Description
Book Synopsis"...a timely and entertaining account of how class rivalries as well as political conflicts have shaped and sometimes warped the news industry."—Michael Lind, author of The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite
Something is wrong with American journalism. Long before “fake news” became the calling card of the Right, Americans had lost faith in their news media. But lately, the feeling that something is off has become impossible to ignore. That’s because the majority of our mainstream news is no longer just liberal; it’s woke. Today’s newsrooms are propagating radical ideas that were fringe as recently as a decade ago, including “antiracism,” intersectionality, open borders, and critical race theory. How did this come to be?
It all has to do with who our news media is written by—and who it is written for. In Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, Batya Ungar-Sargon reveals how American journalism underwent a status revolution over the twentieth century—from a blue-collar trade to an elite profession. As a result, journalists shifted their focus away from the working class and toward the concerns of their affluent, highly educated peers. With the rise of the Internet and the implosion of local news, America’s elite news media became nationalized and its journalists affluent and ideological. And where once business concerns provided a countervailing force to push back against journalists’ worst tendencies, the pressures of the digital media landscape now align corporate incentives with newsroom crusades.
The truth is, the moral panic around race, encouraged by today’s elite newsrooms, does little more than consolidate the power of liberal elites and protect their economic interests. And in abandoning the working class by creating a culture war around identity, our national media is undermining American democracy. Bad News explains how this happened, why it happened, and the dangers posed by this development if it continues unchecked.
Trade Review"Batya Ungar-Sargon has demonstrated that the press has fundamentally misdiagnosed the sources of tension in American political life, which are based more on class than race. As the industry has become more aristocratic, it has shed its egalitarian mission statement, devoting itself instead to reinforcing the assumptions of its educated, affluent readership. As a result, the news media is increasingly disconnected from the nation it pretends to serve and is ceding working-class politics to the American right. Ungar-Sargon’s insightful book is an impassioned plea not for objectivity in reporting but for a partiality that benefits the greatest number, even at the expense of a few egos in American newsrooms."
—Noah Rothman, associate editor at Commentary magazine, MSNBC/NBC News contributor, and author of Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America“
Bad News is a book that every single journalist and aspiring journalist in the country needs to read. The fact that modern journalism has transformed itself to an upper class profession is blindingly obvious to outsiders, but not well understood within the profession itself. The belief that it's up to journalists to lead public opinion in particular directions and lead them away from
inconvenient facts is nothing less than a disaster for democracy. It undermines trust and credibility and destroys the likelihood of our citizens having 'shared facts.' Modern news media needs to earn the trust of the public back, and the first step is taking the hard
medicine in this important book.”
—Greg Lukianoff, CEO of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and co-author, Unlearning Liberty, co-author, Coddling of the American Mind “Journalism, at its best, provides a necessary check against powerful interests. But what happens when journalists themselves become part of a powerful, elite class, disconnected from the interests of the working class of the country? Batya Ungar-Sargon’s timely book paints a disillusioning picture of the state of 21st century journalism, where dispassionate reporting too often takes a back seat to narrative-driven progressive activism. It offers a clarion call for the most important kind of diversity within newsrooms – an ideological diversity that’s increasingly absent from our country’s leading institutions. If you care about the future of journalism,
Bad News is both a wake-up call to the growing threat and a guidebook for how to build back better.”
—Josh Kraushaar, politics editor, National Journal“If you really want to understand the contradictions and complexities of the present moral panic, Batya Ungar-Sargon is an extraordinarily incisive guide to the country we share and the journalism that attempts not just to capture but also to shape it. This is a must-read for anyone concerned about the fragmented state of American media and the perpetual culture (read: class) wars that so powerfully undermine it.”
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Thomas Chatterton Williams, contributing writer, New York Times magazine, and columnist, Harper’s“In the growing chorus of voices speaking up against ideological conformity in the media and the zombie activism that goes along with it, Batya Ungar-Sargon’s call for sanity and intellectual integrity is full-throated and essential. In Bad News, she peels back the layers of a media apparatus that has incentivized the distortion of reality and pitted our brains against our emotions. In so doing, she offers concrete explanations for a cultural crisis that, for most people, is constantly felt on a visceral level but nearly impossible to understand. Readers will come away with a better understanding. From there, they might feel better, too.”
—Meghan Daum, author of The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars “This book is like a flash of lightning, giving sudden illumination to one of the main causes of our current cultural dysfunction. This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how we got here, or how we get out.”
—Jonathan Haidt, NYU-Stern School of Business, co-author,
Coddling of the American Mind ”This lively, provocative, and eye-opening book shows that the cultural symbols of class constitute a forceful engine in American life, even as the prevailing pundit machine tries to remove it from view."
—Nancy Isenberg, author of bestselling White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America“In
Bad News, Batya Ungar-Sargon provides a timely and entertaining account of how class rivalries as well as political conflicts have shaped and sometimes warped the news industry, from the age of yellow journalism to today’s woke media.”
—Michael Lind, author of The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite
