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LMAO at these journalists pretending they're so surprised to find this. As if they had no hand in creating this environment... and as if this wasn't the whole p
by throwaway23597 4y ago
LMAO at these journalists pretending they're so surprised to find this. As if they had no hand in creating this environment... and as if this wasn't the whole point to begin with. The upper class owns journalism and this state of affairs was very much the goal.
- Consultant32452 4y agoI remember when the elites did a Jedi mind trick on the Occupy Wall Street folks and made them change their focus to race and what bathroom people get to use. It was remarkable.
- DoctorOW 4y agoMy idea of this is only anecdotal but anyone I personally know involved with occupy couldn't give a shit who is in what bathroom.
- Consultant32452 4y agoMy anecdata is that as soon as the mega-corporations started waving their pride flags and doing race sensitivity training the masses on my FB/Twitter feed changed their emoji usage right along with them. To be fair this is the same people who immediately forgot that black lives mattered when they traded their BLM fist emoji for a Ukraine flag.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- wrycoder 4y agoNot the elites. Horowitz: Occupy Wall Street: The Communist Movement Reborn [0]. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Occupy-Wall-Street-Communist-Movement-ebook/dp/B0084JQAS0/ref=sr_1_1?crid=KRECS11DBPEJ&keywords=horowitz+occupy+wall+street&qid=1667433076&qu=eyJxc2MiOiIxLjAzIiwicXNhIjoiMC4wMCIsInFzcCI6IjAuMDAifQ%3D%3D&sprefix=horowitz+occupy+wall+street%2Caps%2C133&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Occupy-Wall-Street-Communist-Movement...
- heavyset_go 4y agoMany of the people today who scoff at class analysis were people who clutched their pearls at Occupy Wall Street and thought it was extremism.
- mc32 4y agoI think this is right. They tend to have alternate ways to circumvent the systems they put in place --such as "donor" privileges in university admissions.
- gort19 4y agoWhen you say “these journalists”, do you mean the economist?
- throwaway1777 4y agoIt’s pretty much all mainstream media on both the left and right.
- aiisahik 4y agoAnd why is the Economist mainstream? It's a British publication.
- B1FF_PSUVM 4y agoThere's a hilarious book by Paul Fussell titled Class: A Guide Through the American Status System He closes by positing that university intellectuals are above the whole mess ...
- csa 4y ago> He closes by positing that university intellectuals are above the whole mess That is a very disingenuous if not flat out incorrect summary of what he said. That may be one group of people who might be outside of “this mess” and in his category X, but I don’t think that university intellectuals are categorically in class X. For folks who are interested in a more contemporary class summary, I recommend Michael O’Church’s version: https://indiepf.com/michael-o-churchs-theory-of-3-class-ladders-in-america-archive/ https://indiepf.com/michael-o-churchs-theory-of-3-class-ladd...
- coding123 4y agoNo one is outside. The entire point is that everyone thinks they're outside.
- gnarbarian 4y agofurthermore they focused on race specifically because dividing Americans on class never failed repeatedly.
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y agoIt's because class in America has always been fluid, with people going from poor to rich or middle class, and from rich to poor, based on their life decisions, and seizing opportunities. Perhaps the current events have strangled these opportunities for enough people so class can now be used to divide the population against itself?
- SketchySeaBeast 4y agoHas that actually ever been a reliable truth, or are people finally waking up to the fact that it never really was?
- Alupis 4y agoOf course it's the truth. Success does not just fall into anyone's lap, save a very few minority of cases that get trumpeted as-if they're normal. There are no shortcuts. Hard work and persistence are what is required to be successful in this country - full stop. And hard work doesn't mean you sweat more... There is no system or mechanism in America that prevents a poor child from growing up into one of the nation's wealthiest or most powerful. Are there advantages some children's parents provide - of course - but that does not preclude rising up based on one's own merit. Your children should do better than you... because they build off your life's work. People like to criticize the American Dream from their couch while watching TV... bemoaning how unfair life is and how the deck was stacked against them. They do this instead of working to better their own future... ten years later and they're still complaining, having done nothing to change their situation. Look at the most successful people in this country. What do they all have in common?
