traditional papers and news magazines would be joined by a suite of new “lifestyle” publications wholly devoted to the tastes of metropolitan professionals. In the pages of magazines like New York, working-class people were less often fully-realized subjects—folks just like 2 Works that examine the idea of the “liberal media” tend to focus on conservatives instead of historicizing the changing nature of liberalism or the news industry as a whole. See Nicole Hemmer, Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) and David Greenburg, “The Idea of ‘The Liberal Media” and its Roots in the Civil Rights Movement,” The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 1, no. 2 (Dec. 2008), 167-186. Commentators from the left argue that the press is far from progressive, pointing to its corporate ownership, profit motives, and close relationship with powerful institutions. See, for example, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 1988) and Eric Alterman, What Liberal Media?: The Truth About Bias and the News (New York, Basic Books, 2003). “us”—and more often the objects of anthropological curiosity. Even the most radical publications, like the New Left’s underground press, would undergo a similar process of embourgeoisement as their publishers and readers grew older and more professionally established. Those trends accelerated as inequality deepened after the 1970s. By the 1980s, avowedly liberal publications, from Washington Monthly to The New Republic, would revamp their coverage to speak to the concerns of an upscale readership—just as that same demographic was remaking the Democratic Party in its image. That choice would have profound consequences for the political common sense of professional-class liberals. The advent of Internet journalism in the mid-1990s only deepened journalism’s class divide. It hastened the fall of the Fordist model of media, as large, hierarchical, unionized, nationally-distributed, and class-integrated newspaper operations gave way to small, flexible, non-unionized, coastal-city-based, elite-dominated outlets. In the case of the 1994 San Francisco newspaper strike, the transition was literal: striking San Francisco Examiner journalists launched one of the first online-only news websites. That experience that would inspire one Examiner alum, David Talbot, to found the “militantly centrist” Salon.com the following year. Freed from the constraints of physical publishing—along with the need for expensive fixed investments in craft labor and printing infrastructure—the news media and its political vantage grew more elite and more parochial as the century drew to a close. Ultimately, journalism’s class transformation echoed, and indeed contributed to, the remaking of liberalism that the chapters in this volume seek to explain. Beginning in the 1960s, the media industry was at the vanguard of new forms of labor relations that were more flexible and more technologically-advanced than the Fordist newspapers of earlier decades. Yet the reconfigured newsroom also offered less stability, lower wages, and employed fewer people—particularly those without elite credentials. As journalism shed its craft workers and less-educated lifers, its class base narrowed and the range of voices in the newsroom shrank. In time, so would its political perspective. By the 1980s, magazines like The New Republic proffered a constrained and technocratic vision for liberalism that accorded with the foreshortened horizons of its professional-class authors and readers. At the end of the twentieth century, the attenuated politics that the “liberal media” championed was stripped of nearly all idealism. Even if it remained committed, at least in the abstract, to ideas of equality, its menu of political possibilities had dwindled to a list of legalistic, developmental, or technocratic fixes. Above all else, the liberal media in this era aimed to gratify its upper-middle-class readership—an audience that felt self-satisfied with their “smarts,” political savvy, and cultural centrality. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, as liberalism itself grew culturally all-powerful but politically wan, so too would the stories it told about itself, in the pages of America’s newspapers, magazines, and websites.3 *** The rise of the large metropolitan newspaper is a story of class and organizational consolidation. At the start of the twentieth century, major cities counted dozens of daily papers, with different publications for each political party and ethnic, language, and racial group. The most significant dividing line, though, was social class. Working-class evening papers ran horse-racing reports and poked fun at the city’s elites. Middle-class papers dispensed etiquette and consumer advice along with news to their “respectable” (or at least aspirationally-respectable) readers. Elite papers reported on national and 3 On the demographic and political transformation of the Democratic Party in the over the last quarter of the twentieth century, see Lily Geismer, Left Behind: The Democrats' Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality (New York: Public Affairs, 2022) and Kenneth Baer, Reinventing Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2000). For the relationship between politics and news media, see Media Nation: The Political History of News in Modern America, Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, eds. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). global events along with a healthy dose of society news.4 But those class distinctions started to blur as the industry consolidated. Beginning in the 1920s, chains like Hearst, Scripps, and Gannett began buying up competing dailies. In 1923, the United States had 500 cities with two or more daily papers. After the Depression, that number had fallen to just over 100. In the 1930s, one chain published both the leading morning and evening editions in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. Most of the surviving major papers adapted their content to court the broadest possible readership, with separate sections or columnists appealing to readers from different class (if rarely racial) backgrounds.5 By the 1930s, metropolitan newspapers were increasingly hierarchical, automated, unionized, and class-integrated institutions—assuming the Fordist structure that characterized much of the industrial economy after the New Deal. It began with the physical layout of the newsroom. Starting in the mid-1920s, newsrooms were reconfigured as assembly lines to maximize the throughput of copy. At some papers, literal conveyor belts carried stories from reporters through to the copydesk and on into the composing and layout rooms. Osmore R. Smith, a manager at the Milwaukee Journal, envisioned the newsroom less as a creative space and more like a factory. Moving material from editors to copy to production was “as much a problem of manufacturing as is the making of an automobile or a pair of shoes.”6 In the automated newsroom, just as on the industrial shop floor, seniority counted for more than educational credentials. Mid- and senior-level reporters had more 4 5 6 Julia Guarneri, Newsprint Metropolis: City Papers and the Making of Modern Americans (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 62-75 and David Paul Nord, Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and Their Readers (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 225-277. Guarneri, 219, and “History of Ownership Consolidation,” Dirks, VanEssen & April Research Reports, (March 31, 2017), https://dirksvanessen.com/articles/view/223/history-of-ownershipconsolidation-/, accessed March 14, 2022. Will Mari, The American Newsroom: A History, 1920-1960 (Columbia, MS: University of Missouri Press, 2021), 70-1. of the former than the latter: except for the top papers’ global and national desks, many journalists in the 1920s and 1930s did not have college degrees, and even fewer had experience via undergraduate internships. Fewer still attended journalism programs. When Morton Sontheimer worked as a reporter in Philadelphia in the late 1920s, he “didn’t dare let on” that he was taking college classes in the morning, since “city editors didn’t want anyone who had been contaminated by a school of journalism.”7 Aspiring writers usually began their career on the copydesk, learning the ropes by ferrying photographic plates, writing boilerplate stories, or running errands for reporters. Arthur Gelb, who worked his way up to become managing editor at the New York Times, began his career as a $16-per-week night copyboy in 1944 after dropping out