How Did You Get Interested in the Media?

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"I'm a left wing, populist critique of the where the liberal media has ended up," he says. "This is how that's been driven by woken uss and all that stuff." The author was originally from boston but moved to Israel as a child. He now lives in Los Angeles with his family.

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.