i was inspired by karl sagan and stephen j gould, who reached beyond the academic world into the public realm. My first book came out a w 97 or so after, why people believe we're things. It did pretty well. And occidental, college where i was teaching had a kind of a financial melt down. When they sent out a notice saying all of us non tenure tract faculty would be put on, basically on ice, there's no future here for you. So i thoght, well, ok, thot was medoven. And and just write books and an publish the magazine,. That'll be my day job, and give public talk. I
Something is wrong with American journalism. Long before “fake news” became the calling card of the Right, Americans had lost faith in their news media. But lately, the feeling that something is off has become impossible to ignore. That’s because the majority of our mainstream news is no longer just liberal; it’s woke. Today’s newsrooms are propagating radical ideas that were fringe as recently as a decade ago, including “antiracism,” intersectionality, open borders, and critical race theory. How did this come to be? It all has to do with who our news media is written by — and who it is written for.
Michael Shermer speaks with Batya Ungar-Sargon about her new book Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy in which she reveals how American journalism underwent a status revolution over the twentieth century — from a blue-collar trade to an elite profession. As a result, journalists shifted their focus away from the working class and toward the concerns of their affluent, highly educated peers.
Ungar-Sargon avers that, in abandoning the working class by creating a culture war around identity, our national media is undermining American democracy.