of City College. A plucky charmer, Gelb convinced editors to let him write: first an internal newsletter on the Times, then short stories as a cub reporter. Gelb’s trajectory, with on-the-job promotions outweighing internships or diplomas, remained typical well into the 1950s.8 In the 1930s, as organized labor strengthened across industries due in part to New Deal legislation, newspapers’ white collar and craft workers joined, for the first time, under the umbrella of a shared union. Papers had long observed a division between industrial jobs, like typesetters and printing, and desk jobs, like reporters and salespeople. Manual laborers were almost always organized in craft unions, such as the powerful International Typographical Union. Meanwhile, management underpaid and overworked the putative “professionals” in the newsroom. By the early 1930s, it was not uncommon for a printer to be paid double the wages of a mid-level editor. In response, newsroom workers joined craft workers to form the American Newspaper Guild (ANG) in 1933, over the objections of some journalists who argued that joining a union would 7 8 Morton Sontheimer, Newspaperman: A Book About the Business (New York: McGraw Hill, 1941), 322. Sam Roberts, “Arthur Gelb, Critic and Editor Who Shaped The Times, Dies at 90,” NYT (May 20, 2014); Mari, The American Newsroom, 26-7. degrade whatever remained of their professional status. (The “Guild” appellation was a concession to this constituency.)9 In 1937, the ANG joined the CIO. It also threw open membership to other white-collar departments, including advertising and circulation. By the end of the 1930s, most metropolitan newspaper workers—from editors to drivers to elevator operators to clerks to copyboys to typographers—were organized. Many journalists, even those long resistant to the idea of industrial unions, joined the ANG. Somewhere between one-third to one-half of journalists were members of the Guild in the 1940s, with even higher concentrations in large cities.10 By mid-century, large metropolitan newspapers resembled most other corporations in the heyday of twentieth-century American liberalism. They were huge, bureaucratic, and hierarchical. Most workers were unionized. Salaries, hours, and job descriptions were stable and comparable across the entire industry. Male journalists could expect to earn a family wage and enjoy the prerogatives of a middle-class life. The postwar capital-labor accord, however tenuous, had come to the news business.11 These arrangement held in spite of the fact that almost every paper owner and most editorial boards remained aligned with Republican business interests, and many urban tabloids espoused a conservative populist politics.12 Steven Greenhouse, “More secure jobs, bigger paychecks: The reasons for unionizing haven’t changed much in the last 80 years,” Columbia Journalism Review (Spring/Summer 2018), https://www.cjr.org/special_report/media-unions-history.php, accessed February 25, 2022. 10 Clark, The Making of The American Creative Class: New York’s Culture Workers and Twentieth-Century Consumer Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press 2021), 63-66, 689; Mari, The American Newsroom, 209-213. 11 Even amidst the labor peace of the 1940s, media interests began to resist reformers’ efforts to make media more social democratic and publically accountable. See Victor Pickard, America’s Battle for Media Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), especially chapter 7. 12 Chris Lehmann, “The Eyes of Spiro are Upon You: The Myth of the Liberal Media,” The Baffler 14 (Spring 2001), 25-26 and Matthew Pressman, “The New York Daily News and the History of Conservative Media,” Modern American History 4, no. 3 (Fall 2021), 219-238. On pre-World War II media critiques from the populist left, see Sam Lebovic, “When the ‘Mainstream Media Was Conservative: Media Criticism in the Age of Reform” in Media Nation, Schulman and Zelizer, eds, 63-76. 9 Yet this push to make journalism resemble other white-collar professions set in motion a class transformation that would render the industry unrecognizable by the 1980s. After unionization, the improved working conditions of newsroom jobs began to attract more educated middle-class journalists. The streetwise reporter who had worked his way up from the copydesk would become an endangered species. As newsroom demographics shifted, so too would their coverage, as papers abandoned working-class audiences and stories about labor issues in favor of consumer-oriented journalism for upscale suburban readers. *** The social transformation of journalism began in the late 1950s, as collegeeducated journalists began to supplant working-class writers in newsrooms. It began, ironically, with the ANG. As the union improved pay and conditions, journalism became respectable—an appealing alternative to other white-collar professions. The ANG also helped formalize formerly ad-hoc hiring practices, emphasizing a college education as a prerequisite for entry-level positions. During the 1950s, many publications changed the hiring rules for copy boy and copy girl positions, requiring that they be filled by interns who were either enrolled in, or had just graduated from college. The ANG encouraged newspapers to create formal training courses for interns, exposing them to all aspects of the editorial and reporting process. By the 1960s, most editors came to expect new hires to have experience at a campus newspaper.13 Each spring, those college papers would run ads for summer interns from leading publications, and editors visited campuses to recruit aspiring reporters. But those internships, however attractive, offered little or no salary. In effect, newsrooms offloaded the cost of training apprentices onto students and 13 Mari, The American Newsroom, 30-32. their families. Together, the reliance on poorly-paid internships and the new prerequisite of a college degree tended to favor young trainees from well-off backgrounds.14 During the 1960s and especially the 1970s, college would become an ever-more important qualification for work in a newsroom. This was, of course, part of a wider surge in the number of Americans pursuing higher education—a trend launched by massive federal investments during liberalism’s mid-century heyday. As late as 1971, only 58 percent of journalists possessed a bachelor’s degree. In 1982, that figure had crept upwards to 70 percent. By the start of the 2000s, 93 percent of journalists were college educated. Over the same period, enrollment in graduate journalism schools also rose, if more slowly. (One in five newsroom workers had a master’s degree by the 2010s.)15 Newspapers’ content evolved along with their newsrooms, as journalists hewed to issues that mattered to middle- and upper-middle-class readers. In the immediate postWorld War II period, publishers had pursued the widest possible audience, since advertisers hoped to harness the buying power of a growing mass market. Circulation— the total number of readers—was what mattered. (That mass audience, however, was almost always coded white.)16 But as prosperous readers abandoned central cities for suburbs, the metropolitan newspaper was refashioned to follow them. In the second half of the 1960s, newspapers transformed their existing “women’s pages” into stand-alone See for example: Washington Post ad in “Career Planning & Placement Center Listings,” The Stanford Daily, October 20, 1972, 4; Miami Herald ad in “Summer Journalism Jobs,” The Daily Princetonian, December 17, 1978, 6. 15 John W. C. Johnstone, Edward J. Slawski, and William W. Bowman, The News People: A Sociological Portrait of Journalists and their Work (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 31-47; David H. Weaver, Lars Willnat, and G. Cleveland Wilhoit, “The American Journalist in the Digital Age: Another Look at U.S. News People,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 96, no 1. (March 2019), 104. Graduate degree figure in Joshua Benton, “It’s time to create an alternative path into a journalism career,” NiemanLab, October 20, 2021, https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/10/its-time-to-create-an-alternative-path-into-a-journalismcareer/#:~:text=About%2020%25%20of%20journalists%20have,master's%20in%20some%20o ther%20field, accessed June 20, 2021. 16 Christopher R. Martin, No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), 71-88. 