I recently spoke with Matt Taibbi on my podcast. Matt explains how journalism has changed from a trade to a new media class who know nothing about working class people and have distorted view of them.
Speaking with podcast host Russell Brand, former Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi explained one reason for many Americans having contempt for journalists, asserting, “They see us as people who write about them as hicks and losers and idiots and who are not on their side. And why wouldn’t they hate us?”
Brand asked if there was a base of a “professional class of people” that doesn’t like “sort of working-class people.” Taibbi answered:
I think a ton of this has to do with class and certain natural class antipathy. Just in my business, when my father was coming up in journalism in the 60’s and 70’s, journalists were not upper class people; it was more like a trade than a profession. The people who worked the newspaper, they were more like the sons and daughters of plumbers and electricians. They were never Ivy-League educated rich people. And then a lot of things happened, including the movie “All the President’s Men,” and it became like a sexy profession for upper-class people to go into.
“By the time I went into journalism, it was all people like me, it was upper-class kids who had gone to good schools and whose attraction to the job was being close to figures in power,” he explained. “They wanted to be kind of behind the rope line; they wanted to have a beer with Hillary Clinton’s aide at night. That was sort of their ambition in life was to socially hang out with all these people and they did not have a connection to the ordinary working class person, which journalists once did because they were those people; that’s where they came from.”
Read full article on The Daily Wire
