The Thurston Howells of the Newsroom
Nov 17th, 2006 at 11:50 am by Susie
It was election night at the Radnor Hotel, and one of the Hill rats I was talking to said he figured the press would be on the side of the Democrats now that we had control of the House and Senate again.
“Are you crazy?” I said. “If anything, they’ll be worse. This is high school, and that never changes. They’re high school geeks who waited all their lives for the chance to get even.”
I hate to beat a dying horse (it’s all too easy), but the class divide is also a major part of why newspaper circulation continues to drop like a brick. When you don’t have compelling economic forces in your own life, it’s hard to see them as important in anyone else’s. And if you truly don’t understand how those political issues relate to your readers, they will inevitably go elsewhere.
See, it’s not a game to us. It’s our lives.
As regular readers know, I’m a big union supporter. But I have to say, I don’t think newspaper unions have done much for the quality of newspapers these days. If anything, they’ve widened the class divide.
Think about what it’s like in the non-unionized, private sector world: Most of us started paying health insurance co-pays thirty years ago. Through IPOs, selloffs and mergers, we’ve seen our jobs downgraded, doubled up or disappear completely. We live in a state of chronic low-grade anxiety, knowing our jobs (such as they are) give us only a thin illusion of economic security. We’re lucky to get 3% raises if we get any at all, and then we’re told to be grateful we got anything.
Vacations? In our world, one week after you’ve been there for six months. Two weeks after a year - but hey, what are the odds you’ll still have a job by then? It taps out at two weeks if you’re lucky enough to stay employed, but you have to use it up by the end of the year. Problem is, you don’t have enough people in your department to cover your ass if you take time off, and if you don’t cover your ass, you might lose your job.
Compare this with the top-of-Maslow’s-triangle life of your typical Beltway pundit. No wonder they think the economy’s doing fine - everyone they know is doing fine! Fully-paid insurance? Christ, no wonder these bloviators think we can “solve” the healthcare crisis by raising co-pays - they don’t have any. It’s all too theoretical to them.
I do feel bad for the journalists who are finally waking up to the scary notion that life as they know it is over. Change always sucks (take it from someone whose coat of arms reads, Oh no, not another fucking growth experience! Only in Latin).
But they convinced themselves they didn’t have survival worries because they’re special, and deserve special treatment.
They’re so infatuated with the sound of their own cocktail party chatter, they can’t hear the train whistle coming down the tracks.
Pretty sad. And ugly true.
It depends on where the union person came from, if he or she has been comfortably middle class their entire life, they’ll never understand economic issues of poorer people. My husband has a well paying union job with great benefits, but both he and I know what it is like to be poor. We remember very very well and even though we have great medical benefits now we would still prefer that everyone have universal coverage, even if it means we get less. While we were poor there was a rudimentary “safety net”. It wasn’t good enough since I used to walk around collecting returnable cans and bottles so that we could afford a loaf of bread etc at the end of the month. Now people have even less safety net than we had. I don’t know how people survive anymore.
When people have certain things all of their lives they take them forgranted and think it’s just normal. They also let those things slip away very easily. I see this with many unionized workers who do not appreciate their unions, and even non-unionized workers who do not understand that their wages and benefits are dependent on unionized people in their industry. You can also see it with our civil liberties slipping away under the Bush administration, and women losing all the gains of the feminist movement. We are going backwards historically and soon you won’t be able to tell the difference between modern America and Charles Dicken’s England.
Newspapers, like the broadcast networks, are growing more and more irrelevant and oblivious to the economic realities of typical Americans. The “news” is increasingly just a nightly report on WEALTH: who has it, who doesn’t have it, who is trying to get it; who has lost it. The stock market is irrelevant to me because I don’t have any stocks and I don’t know anyone who does. The daily movements of the stock market are irrelevant to people who have 401(k) accounts because they cannot sell.
Here’s a hypothetical:
When the credit card companies call me, I use an asexual elderly oriental voice and tell them they have the wrong number. When they press me, I just act addled. My student loans are in a permanent state of unemployment deferral. Going to work would mean having to pay 10K a year for child care. If I could get an $10/hour full-time job, the expenses of commuting and maintinaing a car would consume a few thousand bucks a year. At $20K per year, minus taxes, minus 10K for baby kennel, minus 3K for car & gas, I’m left with about 2K, spread across 12 months, which is $38 per week. Then I’d have to make student loan payments somehow, since I was working full time. Impossible. It’s infinitely less stressful for me to eat oatmeal for breakfast and read more books and have meaningful moments with the wonderful creatures here at home than bust my spirit for what? A chance to earn money so I can spend it to buy the privilege of being forced to go out and earn some more money just so I can keep the cycle going? Do I go to work so I can afford to pay for childcare so I can work? No thank you. Screw that. It’s absurd. I’ve got no assets, I’m legally judgement proof, and I get to stay home and care for my household while I get to enjoy a standard of living higher than most of the rest of the population on the planet. Bankruptcy, anyone? If there is one person in the above situation, you can be sure there are thousands more. Freedom’s just another word, right? Anyway, how the frig is reading a newspaper, produced by tassel-loafer-wearing toadies with health insurance and retirement plans and condos and McMansions, going to help me? Why waste my oatmeal money to buy a paper just to get my hands dirty with ink and stare at off-register blobs of color that vaguely resemble human beings? Why read canned stories about wealth and who’s got it and who lost it and who wants it?
Why huh? Yes, why.