14 sections which were heavy on consumer, style, and service-oriented stories. Newspapers also launched new suburban sections. In 1968, the Los Angeles Times added an Orange County edition. Under pressure from suburban retail advertisers, the New York Times followed suit the following year with weekly sections on northern New Jersey and Long Island.17 John Mount, an L.A. Times’ marketing specialist, explained that the new lifestyle sections would appeal to readers with a “high demographic profile.” And it “just happens,” Mount said, “that the more affluent and educated people tend to be white and live in suburban communities.”18 In politics, papers gratified a more educated liberal audience by shifting their emphasis from daily coverage of bureaucratic goings-on to more complex analytical articles that took a critical stance towards government and large corporations. To appeal to good-government liberals—a constituency that grew with the rising mistrust of institutions during the Vietnam War—papers launched new desks to investigate selfdealing and corruption. The Boston Globe’s Spotlight team, which exposed corruption in local government and the Catholic church, was a leading example. Both the New York and Los Angeles Times assumed a more adversarial position vis-a-vis the NYPD and LAPD. And in a more Naderite vein, David Horowitz pioneered the first consumeradvocate news segments on Los Angeles’ NBC television affiliate in the early 1970s. Horowitz’s “Fight Back!,” later syndicated nationally, took companies to task for false advertising claims and shoddy products.19 As they chased suburban consumers, newspapers cut back on their coverage of labor and working-class issues. With chains continuing to buy competing papers and On the “sectorial revolution,” see Pressman, On Press: The Liberal Values That Shaped the News (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 115-119 and 127-132. 18 Felix Gutierrez and Clint C. Wilson II, “The Demographic Dilemma,” Columbia Journalism Review (Jan./Feb. 1979), 53. 19 Lorenzo Benet, “Life Is One Long Mass of Fine Print For Consumer Advocate Horowitz,” Chicago Tribune (Feb. 19, 1987) and Pressman, On Press, 184-218. 17 trim editorial budgets, fewer papers kept a reporter on the labor beat. There had been some two-dozen daily labor reporters in the 1950s. In the early 1960s, there were at least five on staff at the New York Times alone. By the 1970s, though, the Times was down to two labor reporters, and most other papers had abandoned the beat for good.20 (Meanwhile, the Times, along with The Washington Post, Boston Globe, and Chicago Tribune all added standalone business sections in the late 1970s.) When stories did address organized labor, they were less sympathetic to workers’ perspectives than in earlier decades. Since the Depression, stories about strikes had mostly quoted workers, union leaders, or government officials. For example, when New York bus drivers from the Transport Workers Union struck in 1941, the New York Times coverage was generally supportive. Stories asked readers to identify with the bus drivers, who were quoted and photographed, in their struggle against Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and the bus company. But by the early 1980s, when New York-area transit workers launched another strike, the emphasis had shifted to its impact on suburban consumers. The Times’ lead headline read: “Rail Strike Clogs Traffic on Roads in New York Area.” On the front page, the paper ran a large photo of three disgruntled executives from Westchester, forced to commute by subway through the Bronx.21 It wasn’t just editorial: newspapers’ sales and marketing departments intensified their pursuit of upscale demographics while abandoning poorer and minority readers. Overall readership had slipped since the late 1960s, battered by economic recessions and the rising popularity of television, particularly among less-educated Americans. From 1967 to 1977, newspaper consumption fell by over 15 percent among those with less than By 2014, only two of the top twenty-five newspapers employed full-time labor reporters. See Martin, No Longer Newsworthy, 49-52. 21 Nikki Usher, News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), 51-54; Martin, No Longer Newsworthy, 109-119. 20 a high school degree, but only by four percent among college graduates.22 Across the industry, newspapers turned to consultants to help them boost sagging circulation and ad sales. Their recomendati0n? Instead of attempting to recapture working-class readers, papers should try even harder to chase the professional class—the one market segment that saw its buying power increase during the 1970s.23 That meant more serviceoriented lifestyle journalism, more personal finance columns, and more suburbancentric consumer guides. It also meant that marketing departments worked even harder to inform potential advertisers just how wealthy and sophisticated their subscribers were. A 1970 New York Times ad campaign that ran in newspaper trade journals featured photos of their ideal reader: white well-to-do people engaged in upmarket leisure activities, from squash to high-end shopping. Below, in the Times’ signature Gothic font, was the cheeky tagline: “The New York Smarties” or “The New York Spenders,” depending on the ad. “More than 500,000 of them hold post-graduate degrees,” it continued. “They’re the people who read The New York Times.”24 As marketing departments sought to “improve” the class makeup of their readership, thereby boosting their advertising revenue, they also abandoned poor and minority audiences. The Los Angeles Times considered adding Spanish-language content—until a 1977 internal report found that Latinos were “suffering from economic deprivation” and would make a bad business bet.25 The Washington Post cut print distribution in Black neighborhoods to “upgrade the quality of its demographic audience profile.” Across the Southeast and Midwest, chain-owned papers dropped rural white subscribers. Total Figures from Newspaper Association of America in Martin, No Longer Newsworthy, 66. Doug Underwood, When MBAs Rule the Newsroom: How Marketers and Managers are Reshaping Today’s Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 8-9 and 14-25. 24 Martin, No Longer Newsworthy, 101-2. 25 Gutierrez and Wilson II, “The Demographic Dilemma,” 53. 22 23 circulation—a mass market—mattered less than the “quality” of the dwindling number of readers who remained.26 *** Just as the daily paper was being remade by and for college-educated Americans, another group of journalists started a movement that aimed to radically reinvent the news: the underground press of the New Left. These papers, which by the late 1960s would number in the several hundreds and boast a readership in the millions, were everything the establishment press was not. They were lean operations, with writers often doing the editing, compositing, printing, and distribution without help from the usual team of craft workers. Their content was profane, visually avant-garde, and politically militant.27 Opening a representative issue of Atlanta’s Great Speckled Bird, a paper founded in 1967 by members of the SDS-affiliated Southern Student Organizing Committee, readers would find editorials attacking the “straight” press headlong. Life magazine and The New York Times, wrote one syndicated columnist, failed to cover the issues important to young radicals: from “full-scale rebellion” on the streets of Berkeley to the subversive music of The Doors and The Fugs. Mainstream journalists, supine to the interests of the corporate and Washington elite, were keeping radical art and music from the masses. Real change, he argued, would require the overthrow of those interests. And young people could hasten that revolution through the consumption of the right kind of cultural products.28 Leo Bogart, Preserving the Press: How Daily Newspapers Mobilized to Keep Their Readers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 158; Martin, No Longer Newsworthy, 65, 69-70. 27 On the underground press, see John C. McMillian, Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), readership statistic on 4; Abe Peck, Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press (New York: Knopf, 1985). 