I also noticed that conservative sites didn't really give Timpa much coverage either. Likely because it show cops in a bad light, and many conservatives are pro-cop. So only libertarian publications like Reason cover Timpa, Daniel Shaver, Duncan Lemp, etc.
There are definitely reporters that represent the issues that the upper middle class left care about and reporters for the business elite right. But not for working class people. I’m glad you’re trying to fill that role.
I’m not sure I’d call this a book review so much as a literary essay, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. I read the same book, but I feel like I got something new out of it by reading this. Since subscription models tend to target wealthier readers, does that mean that substack is for rich people?
The subscription fees for a single substack aren’t exorbitant, although they sure add up once you have a few. I could see anti-woke discourse being a bit like elitism for the right. The average working class person isn’t woke, but they’re also worried about inflation and things like that. And with substack having a lot of anti-woke people on it, then you could argue that anti-woke substacks are for elite right-wing readers.
That’s a fascinating point. Most people just aren’t interested in politics, and are so disgusted with the machinations of MPs that they simply don’t have time for them. They ARE extremely concerned with the economy and uncontrolled immigration, but with neither of the two main parties willing to clamp down on immigration they’ve been literally left with nobody to vote for. This is leaving the UK vulnerable to the rise of populism, which we have successfully resisted up to now.
This clarifies so much for me. Notably the hard push back from TV presenters who are required by the BBC to be neutral. If they refrain from letting the public know their personal opinions either during broadcasts and interviews or via twitter accounts then ‘journalist activists’ are attaining a status that they are being denied. How unfair!
Like most Americans, I’m pretty ignorant of the media outside the US. My only media consumption from the UK is Triggernometry. But I assume the BBC is probably center left?
I know in the US that cable news commentators have no issues expressing their opinions. Our anchors have definitely become activists themselves.
The same thing has happened to a certain extent in the UK Liam. The vast majority of the media including TV news broadcasts have been moving steadily more to the left over at least the last 10 years with the pace escalating since the political polarisation after the Brexit vote. The leading journalists are predominantly progressives and the news is often swayed to favour the woke narrative. There is however a particular issue with the BBC, which unlike the commercial organisations that are it’s competitors is funded by the government via licences held by everyone consuming television programmes. The government maintains control by setting the cap on what we licence payers must pay. In return for this guarantee of funding we get an advertising free BBC service - but one that must abide by certain standards, one of which is a neutral news service. This is causing tension between the government, the Governor of the BBC (a political appointee), and BBC journalists who feel they have the right to express their beliefs come what may.
I'm curious how the government verifies the neutrality. There's always going to be some bias in what stories they choose to cover and what stories they omit. That's so different from the US I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around it. I wonder who Donald Trump would've appointed if we'd had our own Governor of the BBC.
The appointment is indeed always controversial, but the pool they fish in is small as the appointment always has to have a media background and therefore usually swings to the left. The ‘neutrality’ is never assured but the public complaints service soon hots up if enough viewers are annoyed. The ‘stick’ is the govt control of the BBC funding. At present the debate is around the BBC’s much vaunted devotion to diversity - the argument from the right is that this does not seem to include diversity of political opinion at any level of the organisation. The BBC is struggling to rectify this but how will be fascinating to watch!
Incidentally I’m of an age that remembers this phenomena as being referred to as ‘being in with the in crowd’ a la Roxy Music. Gary Linaker what a little inconsequential man you really are!
Hmmm. So the NYT is “selling status” to wealthy people to whom “anti-racism is a class signifier of wealth”. That’s a convoluted theory with large ellipses in explanation. If we Occam’s Razor this a bit, we get actually existing correlations between higher education, wealth and liberal social attitudes (on average). Publisher sells newspapers to wealthy, educated liberals and advertisers sell high-end products to those same people. Yep, we’re done.
You probably can’t just label people’s beliefs “signalling”, even if they’re rich and don’t deserve your sympathy or you’re a vulgar Marxist with libertarian fans who’s refurbishing false consciousness with some cod-sociological jargon for the social media age.
On the poor white guy; as a former grunt hack in the news mines, I can tell you that it just wasn’t a breaking news story at that moment in time beyond his locality and his poor friends and relatives. There’s not enough space in the public’s attention span for all the horrors in the world, as hungry millions will attest. It’s not pretty but it’s the reality. And you don’t need dialectical materialism to figure out why.
> There’s not enough space in the public’s attention span for all the horrors in the world, as hungry millions will attest. It’s not pretty but it’s the reality. And you don’t need dialectical materialism to figure out why.
The issue is that non-black victims make up 75% of police deaths, but less than 1% of the media coverage. White men make up 30% of America, but nearly half the deaths, but only 1% of the coverage. That’s common knowledge among people who don’t consume their news as a means to virtue signal luxury beliefs. That you missed that seems like evidence that Sargon was right.
Hi Amy. I completely understand what you’re saying and the reason for your complaint. And yet… I wish this was my quote but unfortunately I’m not that smart or pithy… “Never bring statistics to a story fight.” This was said in the context of winning public arguments but the same applies to news. People (and hence the news professionals who provide for them) like stories rather than lists of stats. I don’t want to justify it, or otherwise, but it is a psychological reality. Things like conflict, narrative arc, easy comprehension and so on are key to decisions on what people write and what people read. Anyone like us who writes comments on the bottom of a substack post are complete freaks. Most people, rationally, just want to deal with their immediate problems, friends and families. News is (outside of a few tiny niches for freaks) just a matter of story, story, story. Thanks
Hear hear. I've written about this as well: https://societystandpoint.substack.com/p/journalisms-glaring-class-problem
I also noticed that conservative sites didn't really give Timpa much coverage either. Likely because it show cops in a bad light, and many conservatives are pro-cop. So only libertarian publications like Reason cover Timpa, Daniel Shaver, Duncan Lemp, etc.
