 Mainstream journalists are cloistered Ivy League educated trust fund kids Iraq war cheerleader David Brooks has an article in the New York Times titled what if we're the bad guys here Another one of those tired old think pieces. We've been seeing for the last eight years that asks golly gosh Could we coastal elites have played some role in the rise of Trumpism like it's the first time anyone has ever considered that obvious point The answer is yes. Duh you soft-handed silver spoon-fed ivory tower bubble boy One worthwhile paragraph about the media stands out though quote Over the last decades we've taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out When I began my journalism career in Chicago in the 1980s, there were still some old crusty working-class guys around the newsroom Now we're not only a college-dominated profession. We're an elite college-dominated profession only 0.8% of all college students graduate from the super elite 12 schools the Ivy League colleges plus Stanford MIT Duke and the University of Chicago a 2018 study found that more than 50% of the staff writers at the beloved New York Times in the Wall Street Journal attend one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation and quote Brooks is not the first commentator to make this observation about the drastic shift in the socio-economic Makeup of news reporters that has taken place from previous generations to now The class factor in journalism gets overlooked Journalist Glenn Greenwald said on the Jimmy dorsho in 2021 30 or 40 years ago 50 years ago journalists really were outsiders That's why they had unions. They made shit money. They came from like working-class families They hated the elite they hated bankers and politicians. It was kind of a boss employee relationship They hated them and wanted to throw rocks at them and take them down pegs If I were to list the 20 richest people I've ever met in my entire life I think seven or eight of them are people I met because they work at the intercept People from like the richest fucking families on the planet Greenwald added Journalist Matt Tybee whose father worked for NBC made similar observations on the dark horse podcast back in 2020 Reporters when I was growing up, they came from a different class of people than they do today. Tybee said a Lot of them were kind of more working class Their parents were more likely to be plumbers or electricians than they were to be doctors or lawyers Like this thing where the journalist is an Ivy League grad. That's a relatively new thing That I think came out in the 70s in the 80s with my generation But reporters just instinctively hated rich people. They hated powerful people like if you put up a poster of a politician in a newsroom It was defaced instantaneously like there were darts in it Reporters saw it as their job to stick it to the man Mostly the job is different now Tybee said the fantasy among reporters in the 90s about politicians started to be I want to be the person that hangs out with the candidate after the speech and has a beer and is sort of close to power And that's kind of the model. That's where we're at right now. That's kind of the problem is that basically in the business People want to be behind the rope line with people of influence And it's going to be a problem to get us back to that other adversarial posture of the past This is a major reason behind the freakish sycophancy and empire loyalism. We see in the mainstream press It's not just the obscenely wealthy owners of the mass media who are protecting their class interests It's the reporters editors and pundits as well These are typically fairly wealthy people from fairly wealthy families who become more and more wealthy the more their careers are elevated as Insiders of the mainstream press have attested It's widely understood by employees of the mainstream media that the way to elevate your career is to toe the establishment line and refrain from spotlighting issues that are inconvenient to the powerful This identification with the ruling class feeds into the dynamic described by Tybee in which modern journalists have come to value close proximity to those in power These are the people they want to be sharing drinks with and going to parties with and invited to the weddings of The us versus them dynamic which used to exist between the press and politicians switched and now the press see themselves in the Politicians they fraternize with as us and the general public as them There are other factors that play with regard to elite education the number of journalists with college degrees skyrocketed from 58 percent in 1971 to 92 percent in 2013 if your wealthy parents aren't paying that off for you Then you've got a crushing student debt that you need to pay off yourself Which you can only do in the field you studied in by making a decent amount of money Which you can only do by acting as a dependable propagandist for the imperial establishment Universities themselves tend to play a status quo serving conformity Manufacturing role when churning out journalists as wealth won't flow into an academic environment that is offensive to the wealthy Moneyed interests are unlikely to make large donations to universities Which teach their students that moneyed interests are a plague upon the nation and they certainly are not going to send their kids The whole intellectual culture has a filtering system starting as a child in school. Noam Chomsky once explained in an interview You're expected to accept certain beliefs styles behavioral patterns and so on if you don't accept them You are called maybe a behavioral problem or something. You're weeded out Something like that goes on all the way through universities and graduate schools There is an implicit system of filtering which creates a strong tendency to impose conformism The people who make it through this filtering system are the ones who are elevated to the most influential positions in our civilization All the most widely amplified voices in our society are the celebrities Journalists pundits and politicians who've proven themselves to be reliable stewards of the matrix of narrative control Which keeps the public jacked in to the mainstream worldview? Is it any wonder then that all the sources we've been taught to look to for information about our world Continually feed us stories which give us the impression that the status quo is working fine And this is the only way things can possibly be Is it any wonder that the mass media support all US wars and cheerlead all imperial agendas? This is how things were set up to be Our media act like propagandists for a tyrannical regime Because that's exactly what they are