Almost any journalist old enough to remember when their profession wasn’t a wasteland of listicle sweatshops will acknowledge there’s been a massive cultural shift in newsrooms in recent decades that rarely gets commented on. I started in journalism in the late 1990s. Back then prominent members of the newsroom’s old guard still drank at lunch and smoked in the office—but they were more transgressive in an important regard: They were all working class, or at a minimum, possessed working-class sympathies. An editor I was lucky to work with early in my career, John Corry, started his multi-decade career at the New York Times as a copyboy on the sports desk where he made $25 a week on the side by supplying bookies with the scores of late ballgames by phone, before working his way up the Times’ masthead. “Mild raffishness, moderate dissoluteness, and minor deviancy were tolerated and tacitly encouraged at the Times, and this fact helped breed allegiance to the newsroom,” Corry writes in his memoir, My Times.
But by the time I was working with Corry at the tail end of his career, it was increasingly obvious the industry had no way to put a price tag on experience and working-class solidarity, at least not when a swarm of high achieving, independently wealthy, second-generation yuppies with master’s degrees in “creative nonfiction” were vying for journalism jobs. This was made explicit by a new breed of editors who were more valued for their business acumen than their newsroom experience and editorial abilities. The flipside of my experience with the old guard was working at a major daily under an impeccably organized editor who took great pride in relations with corporate management. While placating the suits is a useful skill, when it came to day-to-day responsibilities that same editor also thought “pogrom” was a misspelling of “program.”
To that end, Ungar-Sargon introduces the book with a number of anecdotes and observations about the media’s current fealty to wokeism, which is astutely defined as a kind of left-wing prestidigitation. By swapping class concerns for narrower and politically correct concerns of race, this allows major media to preserve their existing business models—which hinge on catering to increasingly smaller and wealthier audiences and advertisers—while still keeping up the self-serving illusion that elite media are holding power to account rather than catering to the ruling class.
Once you acknowledge the truth of this observation, the contradiction is everywhere you look. “T magazine, the fashion magazine of the New York Times, recently showcased Angela Davis on the front cover and an ad for a Cartier watch on the back cover; these are not in tension with each other, but rather two sides of the same coin,” Ungar-Sargon dryly notes.