- feet 4y agoOpportunity is only available to those who are in the right place at the right time speaking to the right people. If we consider the fact that the universe is entirely deterministic we can see that the ideas of free will and meritocracy evaporate.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- chiefalchemist 4y agoAgreed. A better article title would be: "American Media is Focused On Everything But What They Should Be (And Are Paid Well For It)" This is yet another example of how many of the elites live in a bubble. Well educated, yet oh so ignorant.
- cbsmith 4y agoWe love to scapegoat the media. If you could capture the public's attention and make tons of money focusing on class, someone would do it and dominate discourse. Maybe not existing institutions, but certainly there's nothing preventing someone else from taking to the field. Indeed, there is no shortage of media that do focus on class issues, but they are invariably small & marginalized. Media will literally eat poop in exchange for attention and the wealth and influence that comes with it. Pretending that the reason they're not talking about class is because of some misguided focus of those in the industry is absurd. It's just... if you don't pretend, then you have to place the blame elsewhere, and nobody wants to.
- chiefalchemist 4y ago> If you could capture the public's attention and make tons of money focusing on class, someone would do it and dominate discourse Well...Both Bobby Kennedy and MLK tried to shift the narrative and...the only thing they dominated was the graveyard. Point made. Lesson taught. And learned. re: Misguided focus?? Lol. You missed the point. They are lazer focused on...exactly what they're told and paid to stay focused on. Else it's negligence and incompetence and that just doesn't make sense.
- chiefalchemist 4y agoSuggested reading: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Estate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Estate https://kottke.org/20/01/jim-lehrers-rules-of-journalism-1 https://kottke.org/20/01/jim-lehrers-rules-of-journalism-1 Conclusion: We're not being harsh enough. We've been lowering the bar, not raising it. And it shows.
- 4y ago
- alexfromapex 4y agoAlmost anything a politician does anymore, they can basically always bypass accountability by claiming the impetus is to help advance some racial or other marginalized agenda.
- matrix_overload 4y ago
- a_shovel 4y agoNote the graph in the bottom-right corner of [0] blaming it on Jewish billionaires.
- Tronno 4y agoYour first link contains an anti-semitic dogwhistle. Is this intentional?
- ed25519FUUU 4y agoIn the racial representation of billionaires? What exactly is the dog whistle?
- Tronno 4y agoThe caption on that same graph - "we also know who did this and why".
- DoctorOW 4y agoI think the part where they literally wrote out in plain text that wealth disparity is the fault of the Jewish people
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ForHackernews 4y agoIt's barely a dog whistle, but the obvious insinuation that sinister Jews are behind all the world's ills.
- happyopossum 4y agoThat’s not a dog-whistle - it’s straight up antisemitism.
- 4y ago
- listless 4y agoGiven our history, I would say race is far more interesting. And we need those clicks. The media is simply responding to the incentives. It’s all of our fault. If we didn’t click on it, they would stop publishing it.
- kareemsabri 4y agoI don't think that's true at all. Class and economics in America are fascinating.
- listless 4y agoI agree that it's fascinating, but the race issue is more like a pornography for America. And Americans would prefer to consume the porn than the substance.
- georgeburdell 4y agoNo, there are certainly times where the media reporting is “top-down”. This latest recession has produced some strange reporting around justifying raising fed rates to cause unemployment to reduce inflation, for example. A more historical example would be on the early days of the 2nd Gulf War and the war drums beating for Iran perhaps a year later (that never materialized into a war)
- lukas099 4y agoInteresting; I didn't think the article author was "pretending they're so surprised" about anything. Do you have any reason to think that they've expressed opposing views in the past?
