Are Journalists Out of Touch with the Poor?
Tim Rutten in his Regarding Media column at LATimes.com writes how the biggest bias in newsrooms today emanates from the fact that most reporters come from the middle-class.
The catalyst for Rutten’s column was retired New York Times columnist Russell Baker, who, in a letter rebuttal in the New York Review of Books, wrote : “Today’s top-drawer Washington news people are part of a highly educated, upper-middle-class elite; they belong to the culture for which the American political system works exceedingly well. ”
Later he told Rutten: “They lack empathy for the rest of the country. If you’ve never lacked health insurance–and most reporters and editors never have–you don’t understand what it means for the 43 million Americans who are doing without it, any more than the Congress does.”
Of course, Public Journalists have been voicing this criticism for years. Here’s an excerpt and from a presentation I made before the Minnesota Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights – Fact Finding “Minneapolis-St Paul News Media Coverage of Minority Communities” in April, 2002:
Everyday people, and especially those in ethnic communities, must be given access to empowerment tools so they learn the strategies and skills needed to get their voices, needs, wants and desires heard inside newsrooms and then amplified to wider audiences. We can’t rely on mostly white, almost always middleclass newsroom to accurately understand how groups outside their own cohort see and interpret the world. If we find methods to get the people’s voices heard inside newsrooms and then amplified to larger audiences, the end result will be a stronger and more accurate body of news available to all news readers, listeners and watchers. Everybody wins.
…this is a battle that must be fought on two fronts. Newsrooms have to be aggressive in finding ways to integrate a multiplicity of voices into their news gathering process. At the same time citizens have to be given empowerment tools so they know the strategies and have the skills to fill that void that is present in so many newsrooms today.
