I'm a link hoarder. My browser bookmarks number in the thousands. I pity any NSA underling or some other entity employee in or out of the government that should ever be tasked with looking at each one. From time to time I scroll through one of the several "Read Later" folders for something that might still be of interest. And this one jumped out.
Thomas Frank's animus toward conservatives was painfully obvious when he wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal. Frank was hired on as a columnist as a way to placate progressive reporters for that newspaper when Rupert Murdoch's family enterprise bought it. Frank was very hostile toward conservatives in those columns, and it prompted some readers to speculate that his addition to the line-up was intended to showcase the hostility progressives held for conservatives more so than to convince anyone that just maybe progressive ideology had some good points after all.
Anyway, Frank eventually moved on, and the buried treasure unearthed from the bookmark archives is his article from July, 21, 2017, from the Guardian in which he tries to explain the disconnect so many people had with the main stream media. See The media's war on Trump is destined to fail. Why can't it see that?.
He saw two reasons. One was the social media websites like Facebook that feed their readers what they want to see. Then there's this:
But there’s also a second reason, one that is even more fundamental. The truth is that the unanimous anti-Trumpness of the respectable press is just one facet of a larger homogeneity. As it happens, the surviving press in this country is unanimous about all sorts of things. ...
Everything they do, they do as a herd – even when it’s running headlong over a cliff. ...
These things don’t happen because the journalists that remain are liberals. It happens because so many of them are part of the same class – an exalted and privileged class. They are professionals and they believe in the things that so many other professional groups believe in: consensus, “realism”, credentialing, the wisdom of their fellow professionals and (of course) the stupidity of the laity.
This is the key to understanding many of their biases – and also for understanding why they are so utterly oblivious to how they appear to the rest of America.
His observations seem accurate. But people who remember his column in the Wall Street Journal might wonder if he's aware of how oblivious he appeared there.
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12:25 PM 4/28/2018
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