28 Harvey Wasserman, “The Power of Time,” Great Speckled Bird 1, no. 10 (July 19, 1968), 11, 14, Great Speckled Bird collection, Digital Collections, Georgia State University, https://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/digital/collection/GSB/id/130/rec/3, accessed January 21, 2022. On the cultural politics of the counterculture, see Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960's and 70's, Michael W. Doyle, Peter Braunstein, eds. 26 In that respect, underground papers like the Bird embodied a tension within the 1960s New Left. Their politics may have been avowedly radical. But from the start, they leavened their anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist viewpoints with a healthy dose of hip consumer advice. Ads for local countercultural businesses flanked scathing anti-war editorials. Record reviews sat beside articles attacking Georgia’s segregationist governor, Lester Maddox. Readers may have wished, or even agitated for, the overthrow of capitalism. Yet most were, after all, the children of the white middle-class postwar suburbs—the heartland of America’s Consumer’s Republic.29 They understood that consumption was an arena for politics, and that politics could be pursued through consumption. Even after the New Left ebbed in the 1970s, veterans of the movement, many now in professional careers, retained the sense that they could continue to pursue their political goals through their consumer choices. Soon, a host of businesses with countercultural or activist roots—from Ben & Jerrys in Vermont, to Whole Foods in Austin, to the LGBT bookstore Giovanni's Room in Philadelphia—emerged to fulfill this impulse.30 The underground press evolved to serve its increasingly-upscale readership. In 1978, the publishers of 30 alternative papers met in Seattle to form a trade organization whose name, the “National Association of Newsweeklies,” was intended to distance it from what reporter Calvin Trillin called the “incense and marijuana smoke” of the underground press. These so-called “alternative weeklies” still hewed to a left-wing perspective—albeit a more polite and less-movement oriented one. Some, like the Chicago Reader and San Francisco Bay Guardian, boasted serious editorial and (Routledge, 2002). On the Bird, see Gregg L. Michel, Struggle for a Better South: The Southern Student Organizing Committee, 1964-1969 (New York: Macmillan, 2004), 141-2. 29 Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003). 30 For the evolution of countercultural capitalism in the 1970s, see Joshua Clark Davis, From Head Shops to Whole Foods: The Rise and Fall of Activist Entrepreneurs (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 2017). investigative teams. But above all else, alt-weeklies amplified the consumerist strain of the 1960s press. At the Seattle meeting, publishers talked about reaching educated “urban sophisticates” whose purchasing power would attract upscale advertisers.31 As the papers professionalized along with their readers, they grew even more committed to consumer and lifestyle coverage. And their writers began to look the part. At the Association’s 1987 meeting in Portland, Maine, most attendees came dressed, one witness reported, “as if they all bought their clothes at the same store: Benetton or The Limited or one of those other yuppie chains.” Instead of awakening the proletariat, altweeklies had become a way for comfortable, left-leaning journalists to reach an audience of liberal yuppies.32 In the 1970s, the alternative press, as well as traditional dailies, faced competition for that bourgeois audience from a new wave of lifestyle magazines. Led by Clay Felker’s New York, these publications applied the libidinous spirit, spiky prose style, and graphical flair of the Sixties alternative press to the terrain of upscale consumption. If the New Left had seen consumption as a means for political action, lifestyle magazines viewed consumption as an end in itself. As Michael Wolff wrote in a commemoration of New York on its 35th anniversary, Felker had the “crass but revolutionary…notion that you are what you buy.” Like other urban lifestyle magazines launched in this era, New York was “not so much a guide to the city,” Wolff continued, “as it was a guide to being cleverer, hipper, more in-the-know”—a handbook for young metropolitan professionals looking to distinguish themselves via their consumer savvy.33 This “in-the-know” spirit also extended to politics, which the magazine treated as yet another arena for connoisseurship. Beginning in 1967, New York compiled an annual list Calvin Trillin, “Alternatives,” The New Yorker (April 2, 1978), 118 and McMillian, Smoking Typewriters, 172-185. 32 Mary Ellen Schoonmaker, “Has the Alternative Press Gone Yuppie?,” Columbia Journalism Review (November 1, 1987), 60. 33 Michael Wolff, “35 Years,” New York (March 28, 2003). 31 of the “ten most powerful men” in the city. Politics, these articles implied, wasn’t a terrain for moral or material struggles. It was more like a stage where celebrity personalities performed. And New York promised its shrewd readers a peak behind the curtain, into the offstage area where experts actually got things done.34 New York, which shared this insider tone with similar publications like Atlanta Magazine and New Times, proved remarkably popular. New York saw its circulation soar from 50,000 to 335,000 over its first five years.35 The success of these lifestyle magazines spurred old-guard newspapers to try to emulate them. In the early 1970s, Abe Rosenthal, managing editor of the sober New York Times, pressed his editors to mimic New York’s style of service journalism. Rosenthal went so far as to hire several former New York journalists, one as a restaurant critic and another as editor of a new Home section. As the metropolitan upper-middle class assumed greater economic and political power, all manner of publications vied for their attention.36 In the 1970s and particularly the 1980s, a string of high-end consumer magazines sought to capture emerging demographic segments within the ascendant professional elite. Deepening economic inequality and the diversification of America’s corporate and managerial workforce drove this trend. From the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s, households headed by college graduates saw their real wages rise some 20 percent as the postindustrial economy paid ever-greater dividends to educated men and women, particularly in high-wage metropolitan areas. In contrast, blue-collar and lower-level corporate workers—even those who hadn’t been laid off in waves of plant and branch closures—saw their buying power fall as inflation, soaring mortgage interest rates, and See, for example, Edward Costikyan, “The Ten Most Powerful Men in New York,” New York (Jan. 5, 1970), 24-27. 35 Miriam Greenburg, “Branding Cities: A Social History of the Urban Lifestyle Magazine,” Urban Affairs Review 36, no. 2 (Nov. 2000), 244-245. 36 Pressman, 136-137. For the relationship of countercultural consumption to the transformation in marketing, see Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 34 rising energy costs ate into their pay.37 Meanwhile, women and African-Americans flooded into the professional workforce in ever-larger numbers. Flush with disposable income, both groups tantalized advertisers. Publications soon sprang up to target them. A half-dozen magazines targeting Black professionals were launched in a span of a decade: from Black Enterprise to Emerge, Upscale, Excel, Urban Profile, and Black Collegian. (Jive was the only new publication aimed at working-class Black readers. Many long-time Black newspapers, suffering from plummeting urban readerships and advertising, shuttered in this era.) And while women across the economic spectrum joined the workforce during the 1970s, most new publications pursued the career woman, with Savvy, Working Mother, Self, Vital, and Working Woman among the most notable titles. Unlike mid-century women’s service magazines (Good Housekeeping, Redbook), they explicitly targeted the top of the class ladder. As the editor of Working Woman confessed in 1985, “cashiers in supermarket checkout lines…should not be part of our audience.”38 Even though these urban and high-end lifestyle magazines were designed to reach an upscale audience, they still published their share of journalists from blue-collar backgrounds. Those writers assumed an important role as cultural intermediaries for their readers. They embodied, and helped yuppies to decode, the perspectives of the white-ethnic urban villagers that they lived alongside in gentrifying neighborhoods like Park Slope or the Back Bay. Beginning in the late 1960s, as a portion of the white working class began to turn against liberalism and depart the New Deal coalition, metropolitan liberals depended on these journalists for perspective on the “common Consumer Research Center, Conference Board, and U.S. Bureau of the Census, “A Marketer's Guide to Discretionary Income,” (1983), available at the Hagley Museum and Library (HML). 