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Every time I talk to my parents or non-poly sci majoring friends about politics, it goes to show how unrepresentative the people who write political columns and host cable shows are of the general population. This goes especially for Republicans.
I have not met a single person with the ideology of David Brooks, Bret Stephens, or pretty much any of the Never Trumpers. Nobody talks to me about how we “need a conversation about entitlement cuts”.
I think the thing a lot of “respectable” Conservative pundits don’t want to admit is that racism is a very common feature among a lot of rank and file Republicans, and something that was persistent long before Trump.
I can tell you tons of stories about things I have heard very close Conservative relatives tell me about immigrants, for example. It’s not a small minority faction of the GOP. It’s also not just a “poor white” thing, as is often stereotyped. Many racists are quite affluent!
If you don’t believe me, be a fly on the wall at some white country club. That scene in Great Gatsby where Tom Buchanan talks at the dinner table about “inferior races” is very indicative of a certain type of upper-crust racist.
I have a hard time finding Conservative pundits that sound like any of the(many many) right-wing people I am related to and have befriended over the years, because the right-wing base and upper-echelon are two different groups.
And by the way, this is an issue that happens with the Democrats in a different way. Most high-profile democratic pundits are people like the hosts of Pod Save America. Most democrats are not center-left affluent white Obama administration officials!
I think about this a lot because I often here about how our news system is dysfunctional, and the solution is to go back to the days of people like Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw, Ed Murrow, Dan Rather, who are envisioned as paragons of an era of morally upstanding reporting.
I hear how we need guardrails and gatekeeping in our institutions. I couldn’t have been hired at a news organization back then unless I changed my name and presented as an Anglo. And I’m lucky because I look white; a lot of people wouldn’t have been hired at all.
Not to mention rampant problems with sexual harassment and rape culture, classism, anti-semitism, and a million other issues that occur when all the top news anchors are wealthy WASPS. That’s not an era I desire to go back to.
It sort of reminds of how a lot of people’s reaction to Trump winning was “we should get rid of primaries and have closed door smoke filled room conventions to stop somebody like him.” That’s not what we should go back to!
Gatekeeping, at least in the way it was set up, was a thing that kept plenty of talented women and people of color and other marginalized people from having any semblance of power in news.
The solution to most of our pundits being wealthy white dudes who are way to the right of the population on issues of economics and power especially is not to go back to the era of “Which white dude with a gravelly voice would you like to hear describe the news today?”
For the sake of society, there needs to be some way to make sure news is actually reporting the facts, and is in the same reality as most people. And I think a big part is how most stations are owned by a small group of billionaires, but I don’t know exactly how to reverse that.
I agree with the critique that government owned media runs into the problem of conflicts of interest, but so does private owned media. I guess the end all be all would be some set-up where we strengthen local news as an independent co-op, but I’m no expert on media control.
I guess the takeaway from all this is that if you’re watching TV or reading a newspaper/magazine and you hear somebody voice an opinion that sounds very fucking crazy, there’s a good chance you can count on one hand the number of people who would agree with that person.