- serf 4y ago>I didn't think the article author was "pretending they're so surprised" it's not as dramatic as feigning surprise, but the mere act of choosing a specific topic to report on makes known the ideas of what a specific journo may think the public will find intriguing. in other words, "Water is Wet." gets no viewership, but "5 Ways You May Not Know How Water Can Kill" does get views -- likewise when a journalist has a topic like "Why X is Y", we (the reader) can presume that the work holds some novelty other than stating the obvious. 'pretending to be surprised' comes from the premise that class is such an obvious distinction in the United States that stating such is about obvious as stating 'Water is Wet.'
- googlryas 4y agoThe goal of whom? Please don't vaguely hand wave about the .1%. Who specifically with means has had this goal? Because without any kind of evidence or idea of who is doing it, it just sounds like a conspiracy theory. I ask because whenever I see instances of the ultra rich trying to control the narrative, it always comes off as obvious and ham fisted. The obvious rebuttal is "well you don't see when they succeed", but I don't think they would torpedo a cause they believe in in order for other causes to be successful. Unless they are truly playing 4d chess.
- ed25519FUUU 4y agoThe rich and powerful, who are able to make it about race and not about money and power.
- scotty79 4y agoBezos for one. He specifically bought newspaper to massage the image of billionaires like him. I don't think he's beneth that tactic given that Amazon has huge employee rotation by design because they haven't anticipate running out of people.
- kareemsabri 4y agoHow do you know this?
- scotty79 4y agoI know nothing.
- ThunderSizzle 4y agoYou can simply read the report
- ironSkillet 4y agoHe bought the newspaper to prove that he could help transform a decaying news business into a digital focused successful one.
- kelseyfrog 4y agoJust wait until they find out the inter-generational conflict they've been fomenting for decades gets the same treatment. Every "Boomer this" or "GenZ that" is a diversion of class-resentment.
- dkarl 4y ago> as if this wasn't the whole point to begin with. The upper class owns journalism and this state of affairs was very much the goal There's more to it than that. Intellectuals look at the parallels between race and class and see potential for "yes, and" solidarity; political professionals see the danger of splitting and confusing the limited mental space that non-professionals have for politics. A competing truth is worse than a lie. The time was ripe for significantly enriching the public understanding about race, and they were ruthless in not letting anything else get in the way. Their desires dovetailed nicely with the social media bullies (high school bullies grown up, or not grown up) who enjoyed the opportunity to indulge in their favorite pastime, shaming people into conformity. It's hard to balance political priorities; it's easy to denounce talking about class as a racist ploy to derail threats to white supremacy. How you feel about the outcome depends on your expectations of people. I don't have high expectations. I think it's pretty cool that race has been getting the attention that it has.
- buscoquadnary 4y agoIdentity politics was manufactured to distract from the income inequality and divide people so they couldn't focus on the increasing shafting of the American middle class.
- dang 4y agoPlease don't do snark or shallow dismissals or fulmination on HN. All that and more is in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- throwaway23597 4y agoMy bad, sorry about that.
- dang 4y agoAppreciated!
- lemmsjid 4y agoWhenever I hear these totalizing opinions I do some searching. The NYT has published an imperial ton of articles on class in the last several years. About the effects on income inequality, on how wealth inequality is now at its highest since WWII, a breakdown of guaranteed income programs by city, a synopsis of a study on poverty reduction, a synopsis of De Blasio's mixed successes and failures on addressing New York income equality, how the effects of New York heat weaves are worse for poorer people... I think the 'upper class' has a lot of influence, but it clearly isn't stopping the NYT from giving enough information to readers to build some pretty strong opinions on the effects of class in the United States. Journalists are clearly spilling a ton of ink over it. I think the blame must be spread more broadly. There is a tremendous anti-socialist, anti-labor force in American discourse, and parts of the media are helping to drive it, but other parts are resisting it. And regardless of its provenance, it is quite entrenched in the day to day, non-journalist culture.