38 Joseph Turow, Breaking Up America: Advertisers and the New Media World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 65-68, quote on 66. On the history of Ebony and Black middle-class magazines, see Adam Green, Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940-1955 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 37 man” and his shifting political allegiances—just as Democrats turned to envoys from the rural white working class to make sense of Donald Trump’s election in 2016. Take the case of Pete Hamill, the consummate Brooklyn newspaperman and columnist. The oldest of seven children born to Irish immigrant parents, Hamill abandoned a sheet-metal worker apprenticeship to take a job on the rewrite desk at the New York Post in 1960. By the end of the decade, he was writing long pieces for the Village Voice, New York, and Esquire, all key outlets for his New Journalism peers.39 Hamill’s writing was peppered with urban working-class argot: knowing references to stickball and the Myrtle Avenue El that validated his streetwise credentials.40 But Hamill and his contemporaries could move seamlessly between worlds (he did, after all, date both Shirley MacLaine and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis). And so his most important articles in lifestyle magazines were missives from what he called the “White Lower Middle Class”—the prototypical Archie Bunker type who was “in revolt” against rising taxes, street crime, and, above all, liberal elites’ sanctimonious sympathy for Black Americans.41 At his best, Hamill did vital translational work for his educated audience. His articles provided economic and sociological context for his subjects’ seemingly irrational resentments. But by ventriloquizing an imagined blue-collar viewpoint, Hamill could also find himself defending some of their most reactionary claims, particularly on the terrain of race and sexuality. In his later columns for Esquire, he justified anti-Black racism as having “a certain validity,” based as it was on street-level encounters with “the For Hamill’s biography, see Christopher Bonanos, “Pete Hamill Was One of Us, Only Better at It,” New York (Aug. 6, 2020), https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/08/pete-hamill-was-oneof-us-only-better-at-it.html, accessed February 19, 2022; Alex Williams, “Pete Hamill ‘Ain’t Done Yet’,” The New York Times (Nov. 26, 2019), https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/26/style/pete-hamill-brooklyn-book.html, accessed February 19, 2022. 40 See, for example, Pete Hamill, “Brooklyn: The Sane Alternative,” New York (July 14, 1969). 41 Pete Hamill, “The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class,” New York (April 14, 1969). 39 virtually permanent welfare-supported underclass,” the people “sitting on the stoop while they go to work.”42 In a long essay addressed to an imaginary Black friend, Hamill exhorted the same “underclass” to follow the upward course of his own immigrant parents, people who were too proud for the dole and “too busy for self pity.”43 Hamill, like many of his working-class male peers—Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese, and particularly Norman Mailer—also bristled at the feminist and gay rights movements.44 In a 1990 column, Hamill admitted that he felt an “uncomfortable sympathy” with gay baiters. Like what he imagined to be “most straight liberal males of [his] generation,” Hamill was “bored” by homosexual protesters’ “theatrical rage” and “self-pitying aura of victimhood”—in the midst of the AIDS crisis, no less. “I am tired,” he continued, “of listening to people who identify themselves exclusively by what they do with their cocks.”45 Hamill’s everyman persona allowed him to indulge, if vicariously, in what he imagined to be the white working class’ disdain for racial and sexual minorities. Worse still, he validated those latent sentiments among his liberal professional-class readers— underwriting (as other essays in this collection detail) some of the punitive policies the Democratic Party would endorse and enact in the 1980s and 1990s. * * * Pete Hamill represented only one part of a wider ideological shift within the liberal magazine commentariat. Established publications like The New Republic and self-declared “neoliberal” magazines like Washington Monthly punctured, with no small dose of contrarianism and sarcasm, what they saw as the exhausted tenets of New Deal- Pete Hamill, “The New Race Hustle,” Esquire (September 1, 1990), quote on 78. Pete Hamill, “Breaking the Silence: A Letter to a Black Friend,” Esquire (March 1, 1988), 91-102, quote on 102. 44 On Mailer, see “Reports of Norman Mailer’s cancellation have been greatly exaggerated,” Salon (Feb. 5, 2022), https://www.salon.com/2022/01/05/norman-mailer-cancelled, accessed March 11, 2022. On Breslin, see “Rage & Outrage : Jimmy Breslin’s Racist Newsroom Pique Provokes a Nationwide Furor,” Los Angeles Times (May 15, 1990), https://www.latimes.com/archives/laxpm-1990-05-15-vw-214-story.html, accessed March 11, 2022. 45 “Confessions of a Heterosexual,” Esquire (August 1, 1990), 55-56. 42 43 era liberalism. After Marty Peretz assumed ownership and editorial control of The New Republic in 1974, it charted an upscale new direction for the Democratic Party.46 It began with its elite readership, which comprised, Peretz crowed, “the opinion class, the policy class, the university professors, lawyers and legislators.”47 It served that audience with a pronounced disdain for the Democrats’ traditional constituencies, now lumped together as “special interests”: labor unions, urban ethnics, and above all, the Black poor. In column after column, it attacked the putative African-American underclass, blaming the excesses of the welfare state for its perpetuation. Columns by Charles Murray and Hedrik Hertzberg assailed affirmative action; unsigned editorials blamed mid-century liberalism for deepening “social pathologies.”48 (The 1980s New Republic, from its policy positions to its author bylines, had substantial overlap with the neoconservative Public Interest and Commentary.) Looking abroad, the magazine advocated for an intelligent but muscular foreign policy that rejected the rigid orthodoxies of the “doves” on the left and “hawks” on the right. For example, a 1986 editorial (likely penned by Charles Krauthammer) made the counter-intuitive “Case for the Contras.” Without American aid, it argued, the Soviet-backed Sandinistas would quash democracy in Nicaragua. One by one, it debunked doves’ ethical arguments for neutrality.49 Ultimately, The New Republic insisted that any a priori political or moral commitments—what literary editor Leon Wieseltier called “extravagant ideological entailments”—were themselves the problem.50 What was needed instead were “smarts”: the protean intelligence to navigate an increasingly complicated world. Conveniently, This paragraph draws extensively from Jacqueline Brandon, “Dead Center: The New Democrats and the Transformation of Liberalism,” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2023), chapter 2. More generally, see Geismer, Left Behind. 47 Mark Muro, “Hot New Republic Beams In Power Town,” Chicago Tribune (June 21, 1985), 2. 48 See, for example, Charles Murray, “Affirmative Racism,” The New Republic (December 31, 1984), 17-23; Hendrik Hertzberg, “Wounds of Race” The New Republic (July 10, 1989); Editorial, “Up From Crisis,” The New Republic (December 10, 1984), 9-12. 49 Editorial, “The Case for the Contras,” The New Republic (March 24, 1986), 7-9. For the authorship claim, see Brandon, “Dead Center,” 33. 50 Leon Wieseltier, “The Great Nuclear Debate,” The New Republic (January 10 & 17, 1983), 7-9. 46 smarts were something that America’s educated elite believed they had in spades. In this respect, The New Republic (along with Washington Monthly and George, and later, Politico, Vox, and Pod Save America) forged a new form of reportage: what media scholar Jay Rosen calls the “savvy style” of political journalism. Reporters and pundits, Rosen argues, aspire to be “hyper-informed, perceptive, ironic, ‘with it,’ and unsentimental” above all else. Winning the political horserace or wonky policy argument is the highest aim. Savvy journalists (David Riesman called them “inside dopesters”) let readers in on the game, too. Instead of mass politics, they offer a glimpse of the way that power “really” works in Washington, D.C.