michael shrimmer: My guest to day is batya ungar sargon. Her new book is called bad news, how woke media is undermining democracy. She identifies three trends that we discuss - respectability counter revolution, working class cultures as unworthy of media attention and status revolution. And then we get into information bubbles, echo chambers and and all the devisiveness that causes.
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.