There are definitely reporters that represent the issues that the upper middle class left care about and reporters for the business elite right. But not for working class people. I’m glad you’re trying to fill that role.
I’m not sure I’d call this a book review so much as a literary essay, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. I read the same book, but I feel like I got something new out of it by reading this. Since subscription models tend to target wealthier readers, does that mean that substack is for rich people?
The subscription fees for a single substack aren’t exorbitant, although they sure add up once you have a few. I could see anti-woke discourse being a bit like elitism for the right. The average working class person isn’t woke, but they’re also worried about inflation and things like that. And with substack having a lot of anti-woke people on it, then you could argue that anti-woke substacks are for elite right-wing readers.
That’s a fascinating point. Most people just aren’t interested in politics, and are so disgusted with the machinations of MPs that they simply don’t have time for them. They ARE extremely concerned with the economy and uncontrolled immigration, but with neither of the two main parties willing to clamp down on immigration they’ve been literally left with nobody to vote for. This is leaving the UK vulnerable to the rise of populism, which we have successfully resisted up to now.
This clarifies so much for me. Notably the hard push back from TV presenters who are required by the BBC to be neutral. If they refrain from letting the public know their personal opinions either during broadcasts and interviews or via twitter accounts then ‘journalist activists’ are attaining a status that they are being denied. How unfair!
Like most Americans, I’m pretty ignorant of the media outside the US. My only media consumption from the UK is Triggernometry. But I assume the BBC is probably center left?
I know in the US that cable news commentators have no issues expressing their opinions. Our anchors have definitely become activists themselves.
The same thing has happened to a certain extent in the UK Liam. The vast majority of the media including TV news broadcasts have been moving steadily more to the left over at least the last 10 years with the pace escalating since the political polarisation after the Brexit vote. The leading journalists are predominantly progressives and the news is often swayed to favour the woke narrative. There is however a particular issue with the BBC, which unlike the commercial organisations that are it’s competitors is funded by the government via licences held by everyone consuming television programmes. The government maintains control by setting the cap on what we licence payers must pay. In return for this guarantee of funding we get an advertising free BBC service - but one that must abide by certain standards, one of which is a neutral news service. This is causing tension between the government, the Governor of the BBC (a political appointee), and BBC journalists who feel they have the right to express their beliefs come what may.
I'm curious how the government verifies the neutrality. There's always going to be some bias in what stories they choose to cover and what stories they omit. That's so different from the US I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around it. I wonder who Donald Trump would've appointed if we'd had our own Governor of the BBC.
The appointment is indeed always controversial, but the pool they fish in is small as the appointment always has to have a media background and therefore usually swings to the left. The ‘neutrality’ is never assured but the public complaints service soon hots up if enough viewers are annoyed. The ‘stick’ is the govt control of the BBC funding. At present the debate is around the BBC’s much vaunted devotion to diversity - the argument from the right is that this does not seem to include diversity of political opinion at any level of the organisation. The BBC is struggling to rectify this but how will be fascinating to watch!
Incidentally I’m of an age that remembers this phenomena as being referred to as ‘being in with the in crowd’ a la Roxy Music. Gary Linaker what a little inconsequential man you really are!
Hmmm. So the NYT is “selling status” to wealthy people to whom “anti-racism is a class signifier of wealth”. That’s a convoluted theory with large ellipses in explanation. If we Occam’s Razor this a bit, we get actually existing correlations between higher education, wealth and liberal social attitudes (on average). Publisher sells newspapers to wealthy, educated liberals and advertisers sell high-end products to those same people. Yep, we’re done.
You probably can’t just label people’s beliefs “signalling”, even if they’re rich and don’t deserve your sympathy or you’re a vulgar Marxist with libertarian fans who’s refurbishing false consciousness with some cod-sociological jargon for the social media age.
On the poor white guy; as a former grunt hack in the news mines, I can tell you that it just wasn’t a breaking news story at that moment in time beyond his locality and his poor friends and relatives. There’s not enough space in the public’s attention span for all the horrors in the world, as hungry millions will attest. It’s not pretty but it’s the reality. And you don’t need dialectical materialism to figure out why.
> There’s not enough space in the public’s attention span for all the horrors in the world, as hungry millions will attest. It’s not pretty but it’s the reality. And you don’t need dialectical materialism to figure out why.
The issue is that non-black victims make up 75% of police deaths, but less than 1% of the media coverage. White men make up 30% of America, but nearly half the deaths, but only 1% of the coverage. That’s common knowledge among people who don’t consume their news as a means to virtue signal luxury beliefs. That you missed that seems like evidence that Sargon was right.
Hi Amy. I completely understand what you’re saying and the reason for your complaint. And yet… I wish this was my quote but unfortunately I’m not that smart or pithy… “Never bring statistics to a story fight.” This was said in the context of winning public arguments but the same applies to news. People (and hence the news professionals who provide for them) like stories rather than lists of stats. I don’t want to justify it, or otherwise, but it is a psychological reality. Things like conflict, narrative arc, easy comprehension and so on are key to decisions on what people write and what people read. Anyone like us who writes comments on the bottom of a substack post are complete freaks. Most people, rationally, just want to deal with their immediate problems, friends and families. News is (outside of a few tiny niches for freaks) just a matter of story, story, story. Thanks