—a peak behind the curtain, where smart operators not unlike themselves play the game. Participatory politics are replaced by savvy spectatorship.51 Seven decades after Walter Lippmann founded The New Republic, it appeared that his vision for democracy, mediated by a “specialized class” of disinterested experts, had won the day.52 The ascendance of that technocratic faction was not without its critics, however. As publications pivoted towards upscale readers and journalists themselves grew more educated and cosmopolitan, they faced mounting accusations of elitism and liberal bias. In the 1970s, neoconservatives, particularly Irving Kristol, took aim at journalists for belonging to and advancing the interests of a “New Class” of cultural elites. Along with their peers in universities, public-interest nonprofits, and government regulatory agencies, neoconservatives argued, media professionals were disproportionately liberal, expensively-educated, urban, secular, and white.53 They wanted to upend free enterprise Jay Rosen, “Why Political Coverage is Broken,” PressThink (August 26, 2011), https://pressthink.org/2011/08/why-political-coverage-is-broken/, accessed March 22, 2022. Rosen is building on ideas developed in Todd Gitlin, “Blips, Bites & Savvy Talk,” Dissent (January 1990), esp. 21-22. On the related idea of political hobbyism, see Eitan Hersh, Politics Is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change (New York: Scribner, 2020). 52 Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.), 310. 53 While embraced in the 1970s by neoconservatives, including Daniel Patrick Moynahan, Norman Podhoretz, and Michael Novak, the term was originally coined by John Kenneth Galbraith in his 1958 The Affluent Society. For a sociological overview of the New Class debate, see Steven Brint, 51 and traditional morality. They remained unduly sympathetic to African-Americans and the poor (even if these sympathies had begun to wane, as evidenced by the editorial evolution at The New Republic.) The New Class, Kristol wrote, believed “that they can do a better job of running our society and feel entitled to have the opportunity.”54 In the 1970s and ‘80s, a series of right-wing books and conferences took aim at the so-called “media elite” within the New Class. They anatomized journalists’ expensive educations (93% had graduated college), narrow geographic base (over two-thirds came from a small number of Northeastern states), and liberal politics (81 percent had voted for Senator George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election).55 To be sure, this critique of the elite liberal media came from a group of New York intellectuals who were themselves part of the same elite. After all, Kristol’s broadsides were published in his column in The Wall Street Journal. And their attacks were tinged with no small amount of personal animosity and racial resentment. But neoconservatives’ diagnosis did contain a shred of truth, particularly to the white working-class Americans who felt left behind by journalism’s class transformation. Metropolitan newspapers had indeed abandoned poor, rural, blue-collar, and urban white-ethnic audiences since the 1960s. The “savvy” style was for educated insiders—and it openly condescended to less-informed outsiders. Political coverage had taken an adversarial and interpretive turn in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, a shift that historian Matthew Pressman locates in the “’New-Class’ and Cumulative Trend Explanations of the Liberal Political Attitudes of Professionals,” American Journal of Sociology 90, no. 1 (July 1984), 30-71. 54 Irving Kristol, “Business and ‘The New Class,” The Wall Street Journal, May 1, 1975. 55 S. Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, Linda S. Lichter, The Media Elite (Bethesda, MD: Adler & Adler, 1986), statistics on 21 and 30. Also see Edith Efron, The News Twisters (Los Angeles, Nash Publishing, 1971); Kevin Phillips, Mediacracy: American Parties and Politics in the Communications Age (New York: Doubleday, 1974); “A Liberal media elite?: A conference sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research,” Nick Thimmesch, ed. (Washington, D.C.: AEI Public Policy Research, 1985). For a devastating critique of Lichter et al. and their methods, see Herbert J. Gans, “Are U.S Journalists Dangerously Liberal?” Columbia Journalism Review (Nov. 1985), 29-33. hegemony of “liberal values” in the newsroom.56 Lifestyle magazines had adopted the cultural politics of the New Left, even as they slavishly targeted upscale readers. The bevy of new consumer magazines largely ignored inflation-strapped, downwardly-mobile Americans. Journalists themselves were drawn from a small handful of colleges and graduate programs, particularly at top national publications. And journalists’ politics had in fact diverged from most rank-and-file white union members. (At the 1972 Democratic convention, the ANG’s executive committee, dominated by white-collar journalists, endorsed George McGovern. Meanwhile, the AFL-CIO—along with most of the ANG’s non-journalist membership—declined to endorse him, even in the general election against President Richard Nixon.)57 For neoconservatives, along with the white silent majority they claimed to speak for, journalism had become incontrovertibly more elite and more liberal since the 1960s. * * * In the early and mid-1990s, the advent of the Internet deepened journalism’s long-term structural, social and ideological transformation. But new technology was only partly responsible for this shift. Online publishing accelerated what had been a decadeslong decline for the Fordist model for media, with its large unionized newspaper operations that dotted nearly every town and city across the United States. By the 1990s, those structures would give way to small, non-union web outlets, which were staffed and managed by highly-educated professionals in a small number of coastal cities. Ownership would pass from family-owned firms to conglomerates, then on to highlyleveraged investors and private equity firms. Expectations for profits rose; journalists’ wages and job security worsened. Craft workers were replaced by typesetting computers. Staff reporters and career pressmen were laid off and replaced by non-union freelancers, 56 57 See Pressman, On Press. “Just Another Union?,” Columbia Journalism Review (Sept/Oct 1972), 4. stringers, and third-party production firms.58 Even as work conditions deteriorated, publications demanded ever-more elite degree and internship credentials for new hires, narrowing newsrooms’ class makeup even further. And publishers—in print and online— intensified their pursuit of high-income audiences, the one bright spot in a consumer economy that grew more unequal with each passing year. As the sun set on the twentieth-century liberal order, the news industry was subject to many of the same changes that were remaking American life.59 Ironically, the sharpest blow to the Fordist media would come as the result of a strike, with the Newspaper Guild playing a key role. In November 1994, 2,600 employees from eight allied unions walked out of San Francisco’s two daily newspapers, the Examiner and the Chronicle, to protest wage freezes, planned layoffs, and the replacement of 150 Teamster-affiliated delivery drivers with independent contractors. (The papers operated jointly since a 1965 agreement that merged their business operations.)60 Ownership retained King & Ballow, a noted union-busting law firm that had broken similar actions at the New York Daily News and Chicago Tribune. For 12 days, editors, composers, and pressmen marched together outside the papers’ headquarters, attacking delivery trucks that attempted to cross the picket line. “The [newspaper] racks are empty and the doorsteps are bare, and we think we can keep it that way,” said one union representative, hopefully. Daniel Lazare, “Journalism's New Underclass?” Columbia Journalism Review (March 1, 1987), 11-13. 59 For an overview of these developments, see Will the Last Reporter Please Turn Out the Lights: The Collapse of Journalism and What Can Be Done to Fix It, Robert W. McChesney and Victor Pickard, eds. (New York: New Press, 2010). On online audiences, see Caitlin Petre, All the News That’s Fit to Click: How Metrics Are Transforming the Work of Journalists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021). 