> There is a status that comes with strangers knowing who you are, what you wrote, what your core ideas are… The problem isn’t that writing generates status, bu

> There is a status that comes with strangers knowing who you are, what you wrote, what your core ideas are… The problem isn’t that writing generates status, but rather that this status is grossly out of proportion to the wages they are earning in the market. I feel like there's something implied here that says we should be listening to those who have the most money. But in fact those journalists whose status/audience is out of proportion to their wages... are more representative of America than wealthier people. The median income of these journalists/pundits may still very well be higher than the median income of America. If they have a monolithically wrong idea of what is going on in "America" or are monolithically unrepresentative of America (I think that's the complaint?), it's not because they homogenously have wages lower than other "high status" people -- and it will not be solved by increasing the wages of journalists/pundits, and or changing the set of who is listened to, to higher income people. Some of the explanations in the OP are more interesting, like: > Unlike wages, status is extremely difficult to directly exchange for goods and services. You need an intermediary, such as a person desperate to market their latest brand of protein powder or neo-fascist authoritarianism, who will pay you for access to your status. Chomsky and Herman's 1988 _Manufacturing Consent_ is about the pressures journalist have to just take the statements of powerful people (whether in government or industry) and report them as facts (or at best as the story) without doing more investigation. But it was written in a more innocent, pre-social-influencer era, where they never would have conceived that journalists or pundits were actually taking outright payment (which they would have called bribes) for this -- even though I don't think journalists made substantially more then. Rather, they explained and showed how it just made the journalists job so much easier. The journalist didn't have time to do actual investigation, it was so much easier to just go on press conferences and press release. Which is surely even more true today with newsrooms that have been (often literally) decimated since 1988. I think the OP is onto something... but I don't think it actually has much to do with journalists wages, the central thesis of OP. In general, if we were somehow able to magically shift the journalist/pundit class to be higher-income -- and thus even less representative of the country as a whole -- I don't see this leading to improvements in any way.