The Irrelevant Media Elites
Over paid media elites are out of touch with real people
I rarely watch legacy media news. However, after the election I may never. I get my news from other sources including Substack and found that the legacy media is no longer relevant. Recently, we learned about the salaries of “stars” on these major TV networks hemoraging their ratings post-election, I can understand why the news lost relevance.
I grew up in a media household, my father wrote for the Boston Globe. Back then, when it was an esteemed publication under the Taylor family, reporters were not the over paid elitists they are today. They were middle class employees, regular joes, most of them veterans writing from the perspective of the real people on their beat. They could write this way because they were part of this demographic.
My father used to complain how the local TV anchors received a six figure salary to read words off the teleprompter. He as the print reporter made a salary well-below the local anchors.
Today, many reporters with their higher salary are no longer in touch with the average people of today.
Can’t understand poverty
After my Navy enlistment, while living in Southern California, I met a priest who once served in one of America’s richest parishes. He said he lasted less than a year. Growing up in an impoverished barrio in a former Spanish colony, he later came to the United States where he studied here for the priesthood. His first assignment was to an incredibly rich parish community in a Los Angeles suburb. I met him in a poorer city parish where he then served and I lived after my Navy enlistment. He explained to me that in August, in the rich parish, Catholics attended Mass in their furs to show them off. He added how there was no way he could talk about poverty to these people.
The Church teaches the preferential option for the poor. Often considered a tenet of liberation theology, it is actually part of Catholic social teaching. This basically is that God loves all but has a special love for the poor and so should we.
Jesus in Matthew 25 teaches how we treat the poor is the main criterion for whether we will be saved. The way we treat the poor, he explains, is how we treat him.
The media is certainly not a Catholic institution or a religious one but clearly, as Catholics, we have to realize that it does not speak for us or even to us if a news anchor sees her pay cut by twenty percent and still receives a salary of twenty-million dollars. In the words of that priest, you cannot talk to people like this about poverty.
If the media elites are ignorant about what true poverty is then at what level are they in touch with those most in need of a voice in government. I believe that Donald Trump understood this issue. He knows he can speak to the middle class and even the poorest members of society in ways that the elitist in the media not only cannot but remain ignorant of their situation. Whether, you agree or disagree with the current president-elect, he understood what the rich elites did not. That is why he is the president-elect. (For the record, I voted for neither front running presidential candidate).
Bubble pipeline
During the pandemic, we learned of elementary schools on both the east and west coasts with tuition in excess of fifty-thousand dollars annually. Parents paid to ensure their children had an advantage in choosing a school and getting an education. However, when you look at this system, you see students who came of age in this elitist bubble, attended Ivy League schools in another elitist bubble and then became the leaders of politics and industry. Their only contact with people outside of their bubble is through books and maybe newspapers.
In light of the legacy media, this means that the pundits broadcast to you through their teleprompters and choose what news you should receive. Some are so out of touch with the real people that they have no credibility. Are some not saying that the reason people voted for Donald Trump is because they are stupid? Again, whether you support him or not the key is media elites are not in touch with populace of the United States.
We know now the salaries of these news professionals, we realize they no longer connect to the poor and even the middle class experience. The concept of living paycheck to paycheck is outside their sphere of understanding unless they are in so much debt that they need their paycheck for mostly debt service.
A twenty-million dollar annually comes out to over a third of a million dollars per week. A person making this salary cannot possibly understand the poor family that struggles to feed their children every day and even pay their rent. Nor can they understand the landlord who starts eviction proceedings the minute a person is late on their rent. This is why the let them eat cake attitude that one can find in the main stream media is so prevalent.
When Martha Raddatz of ABC News countered JD Vance that the Venezuelan gangs overtook only a few apartment houses in Aurora, Colorado, she revealed how little she understood about similar situations. Can she understand the causes of gang activity? Can she understand that even if for her it was only a few apartment houses, for those residents in those apartments, it was their whole world? How can she if her pay and lifestyle is so out of touch with real people outside her bubble.
LCB
I learned many years ago working in the inner city, that the local Boston media broadcasts to the upper middle class and upper-class suburbs in a place I call the Luxury Car Belt (LCB). In Massachusetts that is the swath of towns west of Boston between I-95 and I-495 where many of Boston’s monied class live. I would see two similar incidents such as a fatal car accident. When the deceased was from the inner city, the news crew came in to do a report on the scene. When the deceased lived in the LCB, there was the interview with the family and neighbors, the story of the deceased and the camera shot from outside the church at the end of the funeral.
I advocate in my writing for a reporter willing to live in the inner city to write more accurately of life there.
Dominic Carter who currently has two daily radio programs on New York's WABC grew up poor in the Bronx and now is a highly respected news man and talk show host at the number one talk station in New York. Mr. Carter explained to his audience that Donald Trump connected with the inner city, black community and he took that as a sign the democrats would lose. They did. Donald Trump spoke to the people where they were. The trials Trump suffered in New York made him a hero to the neighborhoods of color because the DA treated him the same way as the poor people of color who are presumed guilty by default.
Believe it or not Reverend David Wilkerson accounts the same dynamic in his book The Cross and the Switchblade from the 1950’s. He had a negative interaction with police in front of the gangs he wanted to evangelize and was even arrested. He discovered later that this opened the door for him to preach to them. They saw him as one of the them because he too was arrested.
Had the Democrats understood that dynamic, they would have realized their prosecution tack against Donald Trump handed him the best political tool possible. This means they failed those who counted on them.
A legacy media print reporter reached out to me recently as he wanted to talk to people of color about our new archbishop. I have two communities here: those who speak English of different national origins and Brazilians. We have all colors, which one did he want to interview? I did not respond.
Journalist Chris Hedges, no fan of Donald Trump, explains the president-elect was created by the ineptitude (my word) of the Democratic Party sold out to corporate power (40:35). The former speech writer for Ralph Nader explained that Nader ran for president to address the failures due to the democratic party’s corporate connections.
Noam Chomsky taught since the sixties about how corporations also control the media and they steer the news toward their interests. I spoke to him years ago at a Catholic Worker House—Clarification of Thought Talk. Being from a media family, I challenged his ideas, asking him how I am to believe that people sit in rooms and decide what to tell the people and what to keep from them.
“No, it is not like that,” he said (or words to that effect). He explained that the higher you go in a company, the more you buy the company line so that by the time you are in the decision-making role of the organization, you are thinking the way the corporation wants you to think. If you do not think that way, you do not go up in rank in the corporation. So those who make decisions for what the network will cover are thinking in the ways the network already wants them to think.
What happens now?
Now that the election is over and the rich legacy media players try to spin in favor of the Democratic party still, we know now they are irrelevant. No one needs to listen to them anymore because a long, long time ago they lost a connection to the regular people who count more in this country than they do.
No one cares what they have to say because the curtain is torn in two and the world can now see that they no longer understand the regular persons outside of their rich bubbles.
If you are angry Trump won, then spend the next four years rebuilding the Democratic party and the media free of corporate influence and filled with passion for truth.
Networks must pay journalists less and maybe charge less for commercials. The less they pay, the more reporters’ passion will influence their work.
While the poor are doing all they can to make it pay check to pay check, the media elites need to break out of their bubbles so that they can report the real story and advocate for real needs.
Fr. Robert J Carr is pastor of St. Anthony Parish in Allston, MA
The parish podcast is at CatholicAudioMedia.com
The newest edition of Fr Robert J Carr's latest book is now available. Christ in Our Humanity. You can find it here.