60 Larry Hatfield, “1994 San Francisco news strike pushed limits and ushered in online media,” Pacific Media Workers Guild, https://mediaworkers.org/1994-strike-set-a-sour-tone-for-a-newera-in-newspapers/, accessed April 22, 2022; David Margolick, “Strike Prevents Delivery of San Francisco Daily Newspapers,” The New York Times (Nov. 3, 1994); 58 But even as the presses sat dormant, the papers’ editorial staff was busy publishing their own online-only news daily, the San Francisco Free Press—one of the first sites of its kind.61 The Free Press wasn’t ornate: striking editors sketched its layout on a bar napkin, and it rented server space from WELL, the local computer network with roots in the Whole Earth Catalog, a print emporium for ecologically-minded countercultural products. However shambolic, the Free Press proved that news and opinions could be delivered effectively on the World Wide Web. It broke at least one national-level story, and it counted some 100,000 daily readers, most of them overwhelmingly affluent and tech-savvy.62 The Free Press, like the countless websites it would inspire, promised journalists a seemingly frictionless medium to convey their ideas. The Internet required no expensive newsprint, no printing presses, and, importantly, no expensive blue-collar employees to make and deliver the news. “It was a traditional newspaper strike, traditional union issues,” remembered Bruce Koon, coeditor of the Free Press. “Here the strike was being supported by a medium bypassing it. There was a certain irony at the time.” Even as Guild members struck in solidarity with craft workers, they pioneered the technological form that would undermine the very institutions that employed them both. Eight unions went on strike together; the success of the Free Press hinted that all but the Guild might soon be obsolete.63 During the strike, management at the Examiner launched their own competing website, The Gate. Without an editorial team, it ran republished wire stories. 62 Carl Bialik, “Freeing the Press,” The Wall Street Journal, May 12, 2004; readership in Peter H. Lewis, “The News, Virtually,” NYT (Nov. 13, 1994). On WELL and its utopian countercultural origins, see Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 63 Carl Bialik, “Freeing the Press,” The Wall Street Journal (May 12, 2004). 61 An early issue of the Free Press. Source: Carl Bialik, “Freeing the Press,” The Wall Street Journal (May 12, 2004). The Free Press, which emerged at nearly the same moment as the pioneering Netscape web browser, inspired a surge of interest and investment in Internet news. In 1995, USA Today began to put out free online content. The New York Times would follow less than a year later. By the middle of 1995, 150 newspapers worldwide would run Web editions.64 Many of the first Internet journalists were former Examiner and Chronicle employees. In the span of a year, the papers lost a publisher, multiple section and desk editors, several reporters, three culture critics, and even their editorial cartoonist to Internet publications.65 In 1995, David Talbot and several other Examiner journalists used money from Apple and Adobe to launch Salon.com in San Francisco. Salon, whose founding manifesto boasted of its “militantly centrist” politics, would elevate the “savvy style” to new heights, running regular pieces by D.C. insider journalists Jake Tapper and Jonathan Broder and neoconservative gadfly David Horowitz. By 1996, the former factory buildings in San Francisco’s South of Market Wendell Cochran, “Searching for right mixture: On-line newspapers seek own identities to compete with ink-stained brethren,” Quill (May 1995), 36. 65 Carol Pogash, “Cyberspace Journalism,” American Journalism Review (June 1, 1996). 64 neighborhood were so chockablock with Internet newsrooms that locals took to calling the area “Multimedia Gulch.”66 These small, scrappy publications styled themselves in opposition to the large mid-century newspaper. Their newsrooms were open and informal, with little physical infrastructure besides clusters of desks and rows of humming computer towers. Reporters’ wages and benefits were low. Except for a handful of technical and janitorial staff (usually third-party contractors), there were no craft workers on staff: no librarians, no typesetters, no delivery drivers. No one belonged to a union. Even if compensation lagged, what Internet publications could promise journalists was a workplace that was informal, hip, and non-hierarchal—a far cry from the layers of often overbearing management at old-school dailies. At HotWired, Wired magazine’s website, journalists pecked out stories under posters listing their Ten Commandments: “Invent New Words,” one read. “We're Not in Newspapers Anymore.”67 That swashbuckling atmosphere, however, concealed trends that would make journalism even more cloistered by geography and class. Internet publications, unlike the local newspapers they replaced, were concentrated in a tiny number of high-cost American cities. By 2015, the moment when the number of web journalists surpassed the number working at newspapers, nearly three-quarters of Internet news jobs were located in either the Boston-New York-Washington-Richmond megalopolis or the Seattle -toSan Diego corridor. Another 5 percent were based in Chicago.68 The journalists headed to those outlets were increasingly well educated. Most editors expected entry-level writers to possess some technical computing skills; almost all required college-level George Kamiya, “Ten Years of Salon,” Salon, https://www.salon.com/2005/11/14/salon_history/, accessed January 4, 2022; Laura Lippman, “Sultan of Salon,” The Baltimore Sun (March 13, 2000). 67 Pogash, “Cyberspace Journalism.” 68 Jack Shafer and Tucker Doherty, “The Media Bubble Is Worse Than You Think,” Politico Magazine (May/June 2017), https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/mediabubble-real-journalism-jobs-east-coast-215048/, accessed April 4, 2022. 66 internship experience. And without a union to set a livable starting wage, young journalists were expected to draw on family wealth to survive. One editor offered a Chicago journalist a job with a salary under $10,000. “Can't your parents help you out?” he asked her.69 Even affirmative actions efforts, which had managed to marginally increase racial diversity starting in the 1970s, did little to broaden the industry’s class base. One internal Los Angeles Times report found that its affirmative-action program mostly recruited from Ivy League universities and paid wages that could not cover the high cost of living in L.A.70 Well into the 1990s, leading magazines continued to hire entry-level editors primarily from their ranks of unpaid interns. Those interns were almost exclusively well-connected and well-to-do. They were also overwhelmingly white. For example, William Whitworth, the editor of The Atlantic, had only two black interns among the hundreds who passed through the program between 1981 and 1995. Despite finding it “unfortunate” that he had no black editors, Whitworth confessed that the exclusivity of the internship pool had “not been at the top of my agenda.” The Atlantic wasn’t alone. In 1995, the New Yorker had fewer than seven non-white editors on a staff of over one hundred. Both Harper’s and The New York Review of Books were entirely white.71 As layoffs and wage cuts spread across the industry during the wave of corporate consolidation in the 1990s and 2000s, journalism grew only more elite. While the field retained much of its cultural capital, it offered employees a slimmer path to a secure, well-paying career. Increasingly, only those with familial wealth, or at the very least, a wealth of marketable credentials, decided to join the profession—trusting that they’d remain secure in the (likely) event they lost their job in media. By the 2010s, journalists Brent Cunningham, “Across the Great Divide—Class,” Columbia Journalism Review (May/June 2004) and “Salary Increase for Grads,” Quill (October 1996), 7. 70 Usher, News for the Rich, White, and Blue, 58. 71 Howard Kutz, “The White Person For the Job,” The Washington Post (April 8, 1995) 69 were more likely to have graduated from a top university than members of the federal judiciary, CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, or even U.S. Senators. Fully half of the masthead at The New Republic—the magazine that had served as an intellectual engine for the newly-upscale Democratic Party in the 1980s—now boasted an Ivy League degree.72 * * * In 1996, only months apart, two new media outlets emerged that embodied the fruits of journalism’s widening class divide. The first, Slate.com, was founded as a joint venture between Microsoft and Michael Kinsley, a key force at The New Republic in the 1980s. Slate was the post-Fordist publication par excellence. Its three bureaus—one in Seattle, one in New York, and one in Washington—spoke to its tripartite investment in the worlds of technology, magazine publishing, and politics. Instead of hiring an expensive roll of reporters, it made several high-profile hires (Paul Krugman, Nicholas Lemann, Michael Lewis, James Fallows) and filled out the rest of its staff with freelancers and interns. Slate’s content was oriented towards affluent, highly-educated readers—the “politically and culturally engaged people,” Kinsley said, who also subscribed to The Economist and The New Republic. (Initially, Slate was also sold in print form at Starbucks locations.) Its audience didn’t visit the weekly online magazine for up-to-theminute reporting. They came instead for political analysis that gratified their insider knowledge of the Washington scene. Each week, it ran a column by a consultant that deconstructed election-season TV ads. And its recurring “Horse Race” feature promised to “track the presidential candidates like stocks, as priced by the opinion polls [and] the 72 Jonathan Wai and Kaja Perina,“Expertise in Journalism: Factors Shaping a Cognitive and Culturally Elite Profession,” Journal of Expertise 10, no. 10 (March 2018), 9. pundits.”73 Even though most of its readers were self-described liberals, Slate prided itself on its partisan promiscuity: it rented D.C. office space from the American Enterprise Institute, and its first advice columnist was Herbert Stein, Chairman of President Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisors.74 In 2002, in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, Slate ran a debate on its merits featuring pro-war takes from a range of hawks, from Andrew Sullivan to Jacob Weisberg to John McWhorter to Gregg Easterbrook.75 That feature, like much of Slate in those years, typified the orientation of many professional-class liberals towards politics at the close of the twentieth century. Instead of an urgent democratic contest for power, politics had become a domain for intellectual swordplay, where experts—some with dangerously reactionary views— offered “takes” whose counter-intuitiveness was taken as a sign of their perspicacity. Smarts and smarm were the coin of this realm. Just a few months after Slate’s debut, Rupert Murdoch, the Australian publishing magnate, launched the Fox News network. The cable channel targeted a culturally bluecollar audience—precisely the demographic that print media had neglected since the 1960s. Fox News offered a muscular, populist conservative take on the news. Murdoch had pioneered this approach in the 1980s with Sky News in the UK and, even earlier, with The New York Post, which he purchased in 1976 and transformed from a leftleaning broadsheet into a sensationalist, racially-reactionary tabloid. The formula was Michael Kinsley, “Welcome to Slate,” Slate, June 25, 1996, https://slate.com/news-andpolitics/1996/06/welcome-to-slate.html, accessed April 24, 2022. 74 Michael Kinsley, “My History of Slate,” Slate, June 18, 2006, https://slate.com/news-andpolitics/2006/06/michael-kinsley-s-history-of-slate.html, accessed April 24, 2022; Kinsley, “Slate on Paper at Starbucks,” Slate, September 14, 1996, https://slate.com/news-andpolitics/1996/09/slate-on-paper-at-starbucks.html, accessed April 24, 2022; Ken Auletta, “The Reeducation of Michael Kinsley,” New Yorker (May 13, 1996), 58-65. 75 “Roll Call: Who’s for war, who’s against it, and why,” Slate, Feb. 19, 2003, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/02/who-s-for-war-who-s-against-it-and-why.html, accessed April 24, 2022. 73 fantastically successful: by 1980, the Post’s circulation had risen by nearly a third, making it the best-selling afternoon paper in the United States.76 Fox News fused the tabloid flair of the Post with a biting critique of America’s elites. It also pulled off a deft sleight of hand when it came to its class positioning. Fox’s populism wasn’t aimed at economic titans; the network actively refrained from attacking Wall Street during the 2008 financial crisis. Instead, Fox directed its ire at the supercilious cultural elites who disdained the values and degraded the status of an “authentic” blue-collar white majority. In the postindustrial era, that identity had more to do with education than income. And Fox News was fantastically successful at reaching that demographic: 76% of Fox News’ viewers did not possess a college degree, by far the highest proportion among cable news networks.77 Fox’s style was essential to communicating its sympathy for this audience. Fox News’ mastermind Roger Ailes recruited hosts from a variety of regional white identities, directing them to play up their blue-collar bona fides. “Shep” Smith spoke with a folksy Southern drawl; Sean Hannity reminded viewers he had worked in construction; Bill O’Reilly leaned into his everyman Long Island accent. In true tabloid style, the network’s graphics and title cards were bold and combative. Ultimately, as media scholar Reece Peck argues, Fox’s style was its politics.78 Indeed, Fox News’ popularity reflected the rising salience of a blue-collar identity among a swath of white Americans since the 1960s. Regardless of their actual economic standing, they tended to value the same qualities: toughness, religiosity, hard work, respect for tradition and masculine authority. (Critics noted how those values were framed as colorblind rebukes to marginalized Americans and their claims for equality.) “Comment: Doing the devil’s work,” Columbia Journalism Review (Jan/Feb. 1980), 22-23. Reece Peck, Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 18, 51, 121-125. 78 Peck, Fox Populism, 134-135. 76 77 Above all else, blue-collar conservatives resented the perceived snobbery and condescension of the New Class of professional-managerial and technocratic workers.79 Mainstream journalists—whom as early as 1969, Spiro Agnew had attacked as a “small unelected elite,” an “urbane and assured presence” from the “geographical and intellectual confines of Washington, D.C. or New York City”—were among the most hated avatars of that cosmopolitan class.80 By the end of the twentieth century, this long-running conservative critique of the elite media had become even more salient. And as we have seen, it had real material origins—this was no case of fake news. Since the 1960s, the industry had abandoned working-class readers and subjects in favor of high-income audiences. Journalists themselves were drawn from an ever-thinner educational stratum. In the 1990s, under pressure to boost profits in an age of corporate ownership, the last vestiges of the large, unionized Fordist newspaper finally gave way, suffering a similar fate as the New Deal political coalition writ large. By the 2000s, the United States was left with the media landscape we are familiar with today: a coterie of expensively-educated reporters, concentrated in a few metropolitan areas, struggling to understand how they could have missed the groundswell of blue-collar conservatism that drove Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. Their failure, however, was far from accidental. It was the culmination of five decades of institutional and social change that had entirely remade American news. But it wasn’t just media, of course. Journalism was only one part of a much broader process of class and perspectival polarization in the United States. That fracture, often narrated as a story of a widening political gulf between left and right, was in fact just as much the product of other divides: between cities and their exurban or rural See Timothy J. Lombardo, Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia and Populist Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). 80 Spiro T. Agnew, “Television News Coverage” speech, November 13, 1969, https://perso.univlyon2.fr/~jkempf/agnew.pdf, accessed March 31, 2022. 79 hinterlands; between cosmopolitan professionals and businesspeople heading regional or family businesses; between highly-educated technocrats and those without a college degree; between upwardly-mobile knowledge workers and a downwardly-mobile tranche of the former middle class.81 Journalism alone did not create those fissures. But it remained one of the few arenas where liberals could work out potential solutions. In the very decades where they might have imagined new and more egalitarian visions for a divided nation, liberals lost the mediating influence of a press that reflected the true diversity of American experience. With it, they lost the imagination needed for a more capacious, more democratic, and more popular political movement. 81 For an account of the regional and attitudinal growing divides among elites, see Melinda Cooper, “Family Capitalism and the Small Business Insurrection,” Dissent (Winter 2022), https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/family-capitalism-and-the-small-businessinsurrection